The first 50 lines of Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude, sounds like he is answering someone’s question. He does speak of prophecy in these lines, “Even in the very words which I have here /Recorded: to the open fields I told/ A prophecy:…”(Balfour 117). This poem is about his life; he wrote it over a period of years and he is giving a kind of prophecy of his own life. Wordsworth does not seem like God or a deity to me, he was a poet, a good one, yes, but his poems can be confusing at times. I still try to go back and reread The Prelude to answer some of my questions. There is one thing missing in his prophecy, (if you want to consider his poetry prophecy), a second voice! Balfour notes that it “requires at least two voices” (p.118), the voice and the echo of the voice. Is there a possibility that he is thinking of Coleridge as the second voice?
Stepping away from prophecy a little bit, I think about the language of the poem itself. Wordsworth was enamored with nature and his poetry reflects that love. The poem was autobiographical and reflected his views on life when he was younger. In the sixth book, lines 631-635, (This particular book describes Cambridge and the Alps) Wordsworth personifies nature, “”the brook and the road were fellow travelers”, winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn”, and “the rocks that muttered close upon our ears,” (p. 421). Like Wordsworth, when the Alps are mentioned my first visualization is of a snow-capped mountain range and the tranquility found there.
The common people of that time had a great respect for nature and the world around them; I believe that this was something that Wordsworth was trying to point out in his poetry: that nature is God’s creation and the people who live around nature are closest to God. Michael is a very touching poem and Wordsworth did a wonderful job of depicting the life of a pastoral man and his family. In a letter to Thomas Poole he wrote, “I have attempted to give a picture of a man of strong mind and lively sensibility,” (Romantic Poetry p. 345). Michael sacrificed his greatest treasure to help someone else and as I read it, I could almost see what was going to happen in the end, but I had hoped that it would have a happy ending. It’s just too bad that Luke, Michael’s son, did not follow in his father’s footsteps. As a matter of fact, you could almost say that he was following Reginald St. Leon and his misadventures.
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I like your thoughts on being closer to God by loving nature. I didn’t think of that while reading Wordsworth, but he seems to imply that idea in all his writing. I don’t think he believes he is God, yet he acts like he is closer to God than others in some ways.
The ending of “Michael” made me sad because he loved his son so much and their relationship could never be reconciled after Luke’s troubles. Is it more realistic for Wordsworth to end the poem the way he did? Or is that too cynical of a reading? I would like to believe that Luke would have returned to his parents instead of disappearing, but I think he felt too much pressure by his parents.
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