The University of Windsor Review - spring-summer 1983 vol. XVII, No. 2 [antikvár]

"The Tide Returns Again": Change, Repetition, and the Structure of The Prelude, Boole X Stephen W. Brown Wrenched somehow out of the natural order, I have been plunged into an incomprehensible chaos where I can make nothing out, and the more I think about my present situation, the less I can understand what has become of me. Reveries of a Solitary Walker Book X poses several problems for the reader of the Prelude that are uniquely its own. In terms of Wordworth's proposed subject, the development of a poet's mind, the narrative of his great spiritual crisis should be a pivotal and essential chapter. It has its finger on the very pulse of modern history. Yet it is evasive, even cryptic, and difficult of substance. Here Wordworth's expression is touched by a great anxiety, articulated through recurrent shifts in mood, and marked by an absence of any sustained moments of unified perception. This latter characteristic significantly separates Book X from the rest of the Prelude. Wordsworth offers no instances of sudden insight, no "spots of time" with their subsequent passages of illuminating analyses. Great images do "leap out" of this text, but those invariably divorce themselves from the flow of the poem, and become sources of terror and confusion that interrupt the surface of Book X with jarring horror, hke the effect of the corpse that shot bolt upright from the lake of Book V. But the particular point that distinguishes Book X from the Prelude as a whole is manifest in the major editorial change of the 1850 edition: its division into two parts. This partition is central to any understanding of the structure in Woodsworth's very long and very nervous book, although the utter divorce of the parts in 1850 destroys the tension imphcit in the earlier repetitive form of 1805. Wordsworth's editorial action, at the very least, emphasizes what should be the reader's sense of closure at hne 566. But such closure is frail and tenuous. Wordsworth's exultation at the death of Robespierre, and the idyllic intimations called forth by Levens Sands pass away, and the dark forces return with a more terrible immediacy. The structural design that the poet first brings to his recollection of personal crisis proves incapable of containing that experience. Thus the ending at hne 566 is no ending; and Wordsworth is returned to his beginning to tell his tale again. In this fashion the form of Book X impresses itself upon the reader through repethion. A crisis that Wordsworth has often confronted, is deliberately rehearsed for the reader, and the impact of its theme finally lies in the degrees of change and variation in