Wordsworth, Pope and the Alps

Abstract

It has become a commonplace of Romantic criticism that the passage in Book VI of The Prelude where Wordsworth describes his crossing of the Alps by the Simplon Pass in 1790 is one of the finest and most important in his work. The passage refers to a moment during Wordsworth’s and Robert Jones’s 1790 walking tour of France and Switzerland. Having visited Geneva and the Vale of Chamonix, they crossed the Alps by the Simplon Pass, descending by the Ravine of Gondo to Lake Maggiore on 19 August. It was on 17 August that Wordsworth and Jones set off to cross the Simplon Pass itself. Spending a little too long over their midday meal at an inn they were separated from other travellers heading in the same direction and took a wrong turning, heading further up into the mountains. Before long they were put right by a peasant, who told them that they must return to the main path and from there head downhill. Thus they learned to their dismay that they had already walked over the highest point of the pass and were now descending into Italy. The poet was disappointed, as we should have been in his place: naturally expecting something significant at the peak of the crossing, he had seen nothing, and had indeed not even noticed the summit of the pass. Romantic expectations of the sublime had been frustrated. It was not until the composition of this part of The Prelude in 1804 that the disappointment itself became the inspiration for a deeper revelation of the imagination’s power. Here is the passage as it appears in the 1805 Prelude, beginning from the point where Wordsworth mentions how his party, following some distance behind another group of travellers, rested at an inn before resuming their journey: