A BOOK OF BOOKS

The end of Book 4 of The Prelude describes a narrator who is seeking his “distant home” with “quiet heart” after discharging a discharged soldier upon the hospitality of a cottager woken from his sleep. Perhaps he saw himself sitting down by a warm fire with a good book. As we have seen, the telling of the story of the discharged soldier is full of bookishness (Dante, Homer, Virgil, Milton), as is so much of Wordsworth's poetry. Most often or perhaps most recognizably, it is the great precursors who frame Wordsworth's tales, Milton and Shakespeare above all. But there are other sources, for example Cook's voyages (in the “Point Rash-Judgment” poem). Then, in “Poor Susan,” there is the impersonalized sea of print that vaporizes and drifts through the streets of London enlivening the reverie of its subject only with the consolations of cliché. The real leech-gatherer Wordsworth met on the road near his Grasmere cottage was about to try his luck as a used-book seller, and books by poets dead or living are very much behind the poem that Wordsworth writes about him. Early in The Prelude Wordsworth remembers himself before he was ten years old deriving an “organic pleasure” from seeing the landscape arrayed as if it were a book, with its “level plain” and “lines of curling mist” (1: 592–93).