The Prelude - Wordsworth

De Quincy was quite justified when he said;

“Wordsworth had his passion for nature fixed in his blood, it was a necessity of his being like that of a mulberry leaf to the silkworm and through his commerce with nature, did he love and breath.” 

Hence, it was from the truth of his love that his knowledge grew. It was his love of nature that led him to the love of man. In the words of Peter;

“Wordsworth approached the spectacle of human life through nature.”

Let man react his sensibilities to the beauty of sun set, the quite dark night, the fragrance of flowers, the calm strength of mountains and the freshness of vernal woods, and he will be possessed of peace that would lend a new colour to his life. This thought is in all that Wordsworth writes. He called nature;

“The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being.” 

Herbert Read says;

“The poetry of Wordsworth is heavily surcharged with the personal quality.” 

He writes of what he has actually experienced in his own life. Nature had educated him. She had uplifted him to a lie of peace and delight. In ‘The Prelude Book I’, we find the poet telling the Derwent river how it had reacted on his thoughts;

“To more than infant softness giving me,

Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,

A foretaste, an aim earnest, of the calm,

That nature breaths among the hills and groves.” 

He tells us;

“  …………………….…………. the earth,

And common faces of nature spake to me,

Rememberable things………………...…. .”

Here is the poet who was brought up in natural surroundings. Wordsworth says in ‘The Prelude Book I’;

“It was my joy to wander half the night among the cliffs and smooth hollows and in the night wanderings, I was alone.”

He says;

“I heard among the solitary hill,

Low breathings come after me and sounds,

Of undistinguishable motion, steps,

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.”

In the stolen boat, he was in the fearful ministries of nature and when the stolen boat started moving over the smooth surface of the lake, to his great dismay, he found a huge peak up reared like an awful and strange living being, with a will and power of its own, following him with regular foot-steps with some fixed purpose. After this frightening incident, the poet with a trembling heart and in a passive mood, “Through the meadows homeward went.”

“……..…..………… but after I had seen,

That spectacle, for many days, my mind,

Worked with a dim and undermined sense.” 

It may be noted here that Wordsworth spiritualized nature by making her a moral teacher. Comptonricket has rightly said;

“It was Wordsworth’s aim as a poet to seek for beauty in meadows, woodland and mountains and to interpret this beauty in spiritual terms.”

To conclude, we may say that Wordsworth did much to bring the language of poetry to its natural beauty and its simplicity. He was a perpetual fountain of good sense.