He came to love urban life in its own right, yet used his summer vacations to return to the place of his youth. Over time, however, the academic exposure broadened Wordsworth’s imagination and sharpened his intellectual side. At first, he was lost in the noises and pitfalls of his early self-sufficient life. The next part of the poem focuses on Wordsworth’s experiences at Cambridge. His isolation from his home, and from a natural environment in general, was like the death of his second mother. He did so until he came of age and enrolled at the University of Cambridge. Once she died, he found solace in nature, which became his maternal substitute, greatly deepening and enriching his inner life as he explored and bonded to its many mysteries. He names her death as partially responsible for his deep fear of being alienated from society. In the second section of the poem, Wordsworth recalls his mother’s death and his process of grieving.
He likens himself to the flora of his childhood home, since he also originated as a figurative “seed,” constrained and enriched by his developmental environment.
He summarizes his early memories of northern England’s Lake District, as well as the emotional associations he formed between it and the progression of the four seasons. He explains that he has always inherently been a poet, but might not have ever understood his vocation if he had not constantly reflected on past experiences. Wordsworth examines his childhood, celebrating his many early opportunities to express himself he contrasts these experiences with his present frustration and strife. The poem initially sets out to explain how Wordsworth’s mind expanded over time until he identified as, and claimed the title of, poet.
The poem is widely considered Wordsworth’s greatest, and instrumental to early figurations of modernity in its focus on the epistemology of the self that is, the question of what the self can know and do. Though he never named it himself, Wordsworth once referred to the poem in a letter as “the poem on the growth of my own mind.” It went unpublished until several months after his death in 1850 thereafter, his wife, Mary Wordsworth, gave it its title. A summary of his formative years and development as a writer, it was initially intended to precede his more philosophical work, The Recluse, a project that was never finished. The Prelude (alternatively titled Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem) is an 1850 extended blank verse poem by William Wordsworth.
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