Summary
For a long time, the speaker says, pessimistic stories about human folly have been his focus. Now it's time to move on, so as not to close out his story on a sad note. Addressing brooks winding through nature, the speaker wishes out loud that he had as musical a voice as they do. Even when man behaves badly, nature is constantly renewed. When he felt hopeless, it was to nature that he turned for comfort. Now addressing Coleridge, he notes that he has largely focused on his own intellectual development—but his intellect and imagination were no match for the tumult of the era he was living through. He felt like a sailor, tempted by the shore but unable to land. He felt that he would eventually return as a completely different man. In this period of intense, alienating growth, he had no idea where to turn. His belief in reason caused him to reject what he had always admired, even poetry. In turning against what he used to love, the speaker felt that he was at war with himself, alienated from everything he had always needed and desired. In this self-imposed darkness, even nature and sensory life became conflicted arenas, tinged with guilt and distrust—at the same time, once someone has learned to love nature, they never can truly lose that love. In the end, the problem with the speaker's worldview was that it was predicated on fighting falsehood rather than discovering truth. Reason can be a very good thing, but not when it takes such a form. Seemingly overcome by gratitude towards nature, the speaker addresses the natural world, comparing its grandeur and consistency to his own feebleness, superficiality, and taste for "sitting in judgment."
When he was most taken with this rationalist worldview, the speaker felt oddly split, his senses ruthlessly taking precedence over his heart. Luckily, nature itself manages to put a stop to that kind of arrogance by causing the senses to become overwhelmed and contradictory, thus making interpretation and imagination necessary. At the time, he says ruefully, he was greedy and self-absorbed. He did, at the time, know a girl who seemed not to have the same vices. He reflects that women tend to be more satisfied with the good things they already have, while men seem to be greedy for more. As a child, he was similarly grateful for the life he knew—only as he grew older did he develop a drive to judge and overanalyze. But, having learned as a young child to love his rustic surroundings, he eventually was able to re-learn that gratitude and sensitivity. There are, he reflects, times of life when one is capable of unusual wisdom and when one's mind overcomes sensory distractions. He experienced one such period as a child, stumbling upon a place known to be the site where a murderer was once executed. The murderer's name had been carved there, and the speaker recalls seeing the still-visible name , feeling extraordinarily upset, and conjuring vivid images of his loved ones to lessen his solitude. To this memory he returns frequently, feeling that it contains something of the power and knowledge of childhood. He then recounts another memory—one year around Christmas, the speaker climbed up a hill to watch out for horses who were due to pick him and his brothers up, sitting quietly in nature. Only days later, his father died. At the funeral, he remembered sitting on the hill, and felt ashamed and even chastised for his childlike shallowness. Now, similarly, the speaker looks back on a misguided period of hubris, feeling regretful but triumphant that he has overcome it. Then, in a passage removed from the later 1850 version, the speaker addresses Coleridge and explains that their friendship has aided him and will continue to aid him as he pursues truth.
Analysis
Here, Wordsworth delves even more deeply into a theme discussed in the previous book: reason and its risks. For the speaker, reason and rationality aren't necessarily bad. They can be useful and important. The problem with reason is that it allows the speaker to indulge his worst, least rational instincts in the guise of intelligence and growth. Reason becomes a way for the speaker to feel superior to others and to distance himself from meaningful engagement with the world. It gives him an excuse to assume the role of judge or arbiter, never performing any self-reflection or allowing himself to be seriously affected by anything he witnesses. This is, he suggests, a reaction to the fear and disappointment of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Shattered after the apparent failure of a cause to which he was emotionally attached, the speaker rejects emotion as a whole. In fact, he hints, a societal obsession with reason might be part of a reaction against the emotional intensity of the period. But reactionary reason isn't rational at all, he chastises: quite the opposite. Furthermore, while rationalism purports to create a more straightforward and less conflict-ridden reality, what it actually does for the speaker is create enormous conflict internally. Instead of engaging in the messy conflicts of social and political reality, he turns on himself, trying to stamp out essential elements of his own worldview, personality, and experience: his appreciation for nature, his sensitivity, his imagination. He artificially divides his sensory reality from his intuition, insisting that empiricism can override any internal or emotional reactions. Extreme reason, therefore, doesn't really offer the speaker the kind of relief that he wants from it. It only leads to a protracted battle with himself, and one that he is inevitably going to lose, anyway. One of the recurring themes of the Prelude is the fateful power of early life. The speaker claims that, having developed a strong relationship with nature as a young child, he is now essentially supplied with one for life. No matter how much he strays, he can, and will, always return to that relationship. Thus, it's not really possible for him to try and eliminate any element of his experience. That experience will always be present and will always dictate the speaker's worldview. As if to demonstrate, Wordsworth closes this book, not by pushing the narrative forward, but by casting back into the past. He raises two memories from the speaker's early life, ostensibly as examples of sobering moments that help the speaker reflect. But these memories have another effect. One, the story of the murderer's execution site, describes a kind of local folklore, maintained painstakingly over years by the community. Another describes a moment of familial loss and change. By choosing these two memories, Wordsworth offers examples of two major ways in which the speaker's past affects him as he moves into the future. His rural, traditional community as well as his own familial relationships continue to form the backbone of his internal life.
In one striking moment of Book Twelfth, Wordsworth touches on gender in an atypically explicit way. He argues that women are likely to feel gratitude for simple things, while men are more likely to experience greed and ambition. This is a complex argument. On the one hand, he suggests that women are superior to men, at least in terms of virtue, because they are able to recognize the importance of what they already have. On the other hand, the distinction may strike readers as rather patronizing. After all, the speaker also notes that he experienced a similar uncomplicated gratitude as a child, thus drawing an implied comparison between women and small children. At the same time, the speaker clearly believes childhood to be a period of real wisdom—one to which he has strained to return. In other words, in women Wordsworth locates a certain uncomplicated intelligence, morally admirable but devoid of much of the internal complexity available to himself and men generally. The Prelude is preoccupied with innocence and rusticity, and its arc is that of the speaker returning to those virtues in a world that wishes to alienate him from them. Yet, arguably, his growth stems largely from that conflict between worldliness and innocence. For women, that kind of conflict isn't an option, making them rather flat presences.
