‘Residence at Cambridge’
(Book Three, The Prelude)

Not that I slighted Books; that were to lack
All sense, but other passions had been mine,
More fervent, making me less prompt, perhaps,
To in-door study than was wise or well,
Or suited to my years. Yet I could shape
The image of a Place, which, sooth’d and lull’d
As I had been, train’d up in paradise
Among sweet garlands and delightful sounds,
Accustom’d in my loneliness to walk
With Nature magisterially, yet I
Methinks could shape the image of a Place
Which with its aspect should have bent me down
To instantaneous service, should at once
Have made me pay to science and to arts
And written lore, acknowledg’d my liege Lord,
A homage frankly offer’d up like that
Which I had paid to Nature. Toil and pains
In this recess which I have bodied forth
Should spread from heart to heart; and stately groves,
Majestic edifices, should not want
A corresponding dignity within.
The congregating temper, which pervades
Our unripe years, not wasted, should be made
To minister to works of high attempt,
Which the enthusiast would perform with love;
Youth should be aw’d, possessed as with a sense
Religious, of what holy joy there is
In knowledge, if it be sincerely sought
For its own sake, in glory, and in praise,
If but by labour won, and fit to endure.
The passing Day should learn to put aside
Her trappings here, should strip them off, abash’d,
Before antiquity and stedfast truth
And strong book-mindedness; and over all
should be a healthy sound simplicity,
A seemly plainness, name it as you will,
Republican or pious.⁠ If these thoughts
be a gratuitous emblazonry
That does but mock this recreant age, at least
Let Folly and False-seeming, we might say,
Be free to affect whatever formal gait
Of moral or scholastic discipline
Shall raise them highest in their own esteem;
Let them parade among the Schools at will,
But spare the House of God. Was ever known
The witless Shepherd who would drive his Flock
With serious repetition to a pool
Of which ’tis plain to sight they never taste.

This excerpt from the first (1805) version of Wordsworth’s much-revised autobiographical epic, The Prelude, follows the narrator’s admission that, as a new Cambridge man, he was “ill-tutored for captivity”. He had gone up in 1787, the same year he published his first poem. Now he’s looking back over a substantial period of time to unravel his original reactions.

The complaint is a lengthy and complex one. I picked out this passage because I think Wordsworth’s self-interrogation is interestingly detailed and uncomfortable, and voices something that many students – including today’s – have perceived on entering a setting they’ve been encouraged to idealise and, possibly, overvalue (fees now of course adding their pernicious effect).

The narrator’s disappointment is strongly articulated. The contrast between his earlier sense of beatified location – where he would walk “magisterially with Nature” – and the university environment is sharp with loss of autonomy. The repetition of “Yet I could shape / The image of a Place …”, the phrases tellingly redistributed across the line break and the claim emphasised by that ironic understatement, “Methinks” (“… yet I / Methinks could shape the image of a Place”) insists on the superiority of the imaginative shaping. He was already a poet, so his confidence is sturdy.

Even after he’d met the reality, the narrator says he had been ready to honour the place (Wordsworth’s college was St John’s), “Which with its aspect should have bent me down”. So that winding sentence finds some plain-speaking with a line of eight monosyllables. Once, the young writer imagined the “majestic edifices” (echoing that earlier “magisterial” walk with Nature); then he saw them, still admiring. Now, in their midst, he is surprised, though he shouldn’t be, by human shortcomings.

His view is both puritanical and tormented: youthful idealism often is. But the long Miltonic sentences make space as they wind on for counter-argument, and show him both narrowing and expanding his thoughts, trying out ideas on the wing. I admire the lines that praise “strong book-mindedness” and “seemly plainness”, and add on the nicely focused “name it as you will / Republican or pious”. This knowingly foreshadows the later narratives concerning revolution in France, and, again, connects the young poet with his admired Milton.

Both pious and Republican, the narrator goes on to condemn the hypocritical parading of “the Schools” at church. It’s the hypocrisy he attacks, not the religion itself. His line becomes tighter, again, and his diction more colloquial with the excellently down-to-earth parable of the witless shepherd.

After the last line of our excerpt, he will directly challenge “Ye Presidents and Deans” to give the “hollow” bell-ringing a rest, and he’ll continue to expatiate on his personal sense of “a Schoolboy’s dreaming” betrayed. The theme will gather impetus when he contrasts the ascetic life of the medieval scholar with the inattentiveness of the present generation (“the Band of my Compeers”), castigated rather endearingly, if pompously: “Our eyes are crossed by Butterflies, our ears / Hear charming Popinjays; the inner heart / Is trivial, and the impresses without / Are of a gaudy region.”

There’s a great deal more of The Prelude, of course, and of Book Three. Student high jinks may be few, but the passage in which he shamefacedly describes getting drunk and being stumblingly late for chapel captures an earnest young man’s embarrassment rather well. There’s not much holiday time left for anyone, prospective student or otherwise, to read the whole poem, but why rush? Amble along the lanes of blank verse, and notice the ideas as well as the scenery: Nature is not everything. Wordsworth has a lot to say on matters less consciously central to his self-image and his piety. The effort is well worth making, and we should probably trust the critics who say the 1805, pre-revision version is the best.