The Prelude as a different kind of art (?)

In the second book of Wordsworth's "Prelude," he notes that it is a "hard task to analyze a soul" (232). He writes this in relation to his themes of geometry in line 209, making a connection between the sort of geometrical magic that fascinated him and the organization of thought. This line (and this stanza in general) drew me in because this is one of the times that Wordsworth very self-consciously writes about what he is writing about on the grander scale throughout the poem.

In my view, Wordsworth is trying to make sense of how he sees the world and how he sees himself. Doing this means making rather unnatural delineations between the internal and the external world. As he explains, one cannot simply classify feelings as though they were works of art in glass cabinets (228). He concluded this stanza by writing about the fluid--very much not chronological--nature of thought. These lines speak to the poem on the whole, helping to explain why Wordsworth began his work with linear titles (boyhood, then schooling, etc.) and then went on to basically give up on that whole structure. Instead, he leaps between lyric memories and present-tense musings.

For Wordsworth, however, this poem is linear; for him, each recollection of memory is just as real as his present-tense thoughts. This idea reminds me of one presented in a book that I am reading fro my Spanish class (U.S. Latino Lit), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The author, Gloria Anzaldúa, writes about the difference between Western art and that of tribal cultures. She explains that her "stories are acts encapsulated in time, "enacted" every time they are spoken aloud or read silently" (89). She explains that "[she] likes to think of them as performances and not as inert and "dead" objects (as the aesthetics of Western culture think of art works)" (89). Wordsworth's kind of art seems to almost fall in line with this tribal kind of performance art in some way.

Here is more about the book, Borderlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderlands/La_Frontera:_The_New_Mestiza