The Hard Task of Analyzing a Soul: Book I and II of Wordworth's 1805 Prelude

Wordsworth, near the end of our excerpts of Book I and II of his 1805 Prelude, deems that one’s days shall be happy if one follows the dictum: “And yet more often living with thyself, / And for thyself” (482-483). These lines come from his address to Coleridge at the end of Book II. Without the poem’s context, this might seem like a statement worthy of an Ayn Rand aphorism. Yet this is not a selfish or solipsistic viewpoint; instead, Wordsworth encourages the sweetness of solitude in the depths of nature as a balm (as it were) for a (particularly urban) society (Book II, 315). What is best is only best when shared; yet what is best may only be first found when alone.

Taken philosophically, this is a fair point. After all, what epiphanies arrive amidst many men, in the hustle and bustle of daily dreary intercourse? Or rather, one can be among many but, in the burst of epiphany, suddenly feel alone and in a state of solitary rapture.

In order to follow Wordsworth on the course of his Prelude, a poem apparently lead by nature’s forces both large and small – “Or shall a twig or any floating thing / Upon the river point me out my course?” (Book I, 31-32) – one must believe that the personal epiphanies of a solitary man are worth reading in depth. Interestingly, Wordsworth is aware that his reader may not share his own selfsame interest in, well, himself. The subject of this poem being his “own passions and habitual thoughts” (Book I, 222), the reader must be convinced that this is a worthwhile affair or journey to embark upon.

Personally, I wasn’t convinced from the start, even after reading Wordsworth’s other (much shorter) lyrics and meditations, these that he names “the holy life of music and of verse” (Book I, 54). What surprised me is that Wordsworth’s speaker (can we just say Wordsworth here?) acknowledges this anxiety, or awareness of the reader who, like me, may feel “as though of hemlock I had drunk.” I found it hard to snap images into attention and distinguish Wordsworth’s descriptions of games of whist from his epiphanies upon rock faces. I had a similar feeling throughout my initial reading of the first section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: many a “who cares?” made up my marginalia.  

Though some of his more self-aware or plain statements struck me: “I yearn towards some philosophic song / Of truth that cherishes our daily life” (Book I, 230-231). The desire (is that enough?) of the poem was there. And the seriousness with which Wordsworth understood his half-failure: “And the whole beauteous fabric seems to lack / Foundation, and withal appears throughout / Shadowy and unsubstantial” (Book I, 226-228). If the “beauteous fabric” merely billows prettily, how can it be of substance? How can it summon truth “that cherishes our daily life”? The poem throughout sounds lovely, but so does a lullaby, drawn through only for putting a child to sleep. When the prettiness is, if not shattered, at least recognized as somewhat insufficient in achieving capital-T Truth, the speaker, and thus his poem/song, gains a strange sort of self-aware power. This is, after all, a poem caught up and continually swept into moments of natural beauty, to the point where the saccharine drip of it nearly drives one to seek irony from the nearest corner of the internet. For example: “The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still / So sweetly ‘mid the gloom the invisible bird / Sang to itself that there I could have made / My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there / To hear such music” (Book II, 132-135). The invisible bird? I could have lived for ever there? Shuddering ivy? ‘mid the gloom? This is almost like a caricature of Romanticism. Or, take this: “and the sky, / Never before so beautiful, sank down / Into my heart and held me like a dream” (178-180). Maybe its my wayward cynicism, but is it possible to read any lines like this now and feel actually moved and not roll your eyes? Never before was the sky so beautiful; it sank into my heart and held me like a dream. Like a dream holds one; like the beauty one can only experience in a dream.

But this critical game is easy to play, and, again, Wordsworth’s awareness of his “beauteous fabric” is interesting and striking. The poem’s awareness speaks not of a naïve young poet but, instead, of one who knows exactly what he’s doing. By the end of Book I, he almost makes the reader (in a nearly passive-aggressive sense) feel badly about passing any judgment on his rural epiphanies: “Nor will it seem to thee, my friend, so prompt / In sympathy, that I have lengthened out / With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale” (Book I, 645). He knows he’s told a tedious tale, telling “like a bee among the flowers” (Book I, 606-608) that “strife too humble to be named in verse” (Book I, 540). I feel like a stereotype of a workshop instructor or fellow poet, urging Wordsworth to “go into” tension instead of reflecting for so long in a meditation about the organic beauty of the natural world and his “intercourse” with it. Yet I do believe that the more interesting aspects of the poem rely on Wordsworth’s admission of failure, or his “tensions.” When he claims, for example, his trial in trying to retrace his childhood that “may I well forget / How other pleasures have been mine” (Book I, 574-575). He worries about imposing an adult imagination on a memory that doesn’t really exist. He is concerned with, too, how “humility and modest awe themselves” and “betray me, serving often for a cloak / To a more subtle selfishness” (Book I, 245-247). His sincerity may yet be thin, serving a subtler master of ill-intent and ego. That, too, if his writing does not form, he will be “unprofitably travelling towards the grave” (Book I, 269). These anxieties were, as one poet reading another, oddly comforting, more so than any description of natural beauty. That a man who believes so firmly in the world, one who is a self-proclaimed “worshipper of nature,” (Book II, 477) could also state self-doubt is, in a way, encouraging.

His anxiety I was most drawn to involves the basic writer’s block problem: where do I start? Wordsworth invokes the muse-wind to solve this riddle in Book I. The blank page rears its head again, though, in Book II, when he realizes that it is a “Hard task to analyse a soul, in which…each most obvious and particular thought…hath no beginning” (Book II, 232, 234, 236). We cannot trace a “real” beginning in the natural world, yet our artificial creation, even one reflecting the natural world, must begin somewhere. To Wordsworth, we begin in the womb, where the mother’s heart and the child converse. So too, naturally, the poem begins with the earliest recollection. How close can we come, the speaker seems to ask, to the very start?