The Prelude Flashcards
Themes (5)
- Power of nature: Storm on the island, Exposure, frightening nature
- Memory: Emigree – identity and place
- Fear
- Pride
- Checking out me History - identity
- Individual experience
About
Wordsworth recalls a moment in his youth when he stole a boat in a lake at night. The mountain looms over him and leaves him with a fearful feeling.
Big ideas (3)
- Humanity vs nature
- Fear and isolation
- Identity
“troubled pleasure”
Power of nature/beauty of nature
Nice experience but some guilt from stealing it
Oxymoron: troubled = tough or ruined, tense, pleasure = nice, relaxed
Thrilled but guilty, almost like forbidden pleasure – Garden of Eden
Semantic field of risk: “act of stealth”, “troubled pleasure”
“small circles glittering idly in the moon”
Power of nature/beauty of nature
“Small circles” – calm, gentle, pleasant, ripples
“Small” – innocent, beauty, harmless
“glittering idly”, “moon” – light imagery: setting the scene from night, tranquillity and peace, “idle” = idyllic, perfect – GofE
“s”, “l”, “m” are soft sounds, with gentle, restful feeling, “glittering” = lustrous splendour alongside “sparkling”
“a huge peak, black and huge…upreared its head”, “with trembling oars I turned”
Power of nature, Fear
Craggy ridge is only moving in his mind, imagination influenced by the power of nature, nightmarish
Repetition of “huge” = taken aback by its size, more powerful than him and his pride
His guilt is messing with him, his logical mind, his belief in his strength from earlier is gone and replaced by a fear of the power of nature, believes he is being chased/attacked as punishment
“Black” – colour imagery of danger, death
“Upreared its head” – personification, come alive to attack the man, like of its own
Trying to escape, no longer confident, fear, worry, regret, involuntary physical reaction shows extreme inner fear through, “trembling”
“There hung a darkness, call it solitude”
Power of nature, Memory
“Hung” – 1. Long-lasting effects, 2. To hang your head in shame, regretful, ashamed
“darkness” = sadness, depression have taken over, gloom
“Solitude” = alone with own thoughts, isolated, no connection to nature to others
Cannot take his usual pleasure in nature anymore
“blank desertion”, “no pleasant images”
Power of nature, Memory
“blank desertion” - no emotion but depression and emptiness
“no pleasant images”: This event has excluded him from the beauty of nature
Everything he once loved about nature have been consumed by the extreme guilt, no more joy from it
“huge and mighty forms…moved slowly through the mind by day, and were a trouble to my dreams”
Power of nature, Memory, Fear
Trauma stays with him, recurring thoughts recalling what he thought he saw take over his life every minute both awake and asleep, he is never at peace
This one act of no morality, going against nature (or against God) has ruined his life, means that nature will always be the higher power to learn from but also to be criticised by especially if laws are broken knowingly as seen in “troubled pleasure”
Structure (8)
- One stanza long, entire work is viewed as an epic poem.
- The poem is a first-person narrative and organised chronologically and acts as a story.
- Blank verse: creates sense of Wordsworth talking and explaining what he did to the reader
- 3 sections: 1 – Wordworth’s sense of adventure and almost arrogance, positive, beauty of nature, pleasure 2 – frightened, gothic, fear/power of nature, 3 – reflective and explains how the experience has changed him, consequence, depression
- Turning point – start of section 2 – occurs at line 21
- Genre: both biblical and gothic: night journey in an isolated setting, elements of fear, psychology of night, surroundings of characters
- There is the sense that a higher power or God watches over us as the poem has potential links to the Garden of Eden. This is because within a setting similar to paradise, the narrator steals what is not his and is then punished for it by exile and suffering for a long time.
- Wordsworth shows we can learn morality from nature and therefore nature is presented as beautiful and inspiring but also frightening if you do something wrong.
Context (3)
- The poem shows the spiritual growth of the poet – how he comes to terms with who he is and his place in nature and the world
- One key theme is that our character and identity are shaped by distinct ‘spots of time’. This experience is a formative one and leads to an epiphany as the poet is made to feel guilty as Wordsworth was a romantic poet who wrote about topics which challenged people and the world we live in. Many focus on the love and worship of the power of nature.
- During this time it was common to write very long poems which looked at the world and our place in it, this poem is an extract from a much larger one looking at the moral development of a man.
