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?

A Note on Form

In “The 1805 Prelude” Wordsworth sets out a rather typical form in terms of progression where the books move chronologically through his life. This seems all well and good until time within the poem goes all sideways. The poem introduces itself in the introduction as being concerned with “Childhood and School-time,” but he doesn’t mention childhood directly until line 268 where he speaks of how the river would “bend his murmur with my nurse’s song.” And so we receive 250 lines of exposition about what the poem will be about before we get to what the poem is about, a seemingly roundabout way for him to approach the subject.

All of this exposition feels like justification for Wordsworth’s passion for his piece. The lines contain some amount of anxiety that his project will not be received or understood fully and therefore undercut its true genius. This analysis comes from lines such as “It is shaken off,/ As by miraculous gift ‘tis shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self,/ The heavy weight of many a weary day/ Not mine, and such as were not made for me”(21-5) and “I yearn towards some philosophical song”(230), which both suggest an ultimate goal not yet achieved that could be missed. And I think it is here in the Prelude where Wordsworth’s ego meets his reality in which his legacy is both determined by his inner thoughts of prowess and questioned by societal pressure.

Childhood

Within “The 1805 Prelude”, Wordsworth is searching through the details of his childhood to find if there is a greater or lasting truth that remains with him as an adult. He speaks to nature and believes “from the first dawn / Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me / The passions that build up our human soul” (432 – 434). Since childhood, he feels that nature has affected him and explores different ways in which he has drawn from it. This idea reminded me of “Tintern Abbey” because of the way in which Wordsworth also explores the differences in how a nature scene makes him feel as an adult versus how it affected him when he was a child. Wordsworth associates childhood with this innocence and wonderment with nature. He looks back at the scenes in which he was “A naked boy, in one delightful rill” showing the wonder and one-ness with nature that he once felt. What I took away from this similarity is that Wordsworth longs for that childhood wonderment though he still feels close to nature as an adult.

Hear What You Want: Wordsworth Argues Against Resolution?

The poem "Resolution and Independence" ends with its speaker resolving not to allow himself to fall into melancholy while in the mist of nature after meeting the old man, saying "God, be my help and stay secure; I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor." Wordsworth seems to me to argue that the speaker's resolution at the end of the poem is not because of the absolute truth or merit of the old man's words and demeanor, but because the speaker chooses to listen to him, and could just as easily forget this resolution. My evidence for this lies in a connection the speaker makes from the ol man to something he says much earlier in the poem. In stanza three, lines 17-18 the speaker says "I heard the woods and distant waters roar; Or heard them not." He later says in stanza 16 lines 107-108 "His voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard." Though he then asks the old man to repeat himself, and upon hearing the old man's story of trials and perseverance admonishes himself for being sad over so little, the point is made. Just as he chooses when to hear the stream he chooses when to hear the old man, and though he is hearing his words and seeing his struggles fresh in his mind's eye now, the speaker could easily soon forget these things and allow himself to return to his sad spirits if he so chose. This fits with the poem as a whole, which cycles between joyous revelation and sadness, as stated in lines 33-35 "Far from the world I walk, and from all care, But there may come another day to me - Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty." There is not much resolution in "Resolution and Independence," or at least not resolution which lasts.

I'm in that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to mind.

“Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” is really interesting to me because Wordsworth seems to capture a moment that many people don’t really discuss or write about. Wordsworth describes a complex human emotion in seven very short stanzas. The feeling I am referring to is when a person suddenly has an almost unexplainable, bizarre, irrational fear, gut feeling, or thought. I think this emotion most often arises when the person really cares about something or someone and is extremely worried about something happening. The fact that Wordsworth was able to capture this sort of moment in poetry is very fascinating to me.

In “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” the speaker tells a story of going to see his love, Lucy, and upon arriving having this sudden feeling that she had died. I think the feeling comes out so powerfully because the speaker uses a very dramatic, story-telling tone until the last stanza. This keeps the reader interested and at the edge of his/her seat. Many parts of the poem drag along, keeping tension in each line. For example, “The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot/ Came nearer, and nearer still” (15-16) or“My horse moved on; hoof after hoof.”(21).

On a completely different note, I find myself sometimes irritated with Wordsworth’s rhyme schemes. They often sound childish and Dr. Suess-ish to me which makes taking the poetry seriously very hard for me. There was even a time in class when Onno read some of Wordsworth’s poetry aloud and he (or someone else) said “It sounds Dr.Suess-ish.”I am currently in a Poetry workshop so I know how hard it is to do what Wordsworth does and I appreciate and respect that. After reading some of Wordsworth poetry I wondered why the rhyming bothered me at all. I came to the conclusion that in today’s literary society, poetry is…much different. Many forms have been abandoned or completely modified, including rhyme schemes. The only place we often see rhyme schemes like this is in a children’s book or an old Disney movie. So Wordsworth didn’t do anything wrong, we kind of just met at the wrong time.

The Leeches in "Resolution and Independence"

On the whole, I gleaned that Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" puts forth the idea that we must sometimes gain strength from others' suffering because simple beauty does not always suffice. That's not to say that the speaker in the poem wishes suffering upon the old man (nor does he relish in the suffering itself), but rather, he uses it as inspiration because his life, in comparison, is not so bad. In the poem, the speaker falls into a state of "despondency and madness" despite the natural, blissful beauty in stanza 5 (49).

The speaker then comes to the realization that he can comfort himself by will of mind in the final stanza of the poem. However, the realization strikes only after the old man explains that he gathers leeches to sell to doctors for a living (100). The speaker sees this as such a dismal existence that he is able to be thankful for his own existence and overcome his misery. I find it interesting that the old man is a leech gatherer for two reasons: firstly, the image's symbolic significance, and secondly, the image's historical magnitude.

In this time, leeches were used to suck out poison of the blood, ailments, etc. as a healing device. Meanwhile, the little leeches could be fat and happy, gorging themselves on the blood they craved. The method was supposed to be a symbiotic relationship for both parties. In this sense, the old man could be likened to a leech, sucking the mental ailments right out of the speaker. The old man might even gain from the exchange: he smiles as he repeats his means of subsistence for the speaker (although this may be a stretch) (120).

Historically speaking, though, this leech arrangement was far from symbiotic. It in fact drained both good and bad blood (and too much of it) from the human bodies. So, when I read this poem over again, I could not help but instead liken the narrator to a leech, sucking the life right out of the old man to quench his own selfish needs while the man wastes away before him.

The Lucy Poems: Three years she grew

I found the discussion on "Three years she grew" to be really interesting, but one question that continued to nag at me was "why three years?" We circled around the idea to a certain extent, thinking about whether or not it was a parent/child relationship versus two lovers, and we discussed Wordsworth's title choices, and how he transitions from referring to her as "This Child" (4) to "The Girl" (9), to "the Maiden" (23), and finally to "Lucy" (34). This demonstrates her growth over the years, so clearly she was not simply three years old when she died. The more thought I put into it, the more my other thoughts on her age became confused.
Initally, I considered the idea that the speaker of the poem was imagining Nature's ideal future for Lucy. It seemed that Lucy had quite possibly died at the age of three, and the audience was potentially seeing a father figure mourning the death of his daughter. The speaker imagining Nature's thought process in giving Lucy life, and then taking it away after realizing that it had given her too much of the natural world. Wordsworth writes, "This Child I to myself will take" (4), and I took this to mean that Nature saw, after three years on the earth, that Lucy was too beautiful to allow her to keep living in the human world. Instead, Nature saw so much of the natural world in Lucy, that Nature wanted Lucy to be completely one with Nature.
The more I considered this to be a possibility, the more reasonable it seemed. There is no other specific evidence that Lucy grew to be an adult, only what Nature predicts about her future. All of these predictions bring Lucy more into the natural world, and they have no mention of what she will look like or any more human traits and qualities. Ultimately, I think that Wordsworth wrote about a grieving father, trying to reason with himself over the loss of his small child. The father figure imagines why the natural world would take his daughter away so quickly, and his only explanation is that the natural world saw something so beautiful in the child, that it knew the child was meant to have "an overseeing power" (11); the child belonged in nature, sharing her beauty with the natural world.