How do I analyse the extract from The Prelude for GCSE?

What is The Prelude extract about?

The speaker is Wordsworth as a boy. One summer evening he finds a little boat tied to a willow tree in its usual mooring place among the rocks. He says he was "led by her", and in the lines just before the extract "her" is Nature, so from the start Nature seems to be guiding him. He unties the boat and rows out. He knows he should not: it is "an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure".

At first the trip is magical. His boat leaves "Small circles glittering idly in the moon", and he rows proudly, fixing his eyes on a ridge on the skyline to keep a straight line. Then a much bigger peak appears from behind that ridge. As he rows further out, more and more of it comes into view, so it seems to grow taller with every stroke, as if it is rising up and following him. Terrified, he turns back, leaves the boat where he found it and walks home "in grave / And serious mood".

The last lines describe what happens afterwards. For many days his mind is troubled by "unknown modes of being", ways of existing that he cannot understand. The pleasant pictures that used to fill his head, of trees, sea, sky and green fields, are gone. In their place come "huge and mighty forms", alive but not "Like living men", which move through his mind by day and become "a trouble to my dreams".

What is the context of The Prelude extract?

William Wordsworth (1770 to 1850) was born in Cockermouth, on the edge of the Lake District in north-west England, and went to school at Hawkshead, in the heart of it. He grew up surrounded by lakes and mountains. He was one of the leading Romantic poets, writers of the late 1700s and early 1800s who valued nature and strong feeling. In 1798 he and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a collection that helped begin the Romantic movement in England.

The Prelude is an autobiographical poem, a poem about the writer's own life, and a very long one. Its subtitle is "Growth of a Poet's Mind", because it traces how his imagination developed. He began it in the late 1790s and kept revising it for the rest of his life. It was published in 1850, a few months after his death, and his widow Mary gave it the title The Prelude. This extract comes from Book 1, which covers his childhood and schooldays.

Because Wordsworth rewrote the poem so often, different versions exist. The extract in the AQA anthology comes from the version published in 1850. If you look the passage up online you may find an earlier version with different wording, so learn the lines as your anthology prints them.

For the Romantics, nature was more than pretty scenery. Wordsworth believed it could teach and shape a person, and not always gently: just before the extract he says Nature sometimes uses "Severer interventions". Romantic writers were also fascinated by the sublime, the mix of awe and terror people feel in front of something vast, such as a mountain or a storm. The stolen boat episode is the sublime in action.

How does Wordsworth present the power of nature in The Prelude extract?

At first nature seems gentle and on the boy's side. The circles his boat leaves on the water melt into "one track / Of sparkling light". He feels in control. He compares himself to a rower "Proud of his skill", and calls his boat "an elfin pinnace": a pinnace is a small boat, and "elfin" means magical, like something from a fairy tale. He rows "lustily", with energy and enthusiasm, and the boat moves "like a swan". Everything suggests confidence, even showing off.

Then nature changes. The phrase "a huge peak, black and huge" repeats "huge" as if the boy cannot find a bigger word, and "black" makes it menacing. The peak rises "As if with voluntary power instinct", which means as if it were filled with a will of its own. Personification, giving human qualities to something that is not human, turns the mountain into a creature: it "Upreared its head", and with "measured motion like a living thing, / Strode after me". It even "Towered up between me and the stars", cutting him off from the sky.

The boy's reaction shows how small he is beside it. "I struck and struck again" repeats the verb, and we hear his panic as he rows harder and harder, yet the peak keeps growing. By the end he is rowing back "With trembling oars". The same boy who was "Proud of his skill" a few lines earlier has lost all his confidence.

The power of nature lasts beyond the lake. "There hung a darkness, call it solitude / Or blank desertion" shows that he feels alone and abandoned. The "huge and mighty forms" in his mind are alive, but not "Like living men". Nature has shown him a force he cannot understand. Look back at "led by her" in the first line: Nature may have guided him to the boat in order to teach him this lesson.

What do the form and structure of The Prelude extract add?

The extract is written in blank verse: lines of iambic pentameter that do not rhyme. Iambic pentameter means ten syllables per line, in a da-DUM rhythm repeated five times. Without rhyme the lines sound close to natural speech, which suits a story being remembered and told. Blank verse is also the form of serious, epic poetry in English, so it gives a boy's adventure the weight of something important.

It is told in the first person and the past tense. The adult Wordsworth looks back on something that happened to him as a child, so we get the boy's feelings in the moment and the man's reflection on them afterwards. There are no stanza breaks. The whole extract is one long verse paragraph, so the story flows on like a memory being relived.

The structure moves through three stages: pleasure, then fear, then troubled thought. The turn comes with the word "When", as the peak appears from behind the ridge. You can trace the change in the vocabulary. Early words like "glittering" and "swan" give way to "black", "grim" and "trembling", and finally to "darkness" and "blank desertion".

Enjambment, where a sentence runs on over the end of a line, carries the story forward like the pull of the oars: "lustily / I dipped my oars into the silent lake". Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, does the opposite. "Upreared its head. I struck and struck again" is split by a full stop, so the reading stops dead just as the boy sees the peak. "Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned" does the same at the moment he gives up and turns back.

Which poems does The Prelude extract compare well with?

Pick a partner poem that lets you say something different, not just something similar. These three work well.

What could an exam question on The Prelude extract ask?

On AQA, Paper 2 Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster. You compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and quote from memory. The question is worth 30 marks and is assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3, the assessment objectives. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise, written for this guide:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the power of nature in the extract from The Prelude and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present fear in the extract from The Prelude and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing The Prelude extract with Storm on the Island:

Both Wordsworth and Heaney show nature exposing how small human confidence is. Wordsworth's boy begins "Proud of his skill", but the mountain that "Strode after me" turns his pride into panic, and the personification makes nature seem alive and watchful. Heaney's islanders start by insisting they are prepared, yet by the end they admit their fear of the storm. The difference is what fear leaves behind: Heaney's islanders are left afraid of something they cannot see, while Wordsworth's fear becomes a lesson that stays in his mind for days.

The last sentence compares the endings of the two poems, which is a quick way to show you have thought about each one as a whole.

Key quotations from The Prelude extract to learn

These six follow the extract from the theft of the boat to the nightmares afterwards.

• "an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure": the boy knows he is doing wrong, and his guilt is mixed with the thrill.
• "She was an elfin pinnace": he imagines his little boat as something magical, which shows his pride and excitement.
• "a huge peak, black and huge": the repeated "huge" sounds like a child lost for words, and "black" makes the peak menacing.
• "like a living thing, / Strode after me": personification makes the mountain seem to chase him.
• "There hung a darkness, call it solitude / Or blank desertion": he is left feeling alone and abandoned.
• "were a trouble to my dreams": the fear stays with him, so nature has changed the way he thinks.