ABSTRACT
The first version of the expanded poem that would become The Prelude was completed in 1805; and by 1806 William Wordsworth had put together that prospective part of The Recluse now known as Home at Grasmere. The language of affirmation and restitution that expounds Wordsworth's alternative response is also flawed and qualified from within, in a way that looks forward to the expanded debates of The Prelude. The address, one that will be repeated at various points in The Prelude and Home at Grasmere, is to Dorothy Wordsworth, the largely silent partner of Wordsworth meditations. Wordsworth, explicitly, does have power over what he sees, the history of his own life. John Milton here recounts the education of Adam into the facts of fallen life, a prelude to his being cast out of paradise, the event recalled at the start of Wordsworth's poem.
