Wordsworth once wrote thatthe child is father to the man.? In his work The Prelude, he shares some of his childhood experiences that ultimately shaped the man he became as he matured. These experiences share many common elements: a predominantly natural setting, a feeling of the sublime in ordinary occurrences, a natural self-consciousness, and the subsequent personal reflection on the series of events. One excerpt from book four of The Prelude contains all of these characteristic romantic properties.
The passage is rife with natural imagery. Within the first few lines, the reader learns of thewillow tree / within a rocky cave? andthe voice / of mountain-echoes.? Nearly every line discusses an aspect of nature.
A feeling of the sublime is established early on, as the speaker tells the readers that thiswas an act of stealth / and troubled pleasure.? As the rower navigates the boat into the middle of the lake, the tone of the poem intensifies. .
?She was an elfin pinnace; lustily / I dipped my oars into the silent lake, and, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat / went heaving through the water like a swan; when, from behind that craggy steep till then / the horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power / upreared its head.? .
The boat and mountain take on characteristics of life such as gender andvoluntary power,? and the scene becomes primal and nearly sexual in connotation -- though the scenery remains that of the natural world.
The third romantic characteristic is revealed when the overwhelming nature of the former scene eventually becomes too much for the speaker's conscience, and the returns to the shorewith trembling oars.? Wordsworth believed in the balance of nature, and that such imposing actions: the mountain's lifelike rising to survey the lake, or the soft howl of the wind through a tree he is climbing, were a sort of omen designed to nag at his conscience until he ceased his dangerous behavior.
