Extract from The Prelude — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Extract from The Prelude
The poems
What you need to know
Extract from The Prelude by William Wordsworth: what it is about, its context, and how Wordsworth uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'One summer evening (led by her) I found', 'It was an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure', 'She was an elfin pinnace', 'a huge peak, black and huge', 'Upreared its head', 'Strode after me', 'With trembling oars I turned', 'There hung a darkness', 'huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men', 'were a trouble to my dreams'.
Form: blank verse and enjambment, and the turn when the peak appears.
Context: Wordsworth and Romanticism, and the sublime.
Comparisons with Storm on the Island, Exposure and Ozymandias.
