THE PRELUDE

• CONTEXT:

  • Wordsworth was a pantheist, seeing God in the all-embracing natural world
  • This section is called “ School days ” where Wordsworth includes veiled reference to a boys fascination with sexual exploration and ambition and recklessness
  • #3 - Romantic movement - where writers rejected the unemotional rationalism that enlightenment brought and used a more emotional and subjective view of the world, looking to the beauty of nature and past life
• “But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.”

  • The poet moves into a forbidding world of “huge and mighty forms” that are personified but not like “living men”
  • They “move slowly though the mind” as if possessed by sinister forces (gothic mood)
  • “Trouble to my dreams” echoes “troubled pleasure”
  • Slow pace of a long ponderous sentence matches the imaginary moving forms in the mind of the poet
• “with trembling pars I turned and through the silent water stole my way”

  • personification -> oars = metaphor for humankind , as the poet manipulates them,
  • Hypallage -> though they are inanimate they “tremble” as if afraid of nature
  • Lexical field of fragility (“trembling”, “stole” and “covert” ) - these words have dental, alliterative plosive “t”s - showing stuttering, trembling and fear
  • A covert is where animals hide when being hunted → poet sees himself as prey
  • Verbs “stole” with “struck” and “heaving” Connote violence and guilt.
• “lustily I dipped my oars… I rose upon the stroke, my boat…”

  • Homophonic “pinnacle”, adverb “lustily”, the assonance (of “oh”) in rose, stroke and boat, and the act of “dipping oars” creates sexual imagery
  • Showing adolescent sexual exploration but also misplaced confidence
  • Semicolon creates a caesura to show an upcoming shift in mood
• “led by her … I unloosened her chain”

  • “Led by her” shows that the poet had no agency over what happened
  • “Unloosened her chain” personifies the boat, indicating a familiarity and spiritual relationship he has with the boat
  • Sailing vessels are often personified as females; but it could also suggest that he sees the boat as a protecting mother figure or a goddess
  • The boat is “chain”Ed to the tree that man needs to grow around nature to survive