English Literature GCSE: William Wordsworth - The Prelude

AKALA:
What do you imagine when you think of nature? Are you seeing beautiful sunrises, birds high in the sky, or ferocious storms, volcanoes erupting, and gigantic tsunamis? We are part of the natural world. It has the power to inspire us and to terrify us, and here in the Lake District, after stealing a boat, one young boy had an encounter with nature that he would never, ever forget.

THE PRELUDE - EXTRACT:
I dipped my oars into the silent lake, and, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat went heaving through the water like a swan; when from behind that craggy steep till then the horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct, upreared its head. I struck and struck again, and growing still in stature the grim shape towered up between me and the stars, and still, for so it seemed, with purpose of its own and measured motion like a living thing, strode after me.

AKALA:
So we are here in the Lake District where Wordsworth grew up. In some senses, a solitary place for him, you know, his mother dies when he's eight, his sister's sent away, Dorothy, who lived with relatives, and then his father dies when he was 13. In some senses, orphaned by nature, so his relationship to nature was always an interesting one.

HELEN MORT:
In that sense, nature becomes a companion and a kind of mentor and guide to him, I think, and it almost takes the place of that. It becomes almost a human presence and something that he relates to as if it's another human being. And, in the poem, nature is personified in different ways.

Walking and listening to your own thoughts was probably quite a big part of writing that poem.

AKALA:
And there's this real sense of the scale of nature, which he is almost unable to describe. You know, "A huge peak, black and huge."

HELEN MORT:
I think it sort of shows as well how you can feel lost for words when you're trying to describe something that is so powerful and so present, but, also, you don't quite have the words for. The repetition of "huge" just really brings that home. That's the overwhelming thing about it, it dominates the whole landscape, it kind of blocks out the sky.

THE PRELUDE - EXTRACT:
With trembling oars I turned, and through the silent water stole my way back to the cavern of the willow tree. There, in her mooring-place, I left my bark and through the meadows homeward went, with grave and serious mood.

YOUNG DEACON:
It's like the water's kind of reflecting his mood as he's talking. He starts off silent and still.

DEANNA RODGER:
And then there's this dark side that he enters and it's almost like the dark side of him, so it's a troubled pleasure.

AKALA:
The imagination, the very thing that the Romantic poets were famous for, is the very thing that scared him. That seems almost absurd, that one could fear this, but we know how quickly nature can turn.

HELEN MORT:
It's sort of about being as terrified of the power of the mind and the imagination, of our own consciousness as the landscape itself.

THE PRELUDE - EXTRACT:
In my thoughts, there hung a darkness, call it solitude or blank desertion. No familiar shapes remained, no pleasant images of trees, of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; but huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

AKALA:
The story ends with this contrast, almost, between where he usually sees nature and where he comes to see it after this experience with his imagination.

HELEN MORT:
Yeah, there's the contrast between the green and pleasant forms and the kind of pastoral way that we normally see nature and the more terrifying shapes of the imagination. And I guess it's interesting to think about what those forms might symbolise.

Today, we're even in an environment where we're used to controlling the natural world, we're still being reminded of our scale within it by things like climate change, the impact of more extreme weather. In a sense, we still should feel as small in the face of landscape as Wordsworth did.

DEANNA RODGER:
You can really see that in this rambling tone of, kind of, as if he's saying, "This happened and I did this." And there's no structure, there's no coherency to it - it's just this pouring out of description…

YOUNG DEACON:
Nebulous, incoherent. Yeah.

Kind of childlike.

DEANNA RODGER:
Yes, exactly.

AKALA:
This is an obviously autobiographical poem.

HELEN MORT:
It is, and it's part of a much longer poem, The Prelude, which Wordsworth was writing and changing and going back to for about 50 years, I think. So it's this event that he kept feeling the need to go back to throughout his life.

AKALA:
Wordsworth believed nature could have a positive effect on people's lives. At a time when industry and machines were taking over the country, when life was becoming mechanised, nature could make you feel free. But Wordsworth also realised something else that evening on the lake. That, yes, nature has the power to inspire us, but it also has the power to destroy us, and we must treat nature with a profound respect.