Wordsworth's Prelude of 1799: Second Part

William Wordsworth’s Prelude works to explain Nature by exploring the relationship of its speaker to this Nature that it loves so much. It personifies Nature, making it very personal, and by telling stories from childhood to present, shows how his relationship with Nature has grown and matured. Some of the stories refer to Nature in general, and other instances are dedicated to a more specific thing, such as the sun and the moon in lines 184-202.
As the speaker’s relationship with Nature matures, it becomes more of a religious affair. Nature becomes a sort of “spirit” that the speaker seems to worship. He just can’t get enough. He tells of getting up early before school to walk laps around a lake with Nature. Here, Nature is presented as an almost living, breathing companion of the speaker’s. Someone he can talk to, and share an even closer bond with. The diction the poet uses helps to portray Nature in this way. In a sense the poem reads almost like The Bible or another form of divine scripture, especially near the end of the Second Part when the speaker discusses God and Nature and uses diction like “Ye mountains, thine O Nature. Thou hast fed/ my lofty speculations, and in thee/ For this uneasy heart of ours I find/ A never-failing principle of joy/ And purest passion.”
The poem is broken into many stanzas, each containing a separate idea or story. When strung together the way Wordsworth has constructed them, they effectively demonstrate the growth of the bond the speaker and Nature begin to share. There is no set rhyme scheme, which frees the poem from most structural limitations, however it does maintain iambic pentameter pretty well throughout. This helps to keep that steady “flow” going as we are introduced to scene after scene of the different forms and representations of Nature and how it has affected the speaker. The lack of rhyming words, or excessive repetition or other literary devices keeps the focus of the poem on the content. Wordsworth wants people to be more concerned with the messages the poem is trying to convey, rather than how poetic and beautiful the poem looks or sounds. It reads almost as prose, but with that iambic pentameter rhythm hanging there in the backdrop to keep things flowing at the right pace.
Towards the end of the Second Part of The Prelude, the speaker begins to receive things from Nature in return for his “devotion” or relationship with it. Lines 415-434 talk about this “feeling” that has swept over the speaker, allowing him to understand the vastness and superior powers of Nature better than most people. The true importance and outreach of Nature is still incomprehensible to any human being, but the speaker’s relationship with Nature has matured to its highest point and the speaker feels at one with it and has found his joy and passion in life.