William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 3 (ctd.)

Wordsworth goes to college! I thought being transplanted from the mountains of the Lake District to Cambridgeshire flatlands would be rather depressing. But he only mentions briefly “a wide plain o’erhung with clouds” and then is all giddy excitement, as he notices the turrets of Cambridge and the first student he passes in his carriage, dressed in full academic robes and evidently in a hurry. Then he meets his older friends who came to Cambridge a bit earlier and goes shopping for all the necessary and unnecessary things in his new life as a student. He is a bit of a dandy, wearing silk hose, powdered hair and a magnificent dressing gown – all these signs of manhood, he notices self-deprecatingly, making up for his lack of beard (he was just seventeen). He describes St John’s College where he enrolled, his room over the noisy kitchen and Newton’s monument in the quad. He mentions briefly his fellow students, running the whole gamut from hard-working to idle ones. He seems to have had a rather enjoyable experience, marred only by worries about his future job. As the Helpful Footnote informs us, Wordsworth’s guardians expected him to be a star student who would eventually become a Fellow, which was not the kind of career he fancied. But why should he worry? He was a rather smart guy, if he says so himself – this sentence is made rather too complicated by the pious insertion in a later revision about how he had not only Reason but also Christian Hope and Faith (all capitals original).

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 2 (the end)

Wordsworth writes that he still liked “the exercise and produce of a toil”, which I take to be physical work, more than analytical thinking, because the former was, in his view, more similar to creative work. Then he rather abruptly switches to his philosophy as he was turning seventeen: he believed that there are affinities between all the things in the universe, both organic as well as unorganic. He says he can’t be sure whether it was innate in him, or the product of his own real life, or maybe the objective truth, but that’s how he perceived the world. But he felt the influence of a Being spread over all Nature, animate and inanimate. In the later version of The Prelude he added a few lines making his thoughts more in line with orthodox Christianity, implying that it was the personal God he was referring to. He then thanks Nature for making him the person he is and says that if there is anything good in him, it’s due to its influence. These are sad times, he says, thinking about the period following the French Revolution, when the British authorities clamped down on any liberal thought and people, disillusioned with the outcome of the Revolution:

On every side, fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness, disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers
On visionary minds

That’s a very good observation (suggested by Coleridge) and still relevant, I think: otherwise good people, disillusioned with politics, say: “it’s all dirty business and there’s no point in my engaging with it. I am going to mind my own business and my family”, and then make fun of those who are still silly enough (in their view) to be activists. But Wordsworth still has faith and hope and that’s thanks to cataracts and mountains of his homeland. That is quite interesting to me but again a sentiment I fail to share completely. Maybe it’s because I’m a product of the post-Darwinian world, but it’s clear to me that nature doesn’t give a shit about us. Finally, Wordsworth addresses his “Friend”, i.e. Coleridge, saying that he knows he shares these sentiments even though he spent his schooldays in London. Wordsworth was writing these words as Coleridge was planning to move back to London and so the poem ends with a farewell and hearty best wishes. (Coleridge did return from London and even moved in with the Wordsworths with his two sons, so in the end perhaps Wordsworth had a reason to wish this farewell had been as definitive as it sounds.)

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 2 (ctd.)

Now it’s one of those tough abstract bits. Wordsworth believes that his early life was for him the source of both his appreciation of solitude and society and his appreciation of nature. These moments of exultation in natural beauty spurred his soul on for further development. That universal power had also for Wordsworth “a superadded soul”, but he doesn’t quite explain what it is. Unless he means his school friend, identified as John Fleming. He describes how often in summer out of his own free will he would get up two hours earlier to go for a five-mile walk with his best friend around the lake. In summer school would start at 6 am (they wanted to make use of the natural light and make up for short winter days, I guess), so that means Wordsworth would get up at 4 am. Perhaps at no point in the poem I felt as at odds with him as now. Anyway, even though they were best friends, they kind of drifted apart in adulthood, although they lived not very far away from each other. Now Wordsworth imagines his old friend getting emotional reading these lines about the days long gone by. Wordsworth describes how wonderful it is to get up before everybody [sic] and how often in such situations his reverie overcame him.

Wordsworth then coyly says it would take which too much space to describe his growing up in all the four seasons of the year, although it seems to me that he’s been doing precisely that through the last two books. But he also emphasizes he’s not just a passive recipient to the beauty of the world. In fact, everyday life would have tempered his receptiveness for the beauty of Nature, had it not been for his “local spirit”, “an auxiliar light” which was the actual source of him seeing beauty in Nature around him.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 2 (ctd.)

