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Wordsworth prelude pdf11/30/2022 ![]() 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. 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. He decries the artifacts of civilization and praises enduring things - life and nature. He addresses what he terms the spirit of the universe. He confides that for some time thereafter he struggled to clarify a conception of pantheism which had been teasing his brain. At the climax of this 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. 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. Occasionally he communicates his mood to the reader by employing natural objects as symbols of his feelings. He sees it as a great and awesome intelligence. Wordsworth sets the tone of the poem by speaking religiously of nature. In this way, nature develops morality in the child. 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. 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 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. If such views change radically after he has recorded them, his analysis of them will be worthless. 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. He rejects historical and martial themes, as well as mere anecdotes from his personal history. 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 mentions in passing the typical moodiness of the poet in likening him to a lover. 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 recalls that even then he had intimations of his future greatness. In the delicious quiet, Wordsworth suddenly sees in his mind's eye the cottage of the landlady with whom he stayed as a schoolboy. Feelings of irresponsible freedom and lack of purpose quickly give way to a prevision of an impending period of optimism and creativity. He immediately identifies spiritual freedom with the absence of the encumbrances of civilization. Wordsworth experiences relief in coming back to nature. ![]() 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 until 1850). The body of the poem employs flashbacks to describe the development of the poetic mind during youth. The start of Book 1 finds Wordsworth speaking from a mature point of view. It is difficult to fix his age as the poem opens because time constantly shifts backward and forward throughout the narrative. 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. ![]()
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