History ripples with unexpected conjunctions. Who would link the names of General James Wolfe and the scholarly poet Thomas Gray? Yet, the mortally wounded Wolfe said after the British capture of Quebec in 1759 that he would rather have written the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” than defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham. (And today Wolfe’s personal copy of the “Elegy” rests in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto, a fitting place.)

The most public – death in battle – and the most private – meditation in a graveyard – become linked in such striking coincidences. Another, which has always intrigued me, occurred 200 years ago this month, bringing the seemingly incompatible names of Lord Nelson and William Wordsworth into surprised juxtaposition.

On October 21, 1805, the English under Nelson decisively defeated the French and Spanish navies off the coast of Spain. Nelson lost his life in the engagement but his victory ensured British domination of the seas for decades to come, though it would take a further 10 years, and Waterloo, to stamp out the little Corsican monster for good. While Nelson was expiring aboard the Victory, the 35-year-old William Wordsworth was putting the finishing touches to the first version of “The Prelude.” We know how old he was because in Book Six, drafted in April of the year before, he had written: “Four years and thirty, told this very week, / Have I now been a sojourner on earth.”

Wordsworth, though intensely ambitious and not a little touchy about his public renown, never published “The Prelude,” his supreme masterpiece. Instead, for more than 35 years, he brooded on the immense poem, revising, rewriting, and recasting it obsessively – eventually producing a complete second version that appeared only in 1850, the year of his death.

“Fair seed-time had my soul,” wrote Wordsworth, but few books have had such a protracted, and secretive, seed-time as “The Prelude.” Only Goethe’s “Faust” and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” both the products of unremitting accretion and revision over decades, stand comparison (Goethe and Whitman, however, continually published and republished their successive versions). Wordsworth, strangely restrained in this instance as he was steadily publishing often inferior poems during this period, did not. Why?

I think that the answer lies in the poem’s very ambition. Scholars quibble over whether “The Prelude” is a true epic. I believe it is, but not a classical one, like, say, the “Aeneid,” with its concern with the founding of an empire. “The Prelude” is concerned instead with the founding of a mind. Could there be a mightier theme, or a more daunting one? Little wonder Wordsworth held back. And though the poem is autobiographical – Wordsworth gives vivid pictures of his boyhood, his Cambridge years, his sojourns in London, and his experience of the French Revolution – it aspires to something deeper than mere documentation of an inimitable life.

Wordsworth subtitled the poem “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” But the poet’s mind in this case is not just the incomparable consciousness of William Wordsworth, tracked in its development through various raptures, setbacks, confusions, and those rare “visionary gleams.” It is also the human mind, our mind, as it were. For he scrutinizes and evokes not only privileged instants of poetic ecstasy, which most of us never experience, but also, as he put it a few years later in his sublime “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood”:

those obstinate questionings,
of sense and outward things,
fallings from us, vanishings;
blank misgivings of a Creature
moving about in worlds not realized.

In fact, “The Prelude” is perhaps the most thoroughgoing exploration of the subtle expansion of the human consciousness as it discovers and discerns all the tendriling affinities that link and lash it to the outside world. For the growth of the mind is also in a mysterious but compelling way the growth of the world within us. At moments this is halting; in Book Five, he exclaims:

Oh! Why hath not the Mind
Some element to stamp her image on
In nature somewhat nearer to her own?
Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad
Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?

But at other moments, moments of harmony, some mental equipoise occurs between the world and us:

Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus
Daily the common range of visible things
Grew dear to me: already I began
To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun,
Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge
And surety of our earthly life, a light
Which we behold and feel we are alive;
Nor for his bounty to so many worlds –
But for this cause, that I had seen him lay
His beauty on the morning hills, had seen
The western mountain touch his setting orb,
In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess
Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow
With its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy.

Only Wordsworth could have expressed this sentiment with such exactitude of simplicity, and yet the sentiment is one all human beings have known and will recognize.

Most editions of “The Prelude” print both the 1805 and the 1850 versions on facing pages for purposes of comparison: A good one is the readily available Penguin Classics ($19.95), edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, though the Norton Critical Edition, at the same price, includes the earliest version of 1799 as well. I used to think the early form of the poem superior; it seemed more spontaneous, with an impetuous, tumbling momentum to the lines. Now though I’m beginning to think the 1850 revision, with its terser, sparer, more forthright manner the better of the two. Happily, you don’t have to choose: With the two versions before you on opposite pages, you have the unusual treat of literally witnessing “the growth of a poet’s mind” over four decades in cold clear print.

Early on, Wordsworth declared of his poem in progress:

The song would speak
Of that interminable building reared
By observation of affinities
In objects where no brotherhood exists
To passive minds.

The “interminable building” is neither the mind alone, nor the outside world, but that almost infinite nexus which our consciousness creates between them. In the end we are “a creek in the vast sea,” distinct as rivulets but inseparable too from that huge element through which we course. What Trafalgar could be worthier of memorial than this?

eormsby@nysun.com