![]() ![]() Only relationship with the boy he used to be, alive within him, provided Wordsworth with the springs of coherent power and purpose and suddenly he fears that this relationship has failed him. The questions that Wordsworth puts to himself suggest the literary form of funeral lament for one who has died young, in a death which threatens the value of life for those who survive. It is inarticulate and confused, certainly ‘self-reproachful’ as Jonathan Wordsworth has said 1 in its contemplation of vast poetic tasks as yet unstarted, but - more importantly - it is anxious with fear of a much more fundamental failure, of which that poetic dilatoriness might only be an expression. The questioning out of which the two-part Prelude grows shares something of the sad perplexity that prompted Tintern Abbey. ![]()
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