The Prelude and Nature as Continuity

It seems quite fitting that we conclude this semester with Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a piece that Wordsworth worked and reworked for the last forty-five years of his life and yet never completed (although of course it is by no means fragmented in its posthumous publication). Written in response from the urge of Coleridge, the poem explores so much of what this course has grappled with: what does it mean to be a poet? How do poet’s see and interact with the world in different ways than us? And what is the role of nature to the poet?

In engaging these broader questions I was struck most significantly by the eleventh book of The Prelude, in which the subject of nature and childhood are explored as the way in which we connect to our pasts. For Wordsworth, there exist certain “spots of time” in a poet’s life that stand out as “renovating Virtue”. It is in these moments, the moments that are often inextricably tied to nature that the poet is born. It is these memories that the poet’s personality and perspective is formed. So it is nature itself that constructs who we are. Nature is the continuity between what we are now, and what we once were as a “thoughtless youth”. This notion of nature as the continuity of our lives seems central to romanticism at large, and it makes sense that we would end on such a powerful and consolidating note. At the same time, I wonder what it would’ve been like to start with Wordsworth, and to have framed the entire course through the continuity of nature; I actually don’t know how different it would be, since we see nature as a means of communication with the past and present in so many of the romantic writers we encountered.