Extract from The Prelude — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Extract from The Prelude
The poems
What you need to know
Wordsworth remembers taking a boat without permission one summer evening as a boy, rowing proudly across a lake until a huge, black peak seemed to rise up and stride after him, and how the sight troubled his mind for days.
How Wordsworth's blank verse moves from pride and pleasure to fear and guilt, as nature, gentle at first, becomes a living, menacing power that changes how the boy sees the world.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'One summer evening (led by her)', 'an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure', 'Small circles glittering idly in the moon', 'She was an elfin pinnace', 'heaving through the water like a swan', 'a huge peak, black and huge', 'Strode after me', 'With trembling oars I turned', 'huge and mighty forms, that do not live', 'a trouble to my dreams'.
Form: forty-four lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), told in the first person and the past tense, with enjambment that carries the rowing forward and a turning point when the peak appears, after which the mood darkens.
Context: William Wordsworth (1770–1850), the Romantic poet who grew up and went to school in the Lake District; The Prelude, his autobiographical poem on the growth of a poet's mind, begun in 1798, revised all his life and published in 1850, months after his death; and the Romantic belief, central to The Prelude, that nature shapes the growing mind.
Compares well with: Exposure (nature as an overwhelming power), A Poison Tree (guilt and inner conflict) and Catrin (a memory of a turning point).
