- Poem begins in 1798 as a boy
- finished 1805 but revised until 1850
- 1805 draft revised/published 1926
Book 1: Intro - Childhood to School-Time
- Vital soul, knowledge of underlying principle's, host of painstaking observations of natural phenomena
- Why does Wordsworth think what he's doing is sacred?
- Why is the narrator so happy at the beginning of book 1?
- Why does he have trouble writing?
- How does Wordsworth get the boat when he's nine?
- What scares Wordsworth when he is out in the boat?
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
p. 596 common life, language really used by men at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination
P. 603 more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, greater knowledge of human nature, more comprehensive soul
Wordsworth thinks its a special gift to be able to write poetry
p. 597 Low and rustic life
Wordsworth wanted to democratize poetry
Confessions of St. Augustine - first spiritual (internal) autobiography
GOD, MAN, NATURE
Prelude is similar but removes God.
Vindication of the Rights of Women
Why are women like soldiers? Subservient classes, do as they're told, not well educated
Sophia Doesn't try to be anything beyond pleasant to men.
1. Call to arms
The system doesn't work because people aren't trained to think systematically. They also aren't interested in learning this. They are distracted by stuff.
Who benefits? Tyrants and libertines (sensualists) Women think they have power by manipulating.
Being a mother and a friend to your husband are the virtues to strive for.
Power of sex appeal fades.
The system creates women who can't function. Bad women.
"How women are to exist in that state."
Women are emotional "In short, women in general."
Ideal woman:
Vindication of the Rights of Women
Why are women like soldiers? Subservient classes, do as they're told, not well educated
Sophia Doesn't try to be anything beyond pleasant to men.
1. Call to arms
The system doesn't work because people aren't trained to think systematically. They also aren't interested in learning this. They are distracted by stuff.
Who benefits? Tyrants and libertines (sensualists) Women think they have power by manipulating.
Being a mother and a friend to your husband are the virtues to strive for.
Power of sex appeal fades.
The system creates women who can't function. Bad women.
"How women are to exist in that state."
Women are emotional "In short, women in general."
Ideal woman:
- Has control of her physical body (exercise)
- Doesn't fake emotion, be honest
- A friend to her husband
- Reign in your passion
- Mutual understanding
- Respect
Women should be able to demand that men take care of their illegitimate children
Public schools with uniforms for everyone
Women should be in Parliament and have careers
Prelude
- Starts with him happy and having figured it out
- Bildungs roman - coming of age Küntsleroman
- "growth of my own mind"
- "poem of my own poetical education"
- Writing to coleridge but Coleridge isn't there. They have gone separate ways. "O friend"
- Processing his memories, reflecting on his past
- 2 consciences. 5 year old conscience and adult conscience
- He asked why that boy saw things different than other people
- Personifying nature
- Male romantics dominate nature
- The scary mountain when he is boating in a turning point of his attitudes toward nature. Now it is sublime instead of beautiful.
Summary and Analysis Book 1: Introduction–Childhood and School-time
Summary
It is a magnificent autumn day. The poet has, by his own account, been too long pent-up in London and only now has managed to return to the beloved Lake District where he spent his childhood and adolescence. It is difficult to fix his age as the poem opens because time constantly shifts backward and forward throughout the narrative. The start of Book 1 finds Wordsworth speaking from a mature point of view. The body of the poem employs flashbacks to describe the development of the poetic mind during youth. This material is amalgamated with the poet's adult views of philosophy and art (those views held during the writing and endless revision of The Prelude, roughly from 1799 to 1850).
Wordsworth experiences relief in coming back to nature. He immediately identifies spiritual freedom with the absence of the encumbrances of civilization. Feelings of irresponsible freedom and lack of purpose quickly give way to a prevision of an impending period of optimism and creativity. In the delicious quiet, Wordsworth suddenly sees in his mind's eye the cottage of the landlady with whom he stayed as a schoolboy. He recalls that even then he had intimations of his future greatness.
His wish to create some profound work of art calls for a re-disciplining of his mind, which has recently been dulled by the artificiality of society. He mentions in passing the typical moodineess of the poet in likening him to a lover. In assessing his faculties, Wordsworth finds he has the three necessary ingredients for creativity: a vital soul; knowledge of the underlying principles of things; and a host of painstaking observations of natural phenomena. He rejects historical and martial themes, as well as mere anecdotes from his personal history. He is searching instead for "some philosophic song that cherishes our daily life." He is next assailed by doubts about the maturity of his views. If such views change radically after he has recorded them, his analysis of them will be worthless. In his indecision, he feels that if he reviews the ideas he formed in childhood and traces their history up until early manhood, he will find whether they have had any lasting truth and permanence.
