Millennial Themes in The Prelude and Mont Blanc Essay -- Wordsworth P

millennian Themes in The Prelude and Mont Blanc On reading Book VI of Wordsworths thirteen-part variant of The Prelude, I was particularly struck by the passage in which, followers his crossing of the Alps, the poet describes the sick sight / And giddy prospect of the raging be adrift (VI. 564-565) of the Arve Ravine as both an apocalyptic foreboding and an expression of millennial union in his theory of the One Mind The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, revolt and peace, the darkness and the light, Were all like workings of atomic number 53 mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. (VI. 566-572) The unity of God, man, and nature is of course a common field in Wordsworths poetry, having been given equally memorable treatments in Tintern Abbey and elsewhere, but it was the plain paradoxical sentiment of this passage from The Prelud e that made such a strong impression on me. As John Beer points out in his article Romantic Apocalypses, Although traditionally the revealing and the millennium have deceased together, recently, the first, with its sense of doom, has been more prominent (109). To a reader who has lived through the ephemeral of both a new century and a new millennium, the phrase Characters of the great Apocalypse tends to evoke feelings of eschatological anxiety, and to suggest the fragility and briefness of the landscape Wordsworth is attempting to describe. It is easy to forget that Wordsworth used the term in its professional sense of simply revelation, the name given to the English version in the New Testament (Beer 109) and that in its evocations o... ... used the essential paradox of apocalypse and millennium not to prophesy the destruction of the existing world, but to reserve their readers aware of the greater harmony of the universe, both within and outside the boundaries of time. ki t and boodle Cited Beer, John. Romantic Apocalypses. Wordsworth Circle 32.2 (2001) 109-116. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Mont Blanc Lines Written in the Vale of Chamounix. 1816. love story An Anthology. second ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford Blackwell, 1998. 845-849. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Excerpt from Journal-Letter from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 22 July to 2 August 1876. Romanticism An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford Blackwell, 1998. 844. Wordsworth, William. Excerpt from The Thirteen-Book Prelude, Book VI. 1806. Romanticism An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford Blackwell, 1998. 389-392.