Prelude

• The Prelude by William Wordsworth tells a true story from Wordsworth's own childhood
• The story takes place in the Lake District, an area of northwest England famous for its lakes, forests, and mountains
• The poem describes the poet as a young boy stealing a rowing boat and rowing across Oldswater Lake
• Wordsworth is led by nature, personified in the poem as 'her'
• Wordsworth rowing the boat


  Finds a boat chained up, gets in, pushes off onto the lake, feels powerful and delighted with himself
• As Wordsworth rows


  He fixes his eyes on a huge mountain that springs into view, gets terrified, turns and rows back to the shore
• Wordsworth is harassed for days by the memory of the event
• William Wordsworth was one of the Romantic poets, along with William Blake and Percy Shelley
• Romantic poetry was a poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
• One key convention of Romantic poetry is a dislike of urban life and an embrace of the natural world
• Speaker's sense of power in the poem

  • Described as an act of stealth, selfish, feeling powerful, ego growing, magical quality to the moment, feeling all-powerful like the hero of a mythical story
• Shift in language usage in the poem

  • From figurative and expressive language to a simplistic definition, repetition of 'huge' for effect
• If a student wrote this line in a piece of creative writing, their teacher might suggest that they replace one use of huge with a different word
• The repetition means it's clunky and doesn't read or flow well like the previous parts of the poem did
• This deliberate repetition is for effect on the part of Wordsworth
• Speaker's characteristics

  • Confidence
  • Pride
  • Vocabulary
• Structural shift in language usage

  Highlights the impact the mountain has on the speaker
• The mountain has drained the speaker of all sense of power
• The speaker has realized in an instance that humans are not powerful, nature is truly powerful
• The poem is structured as one long stanza
• There are numerous possible reasons for the poem being structured as one long stanza
• When the whole poem is read aloud with no major breaks or pauses, we're overwhelmed by the immensity of the poem
• This overwhelming aspect reflects how young Wordsworth himself was overwhelmed by his experience with nature
• Structural feature


  • Enjambment
• Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line
• The first sentence of the poem flows over the first three lines
• Enjambment adds to the sense of the overwhelming effect nature has upon the speaker
• The repetition of 'no' in 'no familiar shapes remained, no pleasant images of trees of sea or sky, no colours of green fields' shows how the speaker's pride from the opening lines has vanished
• The speaker is not confident of what he knows and can only explain things in terms of what he does not know, hence the repetition of the word 'no'
• In terms of power and conflict, the poem shows us a speaker with misguided notions of human power
• The speaker learns the lesson that nature is truly powerful
• In terms of misguided notions of human power, 'Ozymandias', 'My Last Duchess', 'Kamikaze', and 'Tissue' are perhaps the most obvious picks to compare with the extract from 'The Prelude'
• In terms of the power of nature, 'Kamikaze', 'Storm on the Island', 'Exposure', and 'Tissue' are good poems to compare with 'The Prelude'
• For more on this poem, pick up a copy of Mr. Bro's guide to Power and Conflict Poetry available exclusively in ebook form
• If you like this shorter style of analysis video, do give it a thumbs up and more may be made
• This video isn't intended to tell you everything you need to know about the poem, it's a recap