Next, in Book Seventh, the speaker discusses a period when he was living in London. The speaker then describes a walking tour of the French Alps, which took place at the peak of the Revolution and was full of joyful celebration. The other is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom the book is addressed-for the first time, Wordsworth directly alludes to Coleridge's role as his intended audience. In Book Sixth, the speaker quickly describes the end of his years at Cambridge, and introduces two important characters.

The speaker is severely distressed by this mismatch, but also argues that books and poetry are one of the most suitable ways for people to express the strong emotions that nature can induce. Instead of focusing on the facts of Wordsworth's life, it is concerned with the ephemerality of mankind's great works of art when compared to the immortality of nature.

This book also contains a famous scene in which the speaker encounters a sickly soldier and helps him to a shelter for the night.īook Fifth is altogether different from the previous four.

In Book Fourth, the speaker returns home from Cambridge for summer vacation, reencountering the beloved landscape of his youth through newly appreciative and yet newly distant eyes. At the same time, he is thrilled to be in a place that once was home to his heroes, including poets like John Milton. He experiences a degree of culture shock as, separated from the rustic surroundings of his childhood, he confronts an atmosphere of pretension and inauthenticity. In Book Third, the speaker leaves home to attend Cambridge. Wordsworth advances a typically Romantic idea that an individual's childhood influences and experiences continue to shape them throughout their lives. This in itself plays into another Romantic interest: childhood.

He also argues that nature, having been established as an important part of his life early on, remains an ever-present element of his work and worldview. The speaker (who shares much with Wordsworth himself, but who can be seen as a distinct, imaginative persona in his own right) advances the pantheistic idea that God and nature are inseparable. Here, nature appears as a benevolent but extremely powerful force. The first two books of The Preludedescribe the speaker's early attachment to the natural beauty of his native Lake District, in the north of England.

The prelude by william wordsworth