He recollects some of his childhood activities, among them river-bathing (he sported like a naked savage) and climbing and robbing of birds' nests while wandering at night. In a discussion of simple education, he stresses the importance of reaction on the part of the child to every action upon it by its natural environment. In this way, nature develops morality in the child. Wordsworth sets the tone of the poem by speaking religiously of nature. He sees it as a great and awesome intelligence. Occasionally he communicates his mood to the reader by employing natural objects as symbols of his feelings.
In a celebrated passage filled with much color, the poet describes how as a youth he stole a boat and rowed one night across Ullswater Lake. At the climax of his experience, he imagined that a peak beyond the lake became a presence which reared up and menaced him because of his misdeed in taking the boat. He confides that for some time thereafter he struggled to clarify a conception of pantheism which had been teasing his brain. He addresses what he terms the spirit of the universe. He decries the artifacts of civilization and praises enduring things–life and nature.
In a more literal section, he tells of his youthful pastimes and mentions winter ice games with a group of companions and games of cards and tick-tack-toe in front of the peat fire. But above all, he tried to be outdoors at all times of the year so that nature could be unstinting in its education of him. He is particularly troubled when he remembers that certain vistas in Westmoreland–particularly the sea–brought him great pleasure, through he had no prior experience of the same kind of joy. Since beauty is eternal, he may have learned to love such sights during a previous existence of his soul. He then proceeds to develop a romantic theory of aesthetics. He maintains that certain individuals create great art because, in the midst of mundane events, they sense the magical urgency in everyday objects. Insignificant things take on a critical meaning over and above their common and instrumental role. They suggest to the practitioner of the fine arts, the clergyman, and the idealistic philosopher that the universe is of vast and harmonious design. The layman, on the other hand, is insensible to the oneness of all things, and the idea must be communicated to him.
Summary and Analysis Book 9: Residence in France
Summary
Wordsworth likens his own attempt to recapture the formative past to the meandering of a river. When it is threatened with dissolution by absorption into the sea, it tries to work its way back to its origins. He apologizes for his digressions and compares himself to a traveler who has reaced a commanding summit and views all before him. He "Strives, from that height, with one and yet one more / last look" lest he disregard some significant feature. The poet vows once more to forge ahead.
In London, he was free as a colt. He went everywhere and sought not the distinguished person but the simpler things in life. After a year, he determined to return to France; he had fond memories of it from his earlier journey. His destination was Orleans, a small, quiet town on the Loire River. His route from the Channel lay through Paris. There he visited some of the sights connected with contemporary history. He mentions the Champ de Mars, the Faubourg St. Antoine, Montmartre, and the Pantheon (in his day the Church of St. Genevieve). He says, "I saw the Revolutionary Power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms." He describes hectic scene around the Palais Royale. He saw in the faces of the crowd both hope and fear. At the site of the Bastille, he picked up a stone as a souvenir "affecting more emotion than I felt." The Magdalene of the painter Le Brun thrilled him more than the places connected with the Revolution.
Going to Orléans, he found himself fascinated with local manners and customs and tended to ignore the revolutionary fervor. He confesses an ignorance of the origins of the Revolution and its aims. He read the pamphlets and attended the meetings of learned societies. But he was brought to identify with the Revolution only after the initial violence had died, and then only through his love for the ordinary people. However, he found himself presently most at home with a certain band of military officers stationed at Orléans. They were all members of the upper classes. In political sympathies, they were Royalists, naturally, and almost to a man they dreamed of turning back the tide of the growing Revolution.
At this point, Wordsworth began a friendship with Michel Beaupuy that was to have a profound influence on his intellectual outlook. He says of the officer who befriended him that he was a young man in the prime of life, but that the trials of life and circumstances of the time have aged him prematurely. The poet says it is "an hour of universal ferment"; he thinks the future will judge the present harshly. He says that the group of officers befriended him and tried to win him to their cause because he was an Englishman and a youth.
The poet was simply indifferent to the political and social lessons of history; he responded to events only as drama. He always felt dislike for royalty and mere pomp and observed that those who ruled were often the least worthy. In his childhood environment, he had been taught that money and noble blood were worthless if strength of character did not accompany them. He praises the academic institutions in that they strive to create a democratic community and award honors only on the basis of personal merit. In fact, the slow development of Wordsworth's enthusiasm for the liberating effect of the Revolution was because he took it for granted that liberty was an inalienable right and long overdue.
