Extract from The Prelude

This extract from The Prelude by William Wordsworth describes a night from his childhood when he took a boat without permission and rowed out onto a lake. At first he is proud and confident, but then a huge mountain peak seems to rise up and chase him. Terrified, he rows back, and is troubled for days.

The Prelude is a long poem about Wordsworth's own life. He worked on it for most of his life, and it was published in 1850, after his death. Like other Romantics, he saw nature as powerful and spiritual.

The extract is in blank verse, unrhymed lines with a steady rhythm, told in the first person. Long sentences run across the lines with enjambment, like the boat gliding on.

The poem has three parts, with clear shifts in tone:

1. Confidence: the boy rows out, ‘Proud of his skill’.
2. Fear: a peak appears, ‘black and huge’, and seems to follow him.
3. Reflection: for days afterwards, he is troubled.

The shift begins with ‘When’, as the peak suddenly rises into view.

At first nature is beautiful: ‘Small circles glittering idly in the moon’. But it becomes frightening:

And growing still in stature the grim shape

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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. With trembling oars I turned,

The mountain is personified: it ‘Strode after me’ with ‘purpose of its own’, like a giant. Afterwards, the boy's mind is full of ‘huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men’. Nature has shown him how small he is.

Themes: the power of nature; fear; memory; growing up. The boat trip was ‘an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure’: he knew he was doing wrong, and nature seems to punish him.

Compares well with:

• Storm on the Island: confidence shaken by nature's power.
• Exposure: nature as a frightening force.
• Kamikaze: nature and memory changing a person's course.