The Prelude

The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem The Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished, The Prelude is an extremely personal, introspective work and reveals many details of Wordsworth's life.

• Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
  A visitant that while it fans my cheek
  Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
  From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
  Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
  To none more grateful than to me; escaped
  From the vast city, where I long had pined
  A discontented sojourner: now free,
  Free as a bird to settle where I will.
  • l. 1

• The earth is all before me. With a heart
  Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
  I look about; and should the chosen guide
  Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
  I cannot miss my way.
  • l. 14

• Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up
  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.
  • l. 301

• Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
  Like harmony in music; there is a dark
  Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
  Discordant elements, makes them cling together
  In one society.
  • l. 340

•          The grim shape
  Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
  For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
  And measured motion like a living thing,
  Strode after me.
  • l. 381

• Huge and mighty forms, that do not live
  Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
  By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
  • l. 398

• Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
  Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,
  That givest to forms and images a breath
  And everlasting motion.
  • l. 402

    Influence of Natural Objects (1809)

• A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
  • l. 415

    Influence of Natural Objects (1809)

•                    All shod with steel,
  We hissed along the polished ice in games
  Confederate.
  • l. 434

•               With the din
  Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
  The leafless trees and every icy crag
  Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
  Into the tumult sent an alien sound
  Of melancholy.
  • l. 440

•               Leaving the tumultuous throng,
  To cut across the reflex of a star
  That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
  Upon the glassy plain.
  • l. 450

•               Yet still the solitary cliffs
  Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled
  With visible motion her diurnal round!
  • l. 459

• And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
  The self-sufficing power of Solitude.
  • l. 77

•      Many are our joys
  In youth, but oh! what happiness to live
  When every hour brings palpable access
  Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,
  And sorrow is not there!
  • l. 287

•      For I would walk alone,
  Under the quiet stars, and at that time
  Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
  To breathe an elevated mood, by form
  Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
  If the night blackened with a coming storm,
  Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
  The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
  Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
  Thence did I drink the visionary power;
  And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
  Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
  That they are kindred to our purer mind
  And intellectual life; but that the soul,
  Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
  Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
  Of possible sublimity, whereto
  With growing faculties she doth aspire,
  With faculties still growing, feeling still
  That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
  Have something to pursue.
  • l. 305

•                  Where the statue stood
  Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
  The marble index of a mind forever
  Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
  • l. 60

•          There's not a man
  That lives who hath not known his god-like hours.
  • l. 194

• When from our better selves we have too long
  Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
  Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
  How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
  • l. 355

•          A day
  Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
  • l. 379

• Oh! give us once again the wishing cap
  Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
  Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
  And Sabra in the forest with St. George!
  The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap
  One precious gain, that he forgets himself.
  • l. 342

• Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland.
  • l. 14

    Wordsworths' approval of the locals following a night of dancing during his 1788 summer vacation away from Cambridge University. See: Emile Legouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth (Dent & Co., 1897), p. 100

• 'Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw,
  With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared,
  Upon a desert coast, that having brought
  To land a single volume, saved by chance,
  A treatise of Geometry.
  • l. 142

•                          Mighty is the charm
  Of those abstractions to a mind beset
  With images, and haunted by herself,
  And specially delightful unto me
  Was that clear synthesis built up aloft
  So gracefully; even then when it appeared
  Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy
  To sense embodied: not the thing it is
  In verity, an independent world,
  Created out of pure intelligence.
  • l. 158

•                          Multitudes of hours
  Pilfered away, by what the Bard who sang
  Of the Enchanter Indolence hath called
  "Good-natured lounging," and behold a map
  Of my collegiate life.
  • l. 179

•          Another morn
  Risen on mid-noon.
  • l. 197

• Whether we be young or old,
  Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
  Is with infinitude, and only there;
  With hope it is, hope that can never die,
  Effort and expectation, and desire,
  And something evermore about to be.
  • l. 605

• Characters of the great Apocalypse,
  The types and symbols of Eternity,
  Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
  • l. 640

    The Simpleton Pass ("Brook and Road")

• And Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth
  Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth
  Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake
  Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots
  Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids;
  Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roofed with vines,
  Winding from house to house, from town to town,
  Sole link that binds them to each other; walks,
  League after league, and cloistral avenues,
  Where silence dwells if music be not there:
  While yet a youth undisciplined in verse,
  Through fond ambition of that hour, I strove
  To chant your praise; nor can approach you now
  Ungreeted by a more melodious song,
  Where tones of nature smoothed by learned art
  May flow in lasting current. Like a breeze
  Or sunbeam over your domain I passed
  In motion without pause; but ye have left
  Your beauty with me, a serene accord
  Of forms and colors, passive, yet endowed
  In their submissiveness with power as sweet
  And gracious, almost might I dare to say,
  As virtue is, or goodness; sweet as love,
  Or the remembrance of a generous deed,
  Or mildest visitation of pure thought,
  When God, the giver of all joy, is thanked
  Religiously, in silent blessedness;
  Sweet as this last herself, for such it is.
  • l. 662

    Descriptive Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps (1793)

•          How men lived
  Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still
  Strangers, not knowing each the other's name.
  • l. 116

•          Nor was it mean delight
  To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds;
  To note the laws and progress of belief;
  Though obstinate on this way, yet on that
  How willingly we travel, and how far!
  To have, for instance, brought upon the scene
  The champion, Jack the Giant-killer: Lo!
  He dons his coat of darkness; on the stage
  Walks, and achieves his wonders, from the eye
  Of living Mortal covert, "as the moon
  Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."
  Delusion bold! and how can it be wrought?
  The garb he wears is black as death, the word
  "Invisible" flames forth upon his chest.
  • l. 274

• How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
  Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
  Unto myself, "The face of every one
  That passes by me is a mystery!"
  • l. 626

• All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
  Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
  The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
  The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
  Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,
  The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
  The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
  Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
  All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
  Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats
  All jumbled up together, to compose
  A Parliament of Monsters.
  • l. 706

• Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
  Of what the mighty City is herself,
  To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
  Living amid the same perpetual whirl
  Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
  To one identity, by differences
  That have no law, no meaning, and no end—
  Oppression, under which even highest minds
  Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.
  • l. 722

•          Brothers all
  In honour, as in one community,
  Scholars and gentlemen.
  • l. 227

• Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very heaven!
  • l. 108

    French Revolution, as it Appeared to Enthusiasts (1815)

• The budding rose above the rose full blown.
  • l. 121

    French Revolution, as it Appeared to Enthusiasts (1815)

•          There is
  One great society alone on earth:
  The noble Living and the noble Dead.
  • l. 393

• Go to the Poets, they will speak to thee
  More perfectly of purer creatures;—yet
  If reason be nobility in man,
  Can aught be more ignoble than the man
  Whom they delight in, blinded as he is
  By prejudice, the miserable slave
  Of low ambition or distempered love?
  • l. 68

•      Here must thou be, O Man!
  Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;
  Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:
  No other can divide with thee this work:
  No secondary hand can intervene
  To fashion this ability; 'tis thine,
  The prime and vital principle is thine
  In the recesses of thy nature, far
  From any reach of outward fellowship,
  Else is not thine at all.
  • l. 209

• The Prelude (1850)