All about him the youth of the country were proceeding to the frontier to confront the nations in coalition against France. Some of the scenes of farewell rent the poet's heart. He looked upon them as part of the redeeming price to pay for liberty.
His favorite officer (Beaupuy) was a patriot, he says, and was hence rejected by his fellows. Wordsworth calls him meek and benign, and describes him as passing through the revolutionary chaos with perfect faith in man:
Man he loved
as man; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension
Alone together, the two frequently talked politics. They also discussed humanity's inclinations and noble aims, history and its leaders, the foundling or amalgamation of new nations were none existed before. To natural man they imputed only the loftiest motives:
Elate we looked
Upon their virtues; saw, in rudest men,
Self-sacrifice the firmest; generous love,
And continence of mind, and sense of right,
Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife.
Wordsworth says it wonderful on
some nameless rill,
To ruminate, with interchange of talk,
On rational liberty, and hope in man,
Justice and peace.
He likens Beaupuy to the type of deliverer who arises in time of crisis–the true philosopher who risks his life to try and put his political philosophy into action. The poet recollects Beaupuy's death on the banks of the Loire and is glad the soldier did not live to see the tyranny of Napoleon, who had declared himself emperor in 1804.
Wordsworth recalls their walks along the Loire prior to Beaupuy's death. They talked of politics; but the poet's mind kept wandering away from the subject to people and the woods with fanciful characters. The sight of convents closed by the revolutionaries caused the poet remorse. The sight of Chateau de Blois causes them to reflect on the dissoluteness of kings and on their absolutist ways. The sight of a half-starved peasant girl who leads an emaciated cow causes the poet's friend to cry out against the injustice which produces the many poor and the few rich. Both the companions were filled with a faith that the ancient regime and its system of privilege would soon pass.
Wordsworth refers to the tale of Vaudracour and Julia, which was told to him by Beaupuy. It was a tale of young love, typical in its frustration which was caused by the overvaluation of status and position in pre-revolutionary France. Vaudracour and Julia had grown up together in a small town in the heart of France. They feel deeply in love, but Vaudracour's father disapproved of any union because a member of the nobility would degrade himself in marrying a maid of no rank. The lovers finally decided to defy the father. Julia had an illegitimate child. The father continued to conspire against the couple. Julia at length entered a convent to escape persecution. Her lover retired with the child to a lodge in the forest. Soon after, the child died, and Vaudracour was left to lose his reason in the lonely solitude.
The passage was originally written in 1804 and intended for Book 9. It ran to 380 lines and made Book 9 disproportionately long. However, for some reason Wordsworth excised the section, reduced it to 308 lines, and published it as a separate poem in 1820. It was considered one of his dullest, but critics valued it as an autobiographical account of his affair with Annette Vallon. The passion, frustration, and remorse in the poem are reminiscent of the feelings which actually pervaded the affair of the poet with his French mistress. In the lines that remain in Book 9, Wordsworth alludes to these feelings and remarks ruefully that the leveling of the class distinctions by the Revolution came too late to save Vaudracour.
Summary
Wordsworth likens his own attempt to recapture the formative past to the meandering of a river. When it is threatened with dissolution by absorption into the sea, it tries to work its way back to its origins. He apologizes for his digressions and compares himself to a traveler who has reaced a commanding summit and views all before him. He "Strives, from that height, with one and yet one more / last look" lest he disregard some significant feature. The poet vows once more to forge ahead.
In London, he was free as a colt. He went everywhere and sought not the distinguished person but the simpler things in life. After a year, he determined to return to France; he had fond memories of it from his earlier journey. His destination was Orleans, a small, quiet town on the Loire River. His route from the Channel lay through Paris. There he visited some of the sights connected with contemporary history. He mentions the Champ de Mars, the Faubourg St. Antoine, Montmartre, and the Pantheon (in his day the Church of St. Genevieve). He says, "I saw the Revolutionary Power / Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms." He describes hectic scene around the Palais Royale. He saw in the faces of the crowd both hope and fear. At the site of the Bastille, he picked up a stone as a souvenir "affecting more emotion than I felt." The Magdalene of the painter Le Brun thrilled him more than the places connected with the Revolution.
