The cliffs (Symbol)
In Book First, the young speaker steals a boat and steers it beneath huge cliffs. The cliffs seem to come to life, inducing horror and awe in the speaker. This is a life-changing moment for the speaker, in large part because of what the cliffs symbolize: the power of the natural world. While nature has long offered comfort and entertainment, here it morphs into a fully living entity—in fact, an entity with far more strength and wisdom than the human speaker. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth returns to the idea that humans should feel humble in the face of the natural world, accepting its mysteries rather than trying to overtake it. These cliffs are the first major appearance of that idea, representing a nature that is fiercely autonomous and even potentially threatening, instead of one that is simply beautiful, peaceful, and inanimate.
Ruins (Motif)
Many Romantic works of art focus on the melancholic beauty of ruins, and the Prelude is no exception. In Book Second, the speaker and his childhood friends explore an abandoned abbey, admiring the religious scenes depicted inside and the natural beauty that surrounds it. Later, as an adult, the speaker finds himself nearly transported by Stonehenge. In the context of the Prelude, the motif of ruins serves as a reminder of a few ideas. Firstly, ruins like the abbey depict the triumph of the natural world. While the building itself is dilapidated, the scenery surrounding it is self-sustaining, lively, and constantly renewed. Secondly, the ruins' melding of past and present within a single physical form recalls the speaker's own evolution from childhood to physical and artistic maturity. Ruins contain and display the past, but in an altered and sometimes unrecognizable form. Similarly, the speaker believes that every bit of his past remains a part of him, though the correspondence between his child and adult selves is obscure and hard to define. Finally, ruins eventually serve as evidence of harmony between man and nature. Stonehenge moves the speaker because of its use in rites involving the natural world, and stands as a lasting monument to that relationship.
The Medieval (Motif)
The speaker mentions medieval history and material life with some frequency—for instance, while at Cambridge, he mourns the loss of the monastic scholarly culture that characterized intellectual life in the Middle Ages. He contrasts the superficiality, urbanization, and alienation of the present with a lost rustic, communal, passionate medieval era. English writers and thinkers during the Industrial Revolution tended to contrast industrial, urban England with sites that they considered more rustic or closer to nature. These included physical spaces (Scotland, for instance, in some of Wordsworth's work) or eras in time—most famously the medieval. In fact, certain associations with Medieval Europe, such as the culture of chivalry, were heavily shaped by Romantic writers portraying that period in history.
Darkness (Symbol)
Many of the speaker's most formative and vivid moments developmentally occur in solitude and darkness. Among these are his sailing trip to the cliffs and his encounter with the dispatched soldier. In these moments, he becomes aware of the inexplicable, complex nature of reality. He connects to other beings, whether human or personified natural objects, in ways that challenge his self-assurance and complicate his worldview. In fact, darkness itself seems to symbolize the mysteries of nature. For the speaker, these mysteries aren't threatening and don't need to be solved—only appreciated and examined. As he muses in Book Fifth, "in the mystery of words/There, darkness makes abode..." Poets and lovers of literature, in other words, must treat darkness and mystery as their home.
Shipwrecked Person (Allegory)
In order to explain his enjoyment of geometry, the speaker tells a story about a shipwreck victim stuck on a deserted island with other survivors. He explains that this victim possessed a geometry book and little else, and that he would find solitary places on the island to read the book and sketch geometric images in the sand. For the speaker, geometry—with its clarity and elegance—serves a similar purpose, offering comfort and respite from the vivid unpredictability of life. That's especially true for the speaker, who says that his imaginative mind is so often packed with overwhelming imagery that geometry offers a refreshing contrast. Later, in the depths of a personal crisis following the French Revolution, the speaker again turns to mathematics for soothing clarity. This allegory offers a glimpse at Wordsworth's attitudes towards science generally. He emphasizes elsewhere that he finds science a poor substitute for poetry or imagination, but he clearly considers it a useful, important supplement to them.
