At times, this troubles the older speaker, who notes that he feels like a completely different being from his childhood self. He speaks directly to us, such that all of his childhood experiences of exploration and immersion in nature come filtered through this older and more jaded viewpoint. This adult version of our speaker is the one we hear from. There's no single place in the text where the young speaker morphs into his older self-perhaps we can locate the transition during his stint at Cambridge, which the speaker himself recalls as a period of gentle transition into adulthood. He craves and seeks experience, knowledge, and understanding-but in the form of the natural world and his own mind. But, while uncorrupted by artificiality or urban life, he is still fairly worldly. This young version of the speaker is deeply immersed in the natural world and generally free from the pressures and arbitrary norms of human society. Rather, that job is passed off to his older self, whose recollections are vivid but distinct and influenced by intervening years of experience. This version of the speaker doesn't really get to narrate for himself. One is young, and is the subject of the memories that the early books of the Prelude describe. The speaker is essentially split up into two related but distinct characters. But the way Wordsworth plays with time in the Prelude makes this characterization less straightforward. A speaker, by definition, narrates a poem, often sharing his or her own experiences.
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