Going to Orléans, he found himself fascinated with local manners and customs and tended to ignore the revolutionary fervor. He confesses an ignorance of the origins of the Revolution and its aims. He read the pamphlets and attended the meetings of learned societies. But he was brought to identify with the Revolution only after the initial violence had died, and then only through his love for the ordinary people. However, he found himself presently most at home with a certain band of military officers stationed at Orléans. They were all members of the upper classes. In political sympathies, they were Royalists, naturally, and almost to a man they dreamed of turning back the tide of the growing Revolution.
At this point, Wordsworth began a friendship with Michel Beaupuy that was to have a profound influence on his intellectual outlook. He says of the officer who befriended him that he was a young man in the prime of life, but that the trials of life and circumstances of the time have aged him prematurely. The poet says it is "an hour of universal ferment"; he thinks the future will judge the present harshly. He says that the group of officers befriended him and tried to win him to their cause because he was an Englishman and a youth.
The poet was simply indifferent to the political and social lessons of history; he responded to events only as drama. He always felt dislike for royalty and mere pomp and observed that those who ruled were often the least worthy. In his childhood environment, he had been taught that money and noble blood were worthless if strength of character did not accompany them. He praises the academic institutions in that they strive to create a democratic community and award honors only on the basis of personal merit. In fact, the slow development of Wordsworth's enthusiasm for the liberating effect of the Revolution was because he took it for granted that liberty was an inalienable right and long overdue.
All about him the youth of the country were proceeding to the frontier to confront the nations in coalition against France. Some of the scenes of farewell rent the poet's heart. He looked upon them as part of the redeeming price to pay for liberty.
His favorite officer (Beaupuy) was a patriot, he says, and was hence rejected by his fellows. Wordsworth calls him meek and benign, and describes him as passing through the revolutionary chaos with perfect faith in man:
Man he loved
as man; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension
Alone together, the two frequently talked politics. They also discussed humanity's inclinations and noble aims, history and its leaders, the foundling or amalgamation of new nations were none existed before. To natural man they imputed only the loftiest motives:
Elate we looked
Upon their virtues; saw, in rudest men,
Self-sacrifice the firmest; generous love,
And continence of mind, and sense of right,
Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife.
Wordsworth says it wonderful on
some nameless rill,
To ruminate, with interchange of talk,
On rational liberty, and hope in man,
Justice and peace.
He likens Beaupuy to the type of deliverer who arises in time of crisis–the true philosopher who risks his life to try and put his political philosophy into action. The poet recollects Beaupuy's death on the banks of the Loire and is glad the soldier did not live to see the tyranny of Napoleon, who had declared himself emperor in 1804.
Wordsworth recalls their walks along the Loire prior to Beaupuy's death. They talked of politics; but the poet's mind kept wandering away from the subject to people and the woods with fanciful characters. The sight of convents closed by the revolutionaries caused the poet remorse. The sight of Chateau de Blois causes them to reflect on the dissoluteness of kings and on their absolutist ways. The sight of a half-starved peasant girl who leads an emaciated cow causes the poet's friend to cry out against the injustice which produces the many poor and the few rich. Both the companions were filled with a faith that the ancient regime and its system of privilege would soon pass.
Wordsworth refers to the tale of Vaudracour and Julia, which was told to him by Beaupuy. It was a tale of young love, typical in its frustration which was caused by the overvaluation of status and position in pre-revolutionary France. Vaudracour and Julia had grown up together in a small town in the heart of France. They feel deeply in love, but Vaudracour's father disapproved of any union because a member of the nobility would degrade himself in marrying a maid of no rank. The lovers finally decided to defy the father. Julia had an illegitimate child. The father continued to conspire against the couple. Julia at length entered a convent to escape persecution. Her lover retired with the child to a lodge in the forest. Soon after, the child died, and Vaudracour was left to lose his reason in the lonely solitude.
The passage was originally written in 1804 and intended for Book 9. It ran to 380 lines and made Book 9 disproportionately long. However, for some reason Wordsworth excised the section, reduced it to 308 lines, and published it as a separate poem in 1820. It was considered one of his dullest, but critics valued it as an autobiographical account of his affair with Annette Vallon. The passion, frustration, and remorse in the poem are reminiscent of the feelings which actually pervaded the affair of the poet with his French mistress. In the lines that remain in Book 9, Wordsworth alludes to these feelings and remarks ruefully that the leveling of the class distinctions by the Revolution came too late to save Vaudracour.
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