Crowds (Motif)
The speaker emphasizes the crowds that throng urban spaces, as well as Cambridge University. He tends to speak disparagingly of those crowds, making it clear that he prefers solitude or intimate friendship as opposed to diffuse groups. The speaker never identifies himself as a member of these crowds, instead stressing that he prefers to wander away from them or observe them at a distance. Several aspects of crowdedness bother the speaker. At Cambridge, he is struck by the conformity and sameness of his peers. In London, however, he is distressed instead by the crowds' lack of cohesion or closeness. The feeling of being surrounded by and physically close to people about whom he knows nothing is an unappealing one. In both cases, however, crowds signify and create distraction from oneself and from nature, misdirecting energy to either in-group norms or chaotic tumult.
Shepherds (Symbol)
In Book Eighth, Wordsworth's speaker explains that shepherds were the first humans he felt love, admiration, and fascination for. In fact, he says, they were a bridge from his first and most enduring love, nature, to his subsequent love of humanity. Their harmony with animals and natural landscapes meant that he associated them from an early age with nature, and admired them for their toughness and skill in navigating it. In the context of the Prelude, shepherds symbolize humankind when it is most in harmony with the natural world. They embody the most desirable way for people to live, or else for young people to look up to.
Vaudracour and Julia (Allegory)
While living in France, the speaker hears the (apparently true) story of Vaudracour and Julia, two young people who fall in love but who cannot be together because one belongs to the nobility and one is a commoner. The story, among other things, retells the story of France itself through allegory. In this allegorical reading, Vaudracour and Julia represent France's revolutionaries—and at the same time, Vaudracour represents nobility while Julia represents the common people of France. Vaudracour's father, meanwhile, stands in for the strict social order dictating how French people can live their lives. In the story, each person's life is harmed or destroyed by the actions of Vaudracour's father. Vaudracour and Julia alike have no agency, and both are estranged from their families as well as from one another. With this allegory, Wordsworth suggests that both the poor and wealthy of France suffer under a universally punishing and arbitrary social hierarchy.
Dreams (Motif)
In the Prelude, dreams are perhaps the primary realm in which external influence collides with subjective experience. The speaker experiences the river by his childhood home as "a voice / That flowed along my dreams," stirring his growth as a poet and observer of language in dreams before he began writing. Later, feeling alienated from his Cambridge classmates, he feels that he is a dreamer, "they the dream": to feel alienated, in other words, is to experience external phenomena as internal ones and vice versa. At other moments in the book, dreams help characters make sense of the ephemerality of human achievement, or reflect the incursion of political oppression into even the most private and subjective parts of life. Far from being moments of passivity, dreams are moments of intellectual and analytical work for the speaker of the Prelude.
The Murderer's Name (Symbol)
When the speaker is a child, he becomes lost and ends up at the site of a murderer's execution. There, someone has carved the executed man's name into the earth. The speaker feels somewhat overwhelmed by the scene, and soothes himself by imagining familiar faces in the forbidding landscape. As an adult, the memory brings him comfort rather than distress. The murderer's carved name ignites emotion beyond what might be rationally expected, and as a result invites vivid, comforting imaginative experience. It therefore becomes, for the adult speaker, a symbol of the thrilling, exciting, and sometimes frightening power of imaginative life. A tiny trigger, it becomes the source of extremely negative emotions, which in turn give rise to positive, exciting ones.
Stonehenge (Symbol)
When describing the regaining of his own powers of imagination, the speaker recounts a moment of intense imaginative experience: visiting the site of Stonehenge and envisioning ancient forebears who performed mysterious rites and communed with nature hundreds of years ago. He pictures druids using rituals to create links between the natural world, the divine, and human society. This inspires him in his own poetry: he hopes, like the druids of his imagination, to connect these realms via the language of poetry. Stonehenge serves as a mental portal to the past, as well as a symbolic representation of the unexpected ways in which the human, the natural, and the divine can intertwine.