Wodswroth says that now he’s going to say how he started loving Nature for its own sake, not just because of the emotional attachment to his homeland. But who is really able to analyse one’s emotions so minutely? His “Friend”, i.e. Coleridge, learned as he is, knows that learning is just “a prop/To our infirmity”, not the end-all and the highest achievement of humankind. So Wordsworth is sure that he is also going to be doubtful about the idea of being able to classify emotions neatly, like specimens in a display cabinet. Where’s the source of all these emotions? Of course in childhood.

And here we get to something that started to bother me. These fragments up to this point really have read a bit like Swallows and Amazons or “What I Did During Holidays” in blank verse (even though much of it takes place during the school year). What was conspicuously missing is the fact that Wordsworth was an orphan who lost his mother at eight and father at thirteen. I thought, surely he must have been traumatized by the death of his mother, and even though his father was more of a distant figure, who after his wife’s death distributed all his children among various relatives, surely he must have felt his death keenly, too. In fact, he described it in an earlier, 1799 version of the poem (scroll down to line 340 or so). In this last version of the poem he refers to his parents in a rather indirect way. Maybe his way of dealing with the trauma was to surround it with a protective layer of words which grew more and more vague and impersonal.

So in this version Wordsworth writes (at least superficially speaking) about Babe and Mother in general, not himself. The child is very much an alien in this world (he sounds quite Heideggerian here), but because of this “one dear Presence”, they construct the image of the world as a place they can relate to. Most people gradually forget this experience, but some retain it. Then Wordsworth gets personal: through the contact with his mother his sensibility grew. But then “from unknown causes, I was left alone”, which I wouldn’t guess refers to the death of his mother had it not been for the Helpful Footnote. Yet his power of relating to Nature remained undiminished because of the “most watchful power of love”. I am not sure if he wants to say that his mother took care of him even after her death or whether the store of affection she had built for him was so big that it lasted him even after she died.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 2 (ctd.)

Sometimes the boys splurged on hiring a horse from the local inn-keeper and made more distant excursions to the stone circle at Swinside (described by Wordsworth as built by Druids, although it’s of course much older than the Celts), or to the ruins of Furness Abbey. (Wordsworth writes ‘we”, but I don’t think the horse could carry more than two, could it?) One day, a wren was singing in the ruins so sweetly that despite the day being wet and the walls being damp, the young Wordsworth felt half-willing to live there forever. Another place they visited was an old tavern called The White Lion in Bowness on the shores of Windermere, the grandest place in the neighbourhood before the Hall on Belle Isle on the Windermere was built. The poet still has a sweet spot for the place, remembering fondly the bowling matches they played on the green near the inn, eating strawberries and cream. Then they would leave in a boat, rowing through the lake to leave one boy on an island (I presume he lived there and they didn’t just maroon him there for some reason). The boy was playing the flute and the music followed them as they were rowing away.

Through such events Wordsworth learnt to love nature. Already as a boy he loved the sun: not the way he loved it as an adult, as the source of life, but because he saw the numerous sunrises and sunsets and associated them with his own happiness. He also loved the moon for similar reasons which he compares to patriotic feelings: he loved her because she shone on the Vale he loved as if she had belonged to this place only.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 2

The subtitle of this book is “School-time continued” and this is what this book is: a continuation of the stories of Wordsworth’s idyllic childhood. He describes how in summer he used to play outside with his friends until after dusk. Here Worsworth asks some rather perplexing rhetorical questions which I struggle to connect with what he wrote before and after. Is there one, he asks, who doesn’t need a warning to tame “the pride of intellect and virtue’s self-esteem”? Even the wisest person in the world would like to give, if they could, the eagerness of child’s desire to truth and beauty. The children Wordsworth describes are not very concerned with virtue or truth and I am stumped by the second observation. Anyway, Wordsworth muses about how now he is a different, calmer person, and yet the days of childhood are so vivid in his memory that he sometimes feels as if there were two persons within him. He reminisces about a big rock in the centre of the village (Hawkshead, as the Helpful Footnote informs us) where an old woman peddler used to display her wares and which disappeared when the market hall was built, as he found when he revisited the place as a grown-up, accompanied by his brother John and his friend Coleridge. It is them he addresses now as “friends”, saying that “more than one” of them will think with him about the summer nights and the old dame who had her stall there for sixty years. Since John Wordsworth lived in Hawkshead as well, of course he was going to remember her, but why should Wordsworth include Coleridge, unless he means some act of imaginative empathy on Coleridge’s part?

The next vignette is about the boys boat-racing on the Lake Windermere to one of its three islands. It didn’t actually matter who won, because they raced simply for the joy of the race and they all ended up on the same pretty island, which taught Wordsworth, as he thinks, not to be vain.

