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There are two ways of reading the Prelude; one is to read it as about Wordsworth, the other is to read it as about William. Wordsworth wrote a number of poems about persons with Christian names only; there are Lucy and Michael and Margaret and Leonard and Barbara and others. It seems possible to regard the Prelude as one of them. The point of the distinction between the two methods is not that one is superior to the other; neither is. But they define certain alternative tendencies. The reader who is more interested in Wordsworth as a personal poet and a psychological problem will tend to read it in one way; the reader who is more interested in the poetic effect of the poem the other. This will be passionately denied by all the Wordsworthians and treasured as a secret conviction by all the Williamites. It will be noticed from the last sentence that this chapter is definitely Williamite.

Let us imagine that the Prelude is about a person called William, to whom the things described in the poem happened and to whom, except for the irreducible minimum of natural necessity—food, sleep, &c., nothing else happened. A poem contains for itself nothing but what it does contain and nothing of what it contains exists, for poetry, outside the poem. Many poetic discoveries have been dragged out of their context and made to walk the world alone. The removal of even a stanza or line from its context tends, unless we are very careful, to thwart it and us more than we realize. The protagonists of Shakespeare’s plays, the God of Paradise Lost, the William of the Prelude, have all suffered in this way. But they will not endure it. The attentive observer finds himself saying of them, ‘Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated’. Indeed they tend to be translated much as Bottom was; over each awful countenance is imposed an ass’s head—perhaps the reader’s. It may be permissible to use the Prelude as a whole as evidence against Wordsworth’s own fidelity to young love, or Paradise Lost against (say) Milton’s sympathy with the Roman Church. But it is not permissible to use Wordsworth as evidence against the William of the Prelude or Milton as evidence against the God of Paradise Lost. A poem with its persons and its morality is a complete whole.

William, it seems, was a poet, and the poem has a number of dicta about poetry scattered through it; some easy, some difficult, some obvious, some not so obvious. In many places it bears its own testimony to the unique value of poetry. William had a dream once in which he saw only one thing to rival it, only one other human achievement which was of even approximate value; that one thing was Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. The dream ended before he was compelled to choose between these two, but even in the dream poetry was thought to be worth more than Euclid. Euclid expressed ‘reason undisturbed by space or time’, but poetry expressed passion, which itself ‘is highest reason in a soul sublime’. It is noteworthy that William did not say that passion was like reason, or did the same work as reason; he said, tout court, that in a sublime soul passion is reason.

Sublimity nowadays is, like Wordsworth, under a cloud. It has (so we seem to feel) too often run away from its Annette of disturbing physical and mental facts and lost itself in clouds and vapours of unreal idealism. But neither Wordsworth nor William were ashamed of sublimity, as (for all we know) Wordsworth was not ashamed of Annette. He made no particular secret of her. Certainly he did not put her in the Prelude; I have sometimes wondered whether he omitted her because he knew she was not really important to him. Perhaps he did not cease to be a great poet (if he did) because he was too capable of detachment from Annette; perhaps he never could have been attached to Annette because he was a great poet. We have turned him lately into an example of cause and effect. But Annette, perhaps, was never important enough to be a cause of anything, nor Vaudracour and Julia any more autobiographical than Paradise Lost or Hamlet. It is by no means certain that great genius is so romantically attached to persons as our romantic and faithful hearts like to believe. Genius seems often to need a nodal point for its convenience, perhaps for its existence in its achievements.

Never dare poet touch a pen to write

Unless his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.

Annette may have been a nodal point. And the reason Wordsworth said nothing more about her may have been that there was nothing more to say. How extraordinary it would be if the poets were right in what they left out as well as in what they put in!

At any rate William knew nothing about Annette, and was not concerned with her. But with sublimity both he and Wordsworth assuredly were concerned. Wordsworth repeated the word on various occasions. He meant by it, however, a quite definite state of mind which he took the trouble to analyse, at least in part. It occurs twice in Tintern Abbey, once in relation to the state in which, by the power of harmony and the power of joy, ‘we see into the life of things’; the second time, as the sense aroused by the spirit that ‘rolls through all things’. The second reference is vaguer and less convincing than the first; the something ‘whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’ is not quite satisfactory, for Wordsworth’s habitual accuracy leads us to attach importance to the ‘setting suns’ as opposed to suns in any other condition. There is a localized and slightly sentimental emotion in it compared to the simple universality of the rest of the definition. It has a touch of the pseudo-romantic. He may have meant that evening is a peculiarly suitable time for such visitations, but then he goes on to refer to the ‘round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky’ in general, so that we are defeated again. A slight pseudo-romance does occasionally crop up in Wordsworth, and is most to be found in certain of the most popular pieces.

But we may take the other statement and go back with it to the Prelude. Sublimity is a state in which passion is reason; in which we see into the life of things. It is a definition not without importance when we consider the greatest poetry, that of the eternal present, of ‘the life of things’. In Book II (ll. 308-22), speaking of his childhood, he describes how he stood beneath a rock listening to the coming storm;

listening to notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And deem not profitless those fleeting moods

Of shadowy exultation; not for this,

That they are kindred to our purer mind

And intellectual life; but that the soul,

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt

Remembering not, retains an obscure sense

Of possible sublimity, whereto

With growing faculties she doth aspire,

With faculties still growing, feeling still

That whatsoever point they gain, they yet

Have something to pursue.

