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Vicki Feaver on 'The Prelude'

When I was nine or ten I went to the Lake District with my parents on a caravan holiday. We stayed on a farm in Upper Langdale and one day we climbed up the nearby gill to a pool with a waterfall. It was a magical place, the pool surrounded by ferns and rowan trees and the water so clear that you could see the pebbles on the bottom.

The next morning, before my parents or sister woke, I got out of bed as quietly as I could and climbed up there on my own. I took off my clothes and stepped into the freezing water and swam as far as the waterfall and then felt suddenly terrified and swam back as quickly as I could. I didn't feel safe until I was back in the caravan.

I hadn't read Wordsworth at the time but later when we studied him at school I immediately recognised the feeling of being awed and at the same time fearful of nature – almost as if it was a live presence. There are several episodes in The Prelude where Wordsworth describes this feeling. But it is nowhere stronger than in his account from Book 1 of The Prelude of stealing a small rowing boat, the 'elfin Pinnace'.

About Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver chose this poem as part of her series on reading poetry, at Newton Stewart Library and the Ewart Library in April-June 2007, arranged by Dumfries and Galloway Libraries and Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association.

Vicki Feaver is the prizewinning author of two earlier collections, Close Relatives (Secker & Warburg, 1981) and The Handless Maiden (Cape, 1994). Previously a professor at the University of Chichester, she now lives in Scotland at the foot of the Pentland Hills. She is the Scottish Poetry Library's Poet Partner for its outlying collection in Dumfries and Galloway Libraries.

When Vicki Feaver's latest collection The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006) was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize in 2006, Sean O'Brien said of it in The Independent that '[her] best poems offer a disquietingly direct apprehension of the powers by which we are made and driven, and which we must somehow seek to appease' – an observation that uncannily recalls this extract from The Prelude.

• Vicki Feaver in Poets A-Z

Extract from 'The Prelude', Book 1

She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp'd my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear'd its head. I struck, and struck again
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur'd motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work'd with a dim and undetermin'd sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov'd slowly through my mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

William Wordsworth

from 'The Prelude', Book 1. First published 1805, England.

About this poem

The Prelude is William Wordsworth's extraordinary book-length autobiographical poem, with drafts dating from the late 1790s, but only published after his death. It is one of the great English epic poems in blank verse: his commitment to using language close to everyday speech, also prominent in his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the Lyrical Ballads, sings through this extract.

Image: Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta © Robin Gillanders