Notes

271] The Prelude was first published in 1850, shortly after the poet's death. It had been completed in 1805, though revised on three occasions afterwards. It was composed to accompany and form part of a more extensive and ambitious work, The Recluse, which was never finished. The Prelude remained without a title until the poet's widow named it, shortly before publication. Wordsworth had referred to it as "the poem on my life" or "the poem to Coleridge." The earliest passages in the poem go back to the beginning of 1798; the earliest and briefest version of the poem was completed, in two parts, in 1799-1800. This earliest version, in its extent, general subject, and to a considerable degree in its episodes and phrasing, corresponds to the part of The Prelude printed here. The text used is that of the poem as first finished in its longest form in 1805. Selections are reprinted here by the permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Was it for this, etc. In all early manuscripts (1798-1800), the poem begins in this way, the broken line and the initial phrase implying a preceding passage and a known meaning for this. The earliest surviving manuscript for what is now the first 270 lines of the poem belongs to 1804.

278] my 'sweet Birthplace': Cockermouth, in Cumberland. The quotation is from Coleridge's Frost at Midnight composed early in 1798. Wordsworth, writing towards the end of the same year, associates his own memories of childhood with those recorded by his friend.

298] grunsel: groundsel, a common European weed.

299] Skiddaw: a mountain about ten miles east of Cockermouth.

308] That beloved Vale: the vale of Esthwaite with its village of Hawkshead where Wordsworth attended the Grammar School, 1779-87.

317] springes: snares.

385] struck: pulled on the oars; cf. stroke, a single pull on the oars.

425] H. W. Garrod suggested that there should be a comma at the end of the line to make the true meaning clear.

428-89] First published in Coleridge's periodical, The Friend, Dec. 28, 1809, and then in Poems, 1815.

452-89] Dorothy Wordsworth quoted this passage, as recently composed, in a letter to Coleridge on Dec. 21 (?), 1798.

525] Ye lowly Cottages, etc. The students at Hawkshead Grammar School lodged and boarded with the villagers. Wordsworth and his brothers lived in the cottage of a widow, Ann Tyson, in the near-by hamlet of Colthouse.

541-62] Wordsworth plainly had in mind the famous game of cards in The Rape of the Lock; "plebeian cards" (549) echoes a phrase in Pope's poem (III, 54).

645] my Friend: Coleridge, to whom The Prelude was addressed.

652-53] The Prelude was to be preliminary to a more ambitious work, The Recluse.

664-71] These lines were composed early in 1804, at least four years after the preceding passage.

Other poems by William Wordsworth