Their food was simple and frugal and they knew “the blessing… of vigorous hunger” all too well, especially since their weekly allowance was very small, so they couldn’t afford buying many extra snacks. The only exception was at the beginning of a new semester, when they got a bigger sum and they could afford having some picknicks.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 1 (the end)

Wordsworth claims that apart from the sensory pleasures of Nature, he also felt other kind of “an intellectual charm”. He uses the word “intellectual” in the sense of “not being perceived by senses”, the way Shelley was going to use it later. He remembers how he stood looking at the sea in the evening, not connecting this image with any previous notions of peace or quiet, and drinking it all in. The images presented T to him by Nature gave him the feeling of other, more spiritual things, even if at the time he didn’t understand them fully. He never forgot these beautiful scenes, even if he forgot the joy they gave him and they were associated by him with his affections. I sense there must be quite a lot of allusions to David Hartley, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s favourite philosopher at that time, but I’m too tired to delve into it. Wordsworth hopes that he just doesn’t attribute his thoughts and feelings of a mature man: post factum to his younger self and that his Friend (Coleridge, to whom the poem was addressed, and in fact Wordsworth in his lifetime referred to The Prelude as “the poem for Coleridge”) won’t find this story boring. But now at least he found his poetic vocation: he’s going to write an autobiographical poem and he hopes his Friend is going to like it.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 1 (ctd.)

Wordsworth says he could go on and on with these vignettes because each of these experiences played a role in shaping him: angling, nutting, flying a kite. He practically founded, I think, the genre of literature about boys (and sometimes also girls) having adventures out in the wild, like Jefferies’ Bevis or Swallows and Amazons by another Lake District resident, Arthur Ransome. But when weather was bad, life in the interiors of lowly cottages had also its pleasures, like playing the game “too humble to be named in verse”, i.e tic-tac-toe, on their slates (the Helpful Footnote says Wordsworth here is poking fun at the 18th c. poetic convention of using periphrases). Another call-back to the 18th c. is the description of games of cards, recalling Pope’s famous description in The Rape of the Lock. But their deck of cards is incomplete, with many court cards missing, so they had to promote more plebeian cards to play their role (Wordsworth alluding here cleverly to the French Revolution). The game goes on, with the usual trite jokes that people like to make when playing cards, while outside it is raining or freezing, or you can hear the noise made by ice cracking in warmer weather.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 1 (ctd.)

The story of Wordsworth’s childhood continues. One summer evening he stole, or maybe putting it more kindly, borrowed a boat without asking the owner’s permission and set out rowing. He was looking at a point on the ridge on the opposite shore, to keep the course straight, But as he moves on, a huge black peak comes into his field of vision and looks dark and menacing, growing with every stroke of his oars. The boy, who had already been somewhat troubled by what he did, turned back the boat, put it back and for many days felt rattled by the experience. This is actually very good – it’s not scary in the conventional sense of the word, like horror scenes, and yet Wordsworth conveys the somehow improbable idea “the mountain scared me into behaving myself” in such a way that it can be expected.

After eulogizing “Spirit of the Universe” a bit more the next vignette he describes is he and his friends skating on the frozen lake in the early winter evening. The windows of the cottages are lit with the fires on their hearths inside, but the boys do not pay attention, preoccupied with their game of hunt and chase. Young William sometimes breaks away from the noisy crowd, trying to chase the reflection of a star in the ice. He also enjoys the feeling when he suddenly stops short and the whole world still revolves around him, “as if the earth had rolled/with visible motion her diurnal round!”, he writes, echoing the line from “Strange fits of passion“, but also showing how an ordinary experience can give one a premonition of a bigger truth about the universe.

William Wordsworth – “The Prelude” Book 1 (ctd.)

The poet feels frustrated and thinks it’s better to wander through fields and enjoy nature than to be consumed with frustrated ambition and feel like the unprofitable steward from the biblical parable about talents. This leads to a somewhat awkward segue to the part of The Prelude composed first, in 1798 – did my native river Derwent bring me up for that? he asks, which gives him a pretext for a long lyrical passage describing his childhood spent on the river Derwent, like a little Indian savage (his words). The next episode he describes is when he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School and went out at night to set traps for birds, sometimes falling to the temptation and stealing birds from other people’s traps. He also remembers fondly climbing high hills to get eggs from birds’ nests. Everything that he lived through, including the painful parts, contributed to the making of him as a human being and a poet, and everything was a part of Nature’s plan. I wonder how it is that Wordsworth, who could convey the feeling of lost innocence of the natural world in “Nutting”, writes about bird-catching and stealing birds’ eggs in the vein of “oh, the scrapes I got up to when I was a boy”.