I. Geraldine: The lamia-woman or vampire haunting the castle in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Christabel." Geraldine is both a symbol of evil and a being captured by supernatural forces which control her.
"Holy Thursday": Holy Thursday is Ascension Day to celebrate the ascension of Jesus 40 days after Easter, and it is the title of a poem by William Blake telling of the marching of the children to St. Paul's Cathedral in London on that day.
The field of Waterloo: Waterloo is the location where the Duke of Wellington defeated. In Byron's Don Juan, Waterloo is referred to numerous times, and Byron compare his works to the defeat of Napoleon, implying as well that those works would rise once more.
"The Prelude": A long autobiographical poem by William Wordsworth, one that he revised several times. The poem is subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind" and so is concerned more with his intellectual development than with details of his life.
Biographia Literaria: A work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which he intermixes his metaphysical and literary ideas with the history of the mind and fortunes of himself. The work is a prose equivalent to "The Prelude" of Wordsworth.
II. William Wordsworth was one of the poets of the Romantic school, a rejection of the classical school and of classicism in literature and other arts. One of the primary tenets of Romanticism is the elevation of nature, and this poem shows that such an elevation is not necessarily always benign. There is also a hint of another Romantic element in the poem--the belief in the supernatural. Wordsworth always identified himself as having a special message concerning nature's relation to man and man's relation to nature. His adult view was a conscious revolt against the scientific view of the world and man.
William Wordsworth states in his poems "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned" that we can learn much of value from our interaction wi...