Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude

Abstract

�� ��� The temporal complexities of William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude have long attracted critical attention. M. H. Abrams, in his foundational study Natural Supernaturalism, notes, “The construction of The Prelude is radically achronological, starting not at the beginning, but at the end‐‐during Wordsworth’s walk to ‘the Vale that I had chosen’” (74), and further observes that “in the course of The Prelude Wordsworth repeatedly drops the clue that his work has been designed to round back to its point of departure” (79). That is, the episode which comes last in a chronological reconstruction of story events—the walk to the chosen vale—is narrated twice, at the beginning and again at the end of the discourse. In the course of this walk Wordsworth finds inspiration in the breeze, which “assures him of his poetic mission and, though it is fitful, eventually leads to his undertaking The Prelude itself” (Abrams 75). As a result, “The Prelude . . . is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself” (Abrams 79). Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth’s interactions with nature that “assure[d] him of his poetic mission.” The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself becomes evidence of that fitness. Wordsworth alerts readers to this teleological drive of the poem in its opening book, when he asks, “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song?” (1.269 ‐71) As Geoffrey Hartman explicates the rhetoric of this passage, “’Was it for this’ potentially simplifies into ‘it was for this’ and even ‘it was’. The question wants to be a statement about an ‘it’ (nature) that ‘was’ (acted in the past) ‘for this’ (a poetry it calls to birth)” (“Was it for this” 14).