It is easy now to take Wordsworth for granted and to forget just how revolutionary he must have seemed, coming after an age of poetry dominated by Pope’s neat heroic couplets. Pope had famously said ‘The proper study of mankind is man’, and we can concede this up to a considerable point, but the concession is then diminished by the realisation that Pope means ‘man in society’ and that he has little interest in ‘man in the natural world’. Then along comes Wordsworth and all sorts of things start appearing in poetry: lakes, mountains, owls, hazel nuts, moons, stars, mysterious presences…

Here is the stolen boat episode from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’ (see also week 242). If the strange terror the poet describes seem a little over the top – relax, William, it’s just a big rock – then bearing in mind that Wordsworth was a child, alone at night and feeling some guilt over his small theft, it all seems at least as understandable as the young Seamus Heaney having the heebie-jeebies over a pond full of frogs. Sensitive lot, these poets.

The ‘her’ in the first line refers to Nature as a sort of moral tutor.

From ‘The Prelude’

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
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 instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

William Wordsworth