Studies: The Prelude and Speaker Essay

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In the poem The Prelude by William Wordsworth, the speaker journeys across a lake towards what he sees as a “summit of a craggy ridge” only to find himself horribly awe-stricken at its colossal magnitude. Wordsworth uses intense diction, unsettling imagery, and shifts in tone to display the speakers changing responses to his experience. At first, the speaker is shown to enjoy his venture out into the quiet wilderness. He rowed “proud of his skill, [in an] unswerving line.” With each stroke of the oar he “lustily...rose upon the stroke.” Wordsworth’s use of “proud,” “unswerving,” and “lustily” intimates that the speaker at that time was free of any fear or doubt, completely immersed in a great adventure. This attitude towards the austere beauty of nature changes abruptly in line 29 after seeing the terrifying magnitude of the ridge. The speaker is now is with “trembling oars” and wholly “undetermined” in both his thoughts and actions. Juxtaposed against “unswerving” and “proud,” Wordsworth now shows a dramatic change in the speaker’s response to nature through stark contrast. What was once a pleasant and prideful voyage into nature becomes a humbling and dreary boat ride back. As to what exactly the speaker saw that was so terribly terrifying, Wordsworth uses imagery to convey the “craggy ridge” that was the speaker’s initial point of interest, but was found to be unimaginably larger than he expected. It was a “huge peak, black and huge...tower[ing] up between me and the stars...like a living thing.” Wordsworth describes what the speaker discovers as a terrifying behemoth. Black and grim, and compared to an inconceivably tall tower, the ridge is too much for our speaker to bear. The magnitude of nature’s power sends the speaker into a dim and undetermined retreat; to the covert of a willow tree. The tone set at the beginning of the poem paints a very proud and very pleasant picture of the speaker’s state-of-being. He is bigger than his surroundings with his
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