Millennial Themes in The Prelude and Mont Blanc Essay

Millennial Themes in The Prelude and Mont Blanc On reading Book VI of Wordsworths thirteen-part version of The Prelude, I was particularly struck by the passage in which, following his crossing of the Alps, the poet describes the sick sight / And giddy prospect of the raging stream (VI. 564-565) of the Arve Ravine as both an apocalyptic foreboding and an expression of millennial unity in his theory of the One Mind: The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light, Were all like workings of one 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.†¦show more content†¦The time in which Wordsworth and the other Romantics wrote was itself at the turn of a century, and the events of the French Revolution - and later, the Napoleonic War - also served to aggravate apocalyptic/millennial thinking, in both senses. The initial promises of the overthrow of the monarchy to bring about a unified millennial society soon gave way to the lurking destructive potentialities [that] became evident with the Reign of Terror (Beer 110) and the declaration of war between Britain and France - in which people known to Wordsworth had become involved, many losing their lives in the process. The journey retold in Book VI of The Prelude was one Wordsworth had made in 1790, when he was twenty years old, when the turn of the century was still ten years away, and when the Revolution was still in its earlier, more optimistic phases. As he had also done in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth uses his memories of the travels of his younger days to reflect upon the changes in his life since those days, as well as to express his belief in The universal reason of mankind / The truth of young and old (VI. 476-477) that would always endure even through the most violent upheavals in society. Many times throughout The Prelude, and especially in his musings on the imagination and the One Mind in Book VI, Wordsworth contrasts his earlier use of the picturesque with his later use of the sublime, which itself