The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Brandeis

Review by David Starkey

The subtitle to this edition of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude provides a hint of just how jam-packed the book is with ancillary material. “Newly Edited from the Manuscripts [by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond] and Fully Illustrated in Color with Paintings and Drawings Contemporaneous with the Composition of the Poem,” the volume also includes “an Introduction, Maps, Notes, Glosses, and Chronology.” If that’s not enough to keep a reader immersed in the text, there is an insightful and appreciative afterword by the late Helen Vendler.

For those who might blanch at the prospect of diving into a centuries’ old poem, no matter how famous, all the editorial aides are a big help. Little blue and red squares in the margins offer concise notes about context and meaning, and archaic or potentially misleading words and expressions are defined at the bottom of each page. Above all, this big book (10″ x 12″) benefits from a profusion of full color plates, which directly or indirectly bear on the poem’s subject matter.

In Book Tenth, for instance, “Residence in France and French Revolution,” the thousand plus lines are illustrated by images that range from Jean Duplessis-Bertaux’s Taking of the Tuileries, a graphic depiction of “the mob” massacring members of the Swiss Guard assigned to protect Louis XVI; to Charles Benazech’s sympathetic portrayal of the king in Louis XVI at the Foot of the Scaffold; to Achille-Etna Michaellon’s bucolic Ruins of the Theatre at Taormina, which is used to elucidate the following reverie: “Even from my earliest school-day time, I loved / To dream of Sicily… / there’s not a single name / Of note belonging to that honoured Isle … / That is not a comfort to my grief.”

This is the 1805 rather than the 1850 edition, so it’s one book shorter than the later version, with a more youthful and interrogative, if less polished, voice. I’m far from a Wordsworth scholar, but this is my third time through The Prelude, and its rhythms and frequent divagations were not unfamiliar. But what of sort of a reading experience does The Prelude offer to newcomers?

Above all, the poem requires a great deal of attention, much more than the average contemporary reader gives to the average memoir—and the book’s real subtitle, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, reminds us that this is primarily a personal history. While Wordsworth’s blank verse was in his day considered much closer to actual speech than that of many of his predecessors, the language sounds rather highfalutin in 2025. Here, for example, is Wordsworth’s description in Book Eighth of a shepherd training his dog:

A Shepherd in the bottom of a Vale

Towards the centre standing, who with voice,

And hand waved to and fro as need required,

Gave signal to his Dog, thus teaching him

To chace along the mazes of steep crags

The Flock he could not see: and so the Brute,

Dear Creature! with a Man’s intelligence

Advancing, or retreating on his steps,

Through every pervious strait, to right or left,

Thridded away unbaffled, while the Flock

Fled upwards from the terror of his bark

Through rocks and seams of turf with liquid gold

Irradiate, that deep farewell light by which

The setting sun proclaims the love he bears

To mountain regions.

The passage is fairly easy to visualize, especially if you imagine it as one of the many paintings in the book: a shepherd standing in the middle of a valley at sunset while his dog herds frightened sheep along a mountain cliff. But of course after two hundred and twenty years, there are some linguistic speedbumps to overcome—the unfamiliar vocabulary of “pervious strait” and “Thridded” (“narrow passage” and “threaded,” the handy notes inform us), the stops and starts of so many commas, and the syntax itself, which is always in service of the iambic pentameter that both contains and drives the narrative forward.

It can be rough going at times, so finishing The Prelude demands persistence. This is not the sort of book you pick up and read in a single sitting. Fortunately, there are plenty of places to pause along the way, with each “Book,” as Wordsworth, following classical tradition, calls the chapters, is broken into a number of much smaller sections. (A green bookmark ribbon sewn into the binding adds a touch of class for saving your place.)

Despite its challenges, reading The Prelude is an eminently worthwhile experience. As Vendler writes in her Afterword, the poem is “a revelatory rendition of interior consciousness over time…not a tranquil history; rather, it is a spectacular and troubled one.” Once you enter the poet’s mind, you are on a gripping journey of doubt and discovery, dipping into the minutiae of his daily life, then inhabiting an extended memory of his childhood before soaring into a world of “Visionary Power,” where “forms and substances are circumfused / By that transparent veil with light divine.” It’s a heady place to be.