AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding an extract from 'The Prelude'

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The Prelude is a long, semi-autobiographical poem written by Wordsworth which describes his experiences as a boy in the Lake District.  Its full title is The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind and it was a work that Wordsworth started when he was 28 and worked on intermittently throughout his life. He used to refer to it in letters as 'Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge'. It was finally published three months after his death, in 1850. The title it now has comes from the description of it that he used in letters to his sister, and was decided on by his widow.

This extract comes from early on in the poem, starting at line 357. It is part of a description of the poet's childhood, and the nurturing he experiences from nature (personified as 'her' in the first line of this extract).  In ll.301-2 of The Prelude, Wordsworth declares: 'fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / fostered alike by beauty and by fear'. This could almost be used as a gloss on this section of the poem--the beauty and the awe that the child feels in the face of nature is powerfully presented.

The poem is written in blank verse--that is unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. This choice of verse form reinforces both the conversational style of the poem, and also the sense of formal epic. Wordsworth would have been well aware of Shakespeare's use of blank verse in his plays, and this is just one precedent which lends seriousness and gravity to the poem.

The extract describes the poet taking a boat from beneath a willow-tree one summer's night, rowing of the boat out into the lake, experiencing a transcendent feeling of awe when he sees a mountain, and returning the boat again to the mooring. Although he calls her 'my boat' once he is rowing, it is not clear who the boat belongs to, but the description of its use as 'an act of stealth' suggests that the child is knowingly taking the boat without permission, creating a 'troubled pleasure'. It is perhaps this sense of wrongdoing which informs his feeling about the mountain that he sees later in the poem.

The boat is chained to the 'rocky cove, its usual home', suggesting that the speaker knows about it in advance--it's not just a boat he has come across, he knows that it will be there. He takes it without hesitation 'straight I unloosed her chain'. As the boat moves away, the glittering light of the moon is reflected in the ripples created by the oars, the 'small circles'  'on either side' representing the points where the oars touch the water. These ripples join into the larger wake of the boat so as to become 'one track of sparkling light'. The view of this is beautiful, but the speaker looks above the line of the water so as to steer a straight course, fixing his eyes on 'the summit of a craggy ridge / The horizon's utmost boundary'.

In order to understand what happens next, it is important to remember that when a single oarsman is in a rowing boat, the position of the oars means that when he rows the boat moves backwards--that is, he is sitting facing away from the bow of the boat and towards the stern. In this position, the rower is looking away from the direction of travel (this is why teams of rowers generally have a cox sitting in the stern of the boat, who can see ahead and steer the boat). He knows that the lake is huge, and is presumably unafraid of running into anything, and seeks to 'reach a chosen point / With an unswerving line', rowing as swiftly as he can. It is interesting that the poet uses a simile here: 'like one who rows, /Proud of his skill' that yet describes exactly what the speaker is in fact doing.

Initially, the rower's viewpoint, as he is close to the shore, means that as he looks up towards the sky he can only see a nearby crag in view, 'the horizon's utmost boundary' and he uses this as a point of guidance as he rows. The sight of the crag inspires him to think about the essential loneliness of his position, rowing alone in the summer night, with nothing between him and the stars. The situation seems magical: 'she was an elfin pinnace' (a pinnace is a small boat). The idea enthuses him and he starts to row more strongly: 'lustily /I dipped my oars into the silent lake'. His energy is so great that he lifts himself up as he rows, and the boat seems to become alive beneath him: 'as I rose upon the stroke, my boat / Went heaving through the water like a swan'.

However, at this point, as he moves out into the lake, the change of perspective means that a larger peak behind the initial crag comes into view. To see a really excellent explanation of this situation (with a helpful diagram), look at Romanticism @UAB,  by Professor Kyle Grimes. The effect is wholly natural--the change in the boy's angle of vision simply means that he can now see a large peak behind the one that he originally fixed his eyes on--but to the child's mind the mountain seems alive. The repetition of 'huge' in 'a huge peak, black and huge' uses epanalepsis to effectively recall a child's voice, and reminds us, in the adult recollection, of the impact that the event made. The personification of the mountain makes it seem like a giant, as he describes how 'it upreared its head...growing still in stature'. The child sees it as something alive and with free will, and the use of 'instinct' in 'as if with voluntary power instinct' plays on both senses of the word. The first meaning of 'instinct' (and the more common nowadays) is the innate responses of an animal, often as opposed to reason or rational responses, but the second, and the one that Wordsworth is using here, means 'filled with (a quality)'. In other words, although the literal meaning of the phrase is that the mountain looks as though it is full of free will and alive, the choice of the word 'instinct' reinforces the sense that the mountain is animal-like, and inhuman, making it seem more monstrous.

The rower's actions become almost desperate, the repeated use of 'struck' to describe his oar-strokes making it seem as though he is physically fighting the mountain in order to escape it. Of course, his faster rowing simply makes it seem larger, as his point of view means that more and more of it becomes visible as he moves out towards the centre of the lake. At this point, the child almost panics. The mountain is described as 'grim' and like a towering giant, and he imagines that it 'with purpose of its own / and measured motion like a living thing, / Strode after me'. The horrible fantasy causes him to stop his adventure, and 'with trembling oars' he turns around (bearing in mind that to do this he had to put his back to the mountain, this in itself seems pretty courageous)! The use of
metonymy here in 'trembling oars'  (as though they were part of his body) means that the boy seems completely identified with the boat, as he describes how he 'stole my way / Back to the covert of the willow tree'. The choice of verb here is of course a reminder of his original theft of the boat.

The child returns the boat, and goes home 'in grave and serious mood', reflecting on what he has seen and done. In some way his former carefree attitude has left him, and his mind is stunned and blank by the experiences. Wordsworth here uses the rhetorical figure of litotes to emphasise the loss of the 'familiar shapes' of 'trees, / Of sea and sky...colours of green fields', calling up the images of these things even as he denies that they exist. The anaphora of 'no...no....no' at the start of each clause powerfully confirms the sense of loss.  Instead of the 'simple' gifts of nature, the child now focuses upon the sense of awe and wonderment created by the episode. The idea of 'huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men' remains with him at all times, and is the start of that 'fostering' of 'fear' that he describes at the start of the poem. Although the child has had a terrifying experience which has stayed with him in a mysterious manner, it has also awakened in him a sense of the Romantic sublime, a sense of the unseen and incomprehensible that is absolutely necessary to his ultimate development as a poet.