The Prelude

At the end of my sophomore year, I became convinced that the only way I was going to salvage the social, academic, and extracurricular wreck I’d made of my life at university was to go to England’s Lake District and read Wordsworth’s epic, The Prelude, in its original setting. 

I first read Wordsworth in the second semester seminar dreaded by and required of all English Majors: Major English Poets. Actually, “first read” is misleading. “Was first assigned to read” would be more accurate, and hint at the lack of actual reading that took place. At this time in my collegiate career, I wasn’t reading anything, or, for that matter, completing any assignments. I was much too busy attending things: classes, parties, concerts, meetings, rehearsals, etc. Like most Ivy League students, I viewed curricular studies the way I viewed the presence of bread in a sandwich: obligatory, expected. Just as every sandwich has two slices, so every student goes to class. What makes a person interesting, what defines a man or woman on campus, is what is piled between the slices i.e. extracurriculars. And I was a champion piler. If I was interested in something - if I so much as suspected the possibility of being interested in something - I got involved. 

And so, in the second semester of my second year, while many of my peers were finding they'd bitten off more than they could chew, I found myself holding a sandwich too big to even bite. To put my situation less metaphorically: I was doing too many things so I didn’t have time to work on anything, which meant that I was terrible at everything, and, because I didn’t want to be anything I was terrible at – and I was terrible at everything – I didn’t want to be anything at all.

In the midst of this mess, Wordsworth cropped up on thesyllabus of Major English Poets. The plan was to spend a full four weeks with “the father of modern poetry” (as my professor kept calling him), which meant I’d have plenty of time to collect the opinions of my peers and recycle them for the essay at the end of the unit. Good news indeed. As was my custom, I stopped outside Lindsey-Chittenden Hall before the first Wordsworth session for a little roughhousing. Nothing says, “I didn’t do the reading” more than the sound of a mint spine cracking open at the seminar table. In the course of my studies - my non-studies - I discovered that some brief book abuse before class - a few tree thwacks, some violent ruffling - was enough to create the appearance of some late night exegesis in the library. 

Lucky for me, the poems we'd been assigned were short enough to reread at the table. The first was called “Expostulation and Reply," and it opened with the image of a young Wordsworth idling the day away beside a lake. William’s reverie is cut short when his good friend Matthew arrives to criticize him for wasting time that would be better spent reading books. Matthew chides:

Where are your books?--that light bequeathed           

To Beings else forlorn and blind!           

Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed           

From dead men to their kind.      

Listening to my professor read these words aloud, I had three thoughts more or less simultaneously: (1) drinking the spirits of dead men was a perfect description of my education (2) drinking the spirits of dead men seemed like a disgusting way to spend an education (3) this Matthew character sounded suspiciously similar to someone I knew that was always judging me for not doing the reading. Namely, myself. Continuing his attack, Matthew says:

“You look round on your mother earth, 

As if she for no purpose bore you; 

As if you were her first-born birth, 

and none had lived before you,”

For the first time in class that semester, I sat up from my customary slouch and leaned forward in the chair. I felt implicated in Matthew's attack. If William could defend his aimless ways, his shirking of books, his purposelessness, then perhaps I could justify my own behavior. In the next poem, “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth offers his reply:

Books! 'Tis a dull and endless strife,

Come hear the woodland linnet, 

How sweet his music; on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it. 

I liked where this was going.

Enough of science and of art; 

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Both Matthews - myself and the poem’s - fell silent in contemplation. Wordsworth parried his friend's critique by questioning the assumptions underpinning it: that one's purpose in life is to be found in books; that one’s destiny will be whiffed on the stale breath of dead men. It was an assumption tacitly shared by the University, and, so I realized, by myself since I'd entered. But here was Wordsworth, appealing to another kind of knowledge entirely. In fact, he was telling me to abandon book-learning outright, and in a book! Subversive little rascal! On the not reading front, I was already succeeding spectacularly, but I knew it would not be enough to not read; I had to bring a heart “that watches and receives” to bear on experience. I didn’t know what that meant, but I was convinced it held the key to my redemption. 

In subsequent classes I continued - true to Wordsworth’s advice - not to read his poems. But as we discussed his work in class, his words offered me a window into another mode of being, one that was tranquil, inward, and joyous. I didn't know how to access this state of being, but I was certain that Wordsworth had accessed it, and that, with his poems as my guide, I could too. Somehow.

When we reached The Prelude I had my answer. Wordsworth's great epic of inward exploration opens with a young man fleeing the hustle of metropolitan life: "escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented sojourner: now free, / Free as a bird to settle where I will." Bingo! Of course I couldn't get my heart to watch and receive – I was a discontented sojourner, stuck in the vast city! All I needed was to escape.

My plan was simple: As soon as the semester ended, I would make a pilgrimage to the Lake District with nothing more than a spare change of clothes and a copy of The Prelude. Once there, I would read the poem in all the places it described. When Wordsworth mentioned layinghis head on "the genial pillow of the earth," I would lie on the earth’s genial pillow and read his sweet words. When Wordsworth wrote of the Derwent river's "ceaseless music . . . tempering human waywardness," I would kneel by the Derwent and temper my damn waywardness. Somehow (this was the part I had yet understand) through a mysterious process of poetic osmosis, I would "become a living soul" - just like dear William.

3 days after term ended, I boarded the plane.