There are three things to be remarked here, because they were all repeated later on: (i) Visionary power is aroused by the distant winds; (ii) this, and such moods, are kindred to pure mind and intellectual life; (iii) they enable the soul to retain a sense of possible sublimity—possible, and not more than possible, because she remembers how but not what she felt; poetry cannot yet define the what. She feels that she can see into the life of things, but she does not. Passion is reason, but she does not yet see the rational harmony. The references were repeated when at the end of Book V William’s view of poetry was described. A ‘great Nature’ exists in poetry.

Visionary power

Attends the motions of the viewless winds,

Embodied in the mystery of words:

There, darkness makes abode, and all the host

Of shadowy things work endless changes,—there,

As in a mansion like their proper home,

Even forms and substances are circumfused

By that transparent veil with light divine,

And, through the turnings intricate of verse,

Present themselves as objects recognized,

In flashes, and with glory not their own.

Visionary power again attends on the viewless winds which belong to that Nature, but here it is embodied in words. And there—in those words—are recognized forms and substances; the soul knows not merely how but what she felt. She knows power and joy, light and glory; which is, one may admit, near enough to the sublimity she earlier foresaw. And she now recognizes the forms and substances. It seems probable that this recognition of forms and substances, with their relations, are what William meant by ‘reason’. They are not, certainly, Euclid’s Elements; they are something more human. But the Arab was saving the Elements because it was the symbol of pure reason, and long afterwards, in the last book, Wordsworth told us what William held Imagination to be—

Absolute power

And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,

And Reason in her most exalted mood.

Exalted Reason then is a part of the Imagination, of (it will be remembered) ‘the Power so-called Through sad incompetence of human speech’. It is one with the passion of sublimity. It is the intellectual life to which the distant winds of the storm are kindred, and it enables the soul to recognize forms and substances in poetry, ‘with glory not their own’, because of the transparent veil of the divine light of words which circumfuses them. But that is their proper home; they exist there more truly than elsewhere. They are more themselves in poetry than in ordinary life. Reason is related to Power, for Power is its life, though, for the purpose of the poem, it is distinguished from Power. And as Euclid’s Elements holds ‘acquaintance with the stars’ and presents the purest bond of Reason, so in more exalted moods Reason is the faculty by which Power discerns the life of things. But it discerns those principles not as a mere plan but as poetry.

In a long passage at the beginning of Book XIV Wordsworth described how William, with two companions, went to the top of Snowdon. He paused at an inn first; ‘then, cheered by short refreshment, sallied forth’. The cause of some of Wordsworth’s flatness is occasionally misunderstood; it is that he did not like to leave anything out. We are content to live on the top of Snowdon; we should like to build our tabernacles there. But Wordsworth, like Christ, will not have it; he will have the bottom of the mountain as well as the top. So Milton with the Archangel’s digestion; so Shakespeare with the Countryman of Cleopatra. Those moments, indeed, are precisely the countrymen of Cleopatra; and Cleopatra would be a poorer Egypt without them. In Shakespeare they are usually Egyptian enough for us to recognize their kinship to the Queen; in Wordsworth they are often less Egyptian than mere country. But even the ‘short refreshment’ is there to take us to the top of Snowdon in every sense of the words.

At the top, however, William saw something which necessitates for us a temporary tabernacle. He saw the moon and the mists, the hills heaved up over the mists, the mists stretching away into the Atlantic, the greater stars, and the sky, and (more awful) again the moon; he heard a noise of waters, sounding as with a single voice, and seeming to be felt by the starry heavens themselves. So he went away and thought it over, recollecting his emotion in tranquillity. William’s emotions needed to be recollected in tranquillity; they were too strong to be understood at the moment. Less violent passions, in more equable minds, do not need the interval of recovery. But William recollected and reflected. And it seemed to him that all the vision was an emblem of interior power. It showed forth something actual in the nature of man: a mind that fed upon infinity—‘our being’s heart and home’—brooding over the abyss, intent to hear all the voices as one voice issuing into the silence and the light. This mind recognized, by means of its activity, transcendent power, and put forth power. It exercised its own domination upon the face of outward things. It and things interchange supremacy, sending abroad ‘kindred mutations’. In fact, it takes things and makes poetry of them.^[1] Wordsworth certainly and rightly did not limit this ‘glorious faculty’ to poets, he was speaking of all great minds. But certainly great poets belong to this kind of nature, for it is they also who live ‘in a world of life’ and not ‘a universe of death’. The vision from Snowdon was that of a great poet’s mind—‘what in itself it is and would become’. For the desire of all poets is to be great poets, however very often their intelligence beholds the refusal of their desire; just as the desire of all morality must be for sanctity, however far off it seems to labour.

