SHUAIB ASGHAR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GOVT. RAZVIA ISLAMIA COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GOVT. RAZVIA ISLAMIA COLLEGE
HAROONABAD, PAKISTAN
‘The
Prelude’, a kind of ‘semi-autobiography’ is only a
record of the meaningful experiences of Wordsworth’s life. He tells the story
of his inner life from earliest childhood up to 1798, the year of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’. It is not a
self-portrait. In it, Wordsworth makes no attempt to bring his personality
before the reader. It actually offers us a record of his mental and spiritual
growth which starts from his very infant days. As it is concerned with the
development of the poet’s sensibilities, only those aspects and events of his
life which affected them are included. He selects only those of his actions and
experiences which are significant for the evolution of his soul. It is the Nature
inspired life which he lived through his childhood and youth that he tries to
recapture and record.
The introduction to ‘The Prelude’ ends with a brief account of the paradisiacal state
of childhood described as a golden age of poetic radiance and spontaneous
creativity. The child is shown as undergoing the baptism of sun and water in Nature,
in which he feels utterly secure. How such a state of innocent joy is lost, and
how with the help of poetic imagination it may be restored, is the theme of ‘The Prelude’. The introduction in the
Book I leads immediately to the account of Wordsworth’s childhood and
school-time, and from the five year old child to the boy of ten. The seed of
his soul that has been implanted in the world begins to take roots and grow
under the influence of the ‘inscrutable workmanship’ which reconciles
‘discordant elements’.
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I
grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear
In fact, Nature affected her discipline on
the growing boy by providing occasions to evoke the emotions of pleasure and
fear. We can divide these experiences into three degrees of emotions:
1. Pure
Joy (Innocent Delight)
We find the boy of five enjoying long
spells of bath:
In
a small mill-race severed from the stream
Made
one long bathing of a summer’s day
Sometimes Wordsworth would run about in the
sandy fields leaping through flowery fraves of yellow ragwort bush. Then the
frosty season was perhaps the happiest time of rapture for the poet. The most
delightful experiences recalled by Wordsworth is he exciting game of skating in
the company of other young friends. The ringing sounds of their moving skates
would be echoed by the leafless trees and the surrounding hills and Wordsworth
………………wheeled
about
Proud
and exulting like an untired horse
That
cares not for his home.
He would even stand aloof watching the earth and rocks
turning round and round when they stopped their playful whirling movements on
the smooth surface of the ice.
2. Troubled
Pleasure
By the word ‘fear’ Wordsworth implies fear
associated with a feeling of wonder. The bird-nesting episode nicely
illustrates the experience of such pleasure of fear mixed with astonishment.
Wordsworth and his companions used to move about just like robbers in quest of
high places to snatch away the nests and eggs of birds. Sometimes he hung alone
above the nest of a raven at a high altitude in a very precarious position and
then his delight and excitement was much tempered by a sense of great amount of
peril.
While on the perilous ridge I hung
alone
With what strange
utterance did the loud dry wind
Bow through my ears
3. Pure
Fear
In the bird snaring episode Wordsworth has
nicely described his first experience of pure fear. During their night
wanderings sometimes he would catch hold of a bird that happened to be trapped
in the snare of some other boy and then came Nature’s severer intervention:
And when the deed was done
I
heard among the solitary hills
Low
breathing coming after me, and sounds
Of
undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost
as silent as the turf they trod.
Wordsworth’s boyhood is dominated by beauty
and fear of Nature. While snaring birds or robbing nests the boy experiences
exultation as well as terror. Here his feeling of joy and guilt are
inseparable. These experiences remain in the boy’s mind, transforming the world
for him and haunting his dreams. It is from such experiences that Wordsworth’s
poetic imagination is formed.
Then the time comes when Wordsworth is
chastened by Nature so that the meanest flower that blows gives him thoughts
that do often live too deep for tears. Humanity and humility stand now gifted
to him. Realizing the power of Nature to teach, elevate and soothe, his mission
is to spread his philosophy of love and joy through his poetry.
So, we can say that he traces the details
of the mind with extreme care. He holds a microscope over the small, almost
invisible links that build up into principles, morals and characters. He makes
an attempt to show that he and his poetry are made of, and they are not made
only of great events and emotions, but of small things that a less observant
mind would have forgotten—of boating expeditions, of dreams, of the noise of
the wind in the mountains, of the sight of the ash tree outside his bedroom
window. These small apparently disconnected incidents are to Wordsworth neither
small nor disconnected. In the poem we see him tracing the links, joining them
together, and working out their meanings.
Excellent work. Carry on
ReplyDeleteSpiritual autobiography may b yae aie ga??
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