The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind: By William Wordsworth: Edited from the manuscripts with introduction, textual and critical notes by Ernest de Selincourt |
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 | The Prelude |  |
Erelong transported hence as in a dream
I found myself begirt with temporal shapes
Of vice and folly thrust upon my view,
Objects of sport, and ridicule, and scorn,
Manners and characters discriminate,
And little busy passions that eclips'd,
As well they might, the impersonated thought,
The idea or abstraction of the Kind.
An Idler among academic Bowers,
Such was my new condition, as at large
Has been set forth; yet here the vulgar light
Of present actual superficial life,
Gleaming through colouring of other times,
Old usages and local privilege,
Thereby was soften'd, almost solemnized.
And render'd apt and pleasing to the view;
This notwithstanding, being brought more near
As I was now, to guilt and wretchedness,
I trembled, thought of human life at times
With an indefinite terror and dismay
Such as the storms and angry elements
Had bred in me, but gloomier far, a dim
Analogy to uproar and misrule,
Disquiet, danger, and obscurity.
I found myself begirt with temporal shapes
Of vice and folly thrust upon my view,
Objects of sport, and ridicule, and scorn,
Manners and characters discriminate,
And little busy passions that eclips'd,
As well they might, the impersonated thought,
The idea or abstraction of the Kind.
An Idler among academic Bowers,
Such was my new condition, as at large
Has been set forth; yet here the vulgar light
Of present actual superficial life,
Gleaming through colouring of other times,
Old usages and local privilege,
Thereby was soften'd, almost solemnized.
And render'd apt and pleasing to the view;
296
As I was now, to guilt and wretchedness,
I trembled, thought of human life at times
With an indefinite terror and dismay
Such as the storms and angry elements
Had bred in me, but gloomier far, a dim
Analogy to uproar and misrule,
Disquiet, danger, and obscurity.
| The Prelude | |