his comment on 'Lucy Gray' (see p. 277).
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quickly evolved into an independent autobiographical poem, and by late 1799, when Wordsworth settled with his sister, Dorothy, at Grasmere, he had written a two-part, 978-line poem which describes his life from infancy, through his years at Hawkshead School, to the age of seventeen. This poem corresponds, by and large, to the contents of books 1 and 2 of the later versions of The Prelude.
2. The 1805 Prelude. Late in 1801 Wordsworth began to expand the poem on his poetic life, and in 1804 he set to work intensively on the project. His initial plan was to write it in five books, but he soon decided to enlarge it to incorporate an account of his experiences in France and of his mental crisis after the failure of his hopes in the French Revolution, and to end the poem with his settlement at Grasmere and his taking up the great task of The Recluse. He completed the poem, in thirteen books, in May 1805. This is the version that Wordsworth read to Coleridge after the Iatter's return from Malta (see Coleridge's 'To William Wordsworth,' p. 471). 3. The 1850 Prelude. For the next thirty-five years, Wordsworth tinkered with the text. He polished the style and softened some of the challenges to religious orthodoxy that he had set out in his earlier statements about the godlike powers of the human mind in its communion with nature; he did not, however, in any essential way alter its subject matter or overall design. The Prelude that was published in July 1850 is in fourteen books, it incorporated Wordsworth's latest revisions, which had been made in 1839, as well as some alterations introduced by his literary executors. The selections printed here?from W. J. B. Owen's Cornell Wordsworth volume, The Fourteen- Book Prelude (1985) ?are from the manuscript of this final version. Our reasons for choosing this version are set forth in Jack Stillinger's 'Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth,' Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 3?28. When Wordsworth enlarged the two-part Prelude of 1 799, he not only made it a poem of epic length but also heightened the style and introduced various thematic parallels with earlier epics, especially Paradise Lost. The expanded poem, however, is a personal history that turns on a mental crisis and recovery, and for such a narrative design the chief prototype is not the classical or Christian epic but the spiritual autobiography of crisis. St. Augustine's Confessions established this central Christian form late in the fourth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, published between 1780 and 1789, and quickly translated into English from French, renewed this autobiographical form for writers of Wordsworth's generation.
As in many versions of spiritual autobiography, Wordsworth's persistent metaphor is that of life as a circular journey whose end (as T. S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets, his adaptation of the traditional form) is 'to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time' (Little Gidding, lines 241?42). Wordsworth's Prelude opens with a literal journey whose chosen goal (1.72, 106?07) is 'a known Vale whither my feet should turn'?that is, the Vale of Grasmere. The Prelude narrates a number of later journeys, most notably the crossing of the Alps in book 6 and, at the beginning of the final book, the climactic ascent of Mount Snowdon. In the course of the poem, such literal journeys become the metaphoric vehicle for a spiritual journey?the quest, within the poet's memory, and in the very process of composing his poem, for his lost early self and his proper spiritual home. At its end the poem, rounding back on its beginning, leaves the poet at home in the Vale of Grasmere, ready finally to begin his great project The Recluse (14.302?11, 374?85). It is in this sense that the poem is a 'prelude'?preparation for the 'honorable toil' (1.626) for which, having discovered his vocation, the mature writer is ready at last.
Although the episodes of The Prelude are recognizable events from Wordsworth's life, they are interpreted in retrospect, reordered in sequence, and retold as dramas involving the interaction between the mind and nature and between the creative imagination and the force of history. And although the narrator is recognizably William Wordsworth, addressing the entire poem as a communication to his friend Cole- ridge, he adopts the prophetic persona, modeled on the poet-prophets of the Bible, which John Milton had adopted in narrating Paradise Lost (13.300?11). In this way
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324 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth, like his great English predecessor, assumes the authority to speak as a national poet whose function is to reconstitute the grounds of hope in a dark time of postrevolutionary reaction and despair. As Wordsworth describes it (2.433?42), he speaks out
in these times of fear,
This melancholy waste of hopes overthrown,
. . . 'mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men,
On every side, fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love
. . . this time Of dereliction and dismay. . . .
FROM THE PRELUDE OR GROWTH OF A POET'S MIND
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POEM Book First Introduction, Childhood, and School-time 5io0 there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that, while he fans my cheek, Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate'er his mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast City,0 where I long have pinedA discontented Sojourner?Now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will, What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream Shall with its murmur lull me into rest? London The earth is all before me:1 with a heart is20 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, 1 look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again; Trances of thought and mountings of the heart Come fast upon me: it is shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
1. One of many echoes from Paradise Lost, where being expelled from Eden: 'The world was all the line is applied to Adam and Eve as, at the con-before them' (12.646).
clusion of the poem, they begin their new life after
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