The Prelude

I have now read all 200+ pages of Wordsworth's Prelude.

I now deserve congratulations.

Did you know that the Prelude was only meant as, well, a PRELUDE, a "Gothic antechamber" or some such to his "Cathedral" that was going to be The Recluse?

This is the kind of thing that puts me in perplexities; I study Romantic literature; I like Wordsworth; I am desperately grateful that he did not finish his Gothic Cathedral.

While I do wish that somehow, eighteenth and nineteenth century writers could have planned for the strange reading habits of graduate students of the twenty-first century (how DID they have so much time to read back then? I will never understand this), Wordsworth is really rather soothing, and after awhile you get used to and appreciate things like this (a bit of his conclusion):

". . . From love, for here
Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,
All truth and beauty, from pervading love,
That gone, we are as dust. Behold the fields
In balmy spring-time, full of rising flowers
And happy creatures; see that Pair, the Lamb
And the Lamb's Mother, and their tender ways
Shall touch thee to the heart; in some green bower
Rest, and be not alone, but have thou there
The One who is they choice of all the world,
There linger, lulled and lost, and rapt away,
Be happy to thy fill; thou call'st this love
And so it is, but there is higher love
Than this, a love that comes into the heart
With awe and a diffusive sentiment;
Thy love is human merely; this proceeds
More from the brooding Soul, and is divine."

I know people don't like Wordsworth because he seems very solipsistic (as do a lot of the Romantics), but thinking of The Prelude in terms of a spiritual autobiography, as M.H. Abrams suggests, changes one's perspective, since you then read the poem as someone struggling to find his way, intellectually and morally (so naturally it's all about him--that's what an autobiography is). Yes, the whole poet-as-prophet thing seems fairly arrogant when you are the poet-as-prophet, but it seems like England of the time was truly in need of some kind of healing that Wordsworth did supply.