In the Library
The Prelude
William Wordsworth, 1850
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 58k words
£1.99
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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Prelude
A poem with a reputation for being long, blank, and improving, when what it really is underneath all of that is one man trying to explain how a few odd childhood afternoons made him who he became.
The Prelude arrives wrapped in everything that scares people off long poems. It runs to fourteen books of unrhymed blank verse, its subtitle promises the growth of a poet’s mind, and you have probably been told it is the sort of thing read only by people writing essays about it. The length and the blankness are real, and almost everything else in that warning is misleading. What Wordsworth is actually doing is trying to account for himself, going back over his own life to find the handful of ordinary moments that, for reasons he cannot fully explain, made him into the person now writing, and the closer he keeps to those moments the more alive the poem becomes.
If you like this, try
In Memoriam A.H.H.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson writes the same autobiography-in-verse, but grief replaces joy as the engine and the Lake District becomes a graveyard.
£1.99
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau writes the same spiritual autobiography of a man alone in nature, but in American prose instead of English blank verse.
£1.99
About the book
A boy skates alone across a frozen lake at dusk, leans back on his heels to stop, and the cliffs keep wheeling past him as though the earth itself were still turning under his feet. William Wordsworth called episodes like this his "spots of time," moments of fear and wonder from a Lake District boyhood that lodged so deep they went on feeding the imagination for the rest of his life. The Prelude is the long blank-verse account of how those moments made a poet, the first epic whose whole subject is the growth of a single ordinary mind, formed not by war or gods but by ice and starlight and the slow work of mountains. Its argument, earned line by line, is that nature does not merely please the mind, it shapes it, through terror as much as beauty. Wordsworth wrote at it for fifty years and never let it print while he lived, a poem to Coleridge, his dearest friend, about a self he could not finish becoming.