This definitions covers 📖 Key Terms within Extract from The Prelude (Wordsworth) for GCSE English Literature. Revise Extract from The Prelude (Wordsworth) in Power and Conflict Poetry for GCSE English Literature with 10 exam-style questions and 14 flashcards. This is a high-frequency topic, so it is worth revising until the explanation feels precise and repeatable. It is section 13 of 19 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
📖 Key Terms
- The sublime
- A Romantic idea: the feeling produced by something so vast, powerful, or awe-inspiring that it overwhelms ordinary understanding — a mixture of terror and wonder. The mountain's appearance produces a sublime experience in the boy: it is too large, too purposeful, and too strange to be absorbed rationally.
- Personification
- Giving human qualities to something non-human. Wordsworth personifies the mountain throughout: it "upreared its head," moved "like a living thing," and seemed to stride after the boy. The technique makes Nature the active agent of the poem, not a passive backdrop.
- Autobiography in verse
- A poem that records the poet's own life and development. The Prelude is Wordsworth's account of how his mind and imagination formed — each episode is chosen because it shaped him, not simply because it happened.
- Spots of time
- Wordsworth's term for formative moments in childhood and youth whose power grows as you carry them through life. The boat-stealing episode is a "spot of time" — a seemingly small event whose influence on the developing mind is profound and lasting.
- Blank verse
- Unrhymed lines of ten syllables (iambic pentameter). Wordsworth uses blank verse throughout The Prelude — the absence of rhyme allows the poem to move at the pace of natural thought and memory, without the artificiality of a rhyme scheme pulling events into neat resolution.
Practice questions for Extract from The Prelude (Wordsworth)
Wordsworth writes that the cliff rose 'as if with voluntary power instinct.' What does the phrase 'voluntary power instinct' most clearly suggest about Nature in this poem?
Explain how Wordsworth uses form and structure in The Prelude to serve the poem's argument about the growth of consciousness. Refer to at least one specific formal feature.