Poetry - The Prelude

• Extract from the prelude


  A true story from Wordsworth's own childhood that takes place in the Lake District, an area of northwest England famous for its lakes, forests, and mountains
• Poem describes


  1. The poet as a young boy stealing a rowing boat and rowing across Oldwater Lake

  2. Wordsworth led by nature, which is personified in the poem as 'her'

  3. Wordsworth finds a boat chained up, gets in, and pushes off onto the lake

  4. Wordsworth feels proud and delighted with himself

  5. Wordsworth fixes his eyes on a huge mountain that springs into view, terrified, he turns and rows back to the shore

  6. Wordsworth is harassed for days by the memory of the event
• William Wordsworth


  One of the Romantic poets, along with William Blake and Percy Shelley
• Romantic poetry


  • A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
  • Key convention is a dislike of urban life and embrace of the natural world
• Speaker's sense of power


  • Described through positive imagery, such as the boat moving 'like a swan' and being an 'elfin pinis'
  • Speaker feels selfish and takes the boat with no thought of consequences
• Speaker fixes his eyes on a huge mountain

  Terrified, he turns and rows back to the shore
• Shift in language usage


  • Speaker's previous use of figurative and expressive language deserts him, he regresses to a simplistic definition of what he sees
  • Repetition of 'huge' is clunky and deliberate, highlighting the impact the mountain has on the speaker
• Poem is structured as one long stanza
• Enjambment is used, where a sentence continues beyond the end of a line
• Repetition of 'no' shows the speaker's pride has vanished, and he can only explain things in terms of what he does not know
• Poem shows a speaker with misguided notions of human power


  He learns the lesson that nature is truly powerful
• Poems that compare well with the extract from The Prelude


  • Ozymandias, My Last Duchess, Kamikaze, Tissue
  • Kamikaze, Storm on the Island, Exposure, Tissue