POWER AND CONFLICT

• Entire extract


  • Single stanza which emphasizes the overwhelming power of nature
  • Reflects how Wordsworth was overwhelmed by the immensity of the mountain and nature
• Breathless pace


  1. Frequent enjambment that prevents the reader from pausing

  2. Incites a sense of vastness in the reader by making the poem seem endless and immense

  3. Reader being left speechless and overwhelmed helps them empathize with the overwhelming feelings of the speaker
• Motif of the mountain


  • Portrays the underestimation of nature's power
  • The speaker can be seen as symbolic of humanity as a whole
• "The horizons utmost boundary" shows humanity's misplaced confidence and false sense of superiority over nature
• True size is "huge peak, black and huge"- it's not the mountain itself that scares him but rather the implications of his judgement of the world being deeply flawed
• He is intimidated not by the physical size of the mountain, but by the existential realisation of his own insignificance
• Message is the realisation of how minute and unimportant human life is in comparison to the vast array and power of nature
• At the start he uses sophisticated, poetic language


  Then, the revelation of nature's true power renders him speechless and he has lost all pride and arrogance
• "a huge black peak, black and huge"
• Repetition of "huge" reflects how much of an impact this revelation is having on him
• Could also reflect how man is unable to comprehend the extent of nature's power