Year 8 Scholars Explore Wordsworth and the Sublime
The Year 8 Scholars, led by Mr Cook, were reading and, perhaps more importantly, visualising Stealing the Boat from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. After listening to a reading of the poem, always an essential part of appreciating it, the pupils analysed elements of language and structure, reflecting on the romantic elements as well as the concept of the sublime. They enjoyed detecting the shifts in mood and tone and were able to accurately pinpoint how these were achieved. It was an engaging session that will encourage not only further reading of the Romantic poets but also, as Mr Cavendish encouraged, a visit to the Lake District.
A Pupil's Perspective
The Prelude: Stealing the Boat
By Evelyn
In the most recent Year 8 Academic Scholars’ meeting, Mr Cook, Head of English, gave us a poem to read, analyse and discuss: Stealing the Boat, an excerpt from The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
Wordsworth is one of Britain’s most celebrated poets, born and growing up in the Lake District, though sadly losing his parents at a very young age. He wrote The Prelude throughout his life, a poem that traces his spiritual development and takes up 14 books. It was published three months after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, by his wife.
We focused on just one excerpt, known as Stealing the Boat, written in the 1790s. Wordsworth describes taking a shepherd’s boat, rowing out onto Ullswater at night and mistaking a huge, dark mountain for a monster. He turns, ‘with trembling oars’, rows back to the mooring place and walks home through meadows ‘in grave and serious mood’. But the spectacle has a profound impact on him. For many days afterwards, his brain:
‘Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;’
Wordsworth called poetry ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and he believed that nature was an uncontrollable force with healing powers. In this extract, typical of the Romantic Period, Wordsworth is saying that nature isn’t small, harmless and pretty, but contains a hidden power that no one can control.
The message carried in this talk and the poem was to not mess with nature – nature is not a simple thing to be challenged, and you might regret it…