The poets, then, create an existence like the external world, ‘the whole compass of the universe’. This existence—it is a shame to paraphrase a passage from which in paraphrase the power departs—is sometimes created by them and sometimes presented to them; perhaps it is not too bold to see in this the two methods by which the beginnings of a poem may be suggested—either arising from the poet’s own intellectual labour or suddenly thrust on his mind by the process of things. Either way the poet is arrested by a sense of harmony; we need not underrate that word because it has so often been made so cheap. Concord of some kind, it would seem, there must be in a poem, however difficult, or it would not be a poem; it would not have a separate existence at all. Harmony does not mean the most popular tunes; it may be as difficult as we please. But wherever two things are brought into verbal concord there must be some kind of harmony. Drama, for example, may involve clash and opposition. But without some kind of underlying harmony, it would not be drama. It would be a number of detached and unrelated elements. The beginnings of poetry (William understood) might come from anything, momentary or everlasting; the smallest suggestion is enough. Unenthralled by the world of sense, the poets are yet quickened by it. They are Powers; they exist in a world of life; and they exemplify in the highest degree that faculty which we all possess of understanding outward things in the domination of our own spirits. It is a ‘glorious’ faculty; let us risk one more collocation and remember that it was glory in which ‘forms and substances’ were recognized. William is but realizing more fully what he knew before; he is only thinking again of the ‘Nature’ that exists in the works of mighty poets. But here he is exemplifying his own maxim; here his genius remembers what she felt and how she felt, and his passion is itself highest Reason in his soul sublime.

Certainly there is a fact which we must remember, though he himself, merely because he was exemplifying his own maxims, omitted it; and perhaps also because of his own slight tendency to introduce religious authority into the poetic. Proclaiming in that great verse the nature of genius, he declared also that it must raise all affections ‘from earth to heaven, from human to divine’; and a little later on, speaking of the progress of Imagination, he asserted that we draw from it sustaining thoughts ‘Of human Being, Eternity, and God’. This particular conclusion was part of the domination over external things which William himself was taught to exercise; but it is not an inevitable part of the domination for all poets. One may remark that William did not actually see more in the mature movement of Imagination than ‘the works of man and face of human life’, but he did draw lessons from them and it. Other poets may not draw the same lessons; other poets exercise their domination and not his. He was dominating, even while he was describing domination. He was sending abroad mutations kindred to the universe but from his ‘native self’, and other poets must send them from their ‘native selves’. The high description of the act is not diminished because the moral in Hardy is different from the moral in Milton. Actually, of course, we cannot truthfully compare them; for to do so we have to compare a ‘form’ with a ‘form’ and to withdraw those forms from their glory in order to do so. But it is the glory that is the only important element in the whole discussion, for the glory is the poetry, and without it the forms remain unpoetic, and therefore for the present purpose negligible.

The word ‘exalted’ which William in this passage thought definitive of poetic Reason recurs again at the end of the Prelude. It is worth noting because it there refers to a substantive which William did not so frequently name in the poem as he did Power; it qualifies Beauty—the mind of man is exalted in beauty ‘above this frame of things’. William—and Samuel Taylor—are to be Prophets of Nature to men; they are to be so because they are poets (he has, but a page or so before, been recalling their various poems by name), and therefore the Nature must be both that of the principles of the earth and that which exists in the work of the poets. In an earlier passage (VII. 759-61) he had spoken of the Spirit of Nature, which

aids the thoughts,

However multitudinous, to move

With order and relation.

It is ‘the soul of Beauty and enduring Life’, and it exalted London; it

diffused,

Through meagre lines and colours, and the press

Of self-destroying, transitory things,

Composure, and ennobling Harmony.

He did not name Beauty as an element in Imagination; but he habitually spoke of the joy which Beauty creates in the mind. He attended there rather to the state of the mind creating than the thing created. But since it is that mind which sends vibrations abroad and since it is exalted in beauty, we may believe that the vibrations themselves, in bestowing composure and harmony, bestow beauty also. William, though he realized it, did not stress it; he left that to other—generally lesser—poets.

The Prelude then asserts that exalted Reason is a part of the Imagination; by Reason it means either (i) an abstract pattern, such as Euclid or Archimedes produced, geometry or mathematics, the self-consistent, unemotional world of logical creation, or (ii) that world exalted in passion to sublimity. And by (ii) he meant the operation of a great mind on the forms and substances of the universe, composing and harmonizing them into a new nature within itself. In its effective state such a mind recognizes and unites both its own experiencing faculties and the things it experiences. Reason without passion and yet applied to the world is a deadly thing (the poem earlier describes William’s effort to use it so). But when it is passion it sees into the life of things. It beholds them, as from Snowdon; it hears ascending a single voice, which, in his own image of his own experience, he beheld himself feeling.

There is, certainly—for good or evil—a good deal of ‘sublimity’ about all this. But if it is all true, how have the poets done it? Power we may accept. But in what sense has the exalted Reason been possessed by them? And what have they done about Beauty?

[1]

He even showed us how it was done. In Book XII in the passage which begins (l. 208) ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ he described how William saw the thrilling vision of the moor, the naked pool, the beacon, and the girl carrying a pitcher and leaning against the wind. Every such moment is like a poem; the vision from Snowdon is like a great poem.