Wordsworth's Spots of Time

A Quick Overview of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805)

1.      Composed 1798-1805; began as preparation for The Recluse - never completed 'philosophical poem' that Coleridge asked Wordsworth to write

in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophies. (Coleridge to Wordsworth, 1799)

2.      Genre: auto-bio-graphy (self-life-writing): autobiography always a writing of self, a construction; Wordsworth kept rewriting/reinventing his life/poetic autobiography throughout his life; we need to distinguish between human being who wrote poem (Wordsworth) and the speaker as a textual construct/written being ('Wordsworth').

a.       'The Prelude turns epic inward' (2A, p.452): 'the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long narrative poem on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the instance of ... Paradise Lost) the human race' (Abrams, Glossary); in The Prelude, artist/poet becomes quintessential Romantic hero – but focus more on inner life than heroic action; yet a sense in which Wordsworth is a 'hero' that the nation needs to follow in order to save itself.

b.      Epic, but also an epistle to Coleridge with wonderful lyrical passages.

3.      'Argument': Wordsworth's expansion of five-part poem of late 1790s into 13-book poem completed in 1805 allowed The Prelude to become philosophical poem he thought himself unable to write; new material included account of his period of radical political activity, subsequent crisis, and means of recovery; Wordsworth gives his life a 'plot', making it an example to radicals who had undergone similar disillusionment; poem's 'argument' is that Wordsworth's childhood – in which intense experiences of nature helped to shape his imagination – inspired in him a love of liberty that prepared him to become an enthusiast for French Revolution; things began to go wrong when Britain declared war against France (destroying his faith in Britain), and when the French Revolution developed into Terror under Robespierre and military imperialism under Napoleon; these developments eventually led Wordsworth into despair; poem claims that he recovered and rediscovered himself through influence of Coleridge, his sister Dorothy, and Nature (X, 904-26); concludes that true liberty exists only in soul and through the imagination's creative interaction with nature – which is where poem begins ...

4.      The Prelude a poem of self-reflexive analysis rather than self-aggrandizement; also often a self-reflexive poem about itself – about how it came to be written and processes of writing.

5.      Can The Prelude be regarded as espousing a radical or a conservative political viewpoint?

Some Reading Questions for the "Spots of Time" Passage

1.      XI, lines 258-79 ('There are in our existence' – 'beneficent influence') and lines 326-43 ('So feeling comes' – 'future restoration').

a.       In what ways might these two passages be read as articulating a theory of perception and/or imagination?

b.      Try to work out the theory of, or assumptions about, the mind or the self that appears in these two passages.

c.       To what extent does Wordsworth understand his own self and the sources of his 'power' (336)? What power?

2.      XI, lines 289-326: 'At a time' – 'They left behind?'

a.       Why does the 'ordinary sight' (309) get invested with a 'visionary dreariness' (311) that is impossible to represent?

b.      Why is the same ordinary sight illuminated by a divine radiance when Wordsworth returns to the spot as an adult with his sister and future wife?

3.      XI, lines 345-89: 'One Christmas-time' – 'thence are brought'.

a.       What is the difference (or what differences are there) between the place where the 13 year-old Wordsworth waited for the horses to take him and his brother home for Christmas (356-61) and his memory of the place after his father's death (376-85)?

b.      Why have these images been transformed? What effect do the images then have, and why?

4.      To what extent do these two 'spots of time' illustrate the theory of lines 258-79 and 326-43?

5.      In what ways might the whole passage reveal a psychological account of the development of the (poetic) mind?

6.      Identify (underline, highlight) all the words and imagery to do with height and depth throughout the whole passage. What do you make of the way this imagery is used? How does it help or change your answers to the previous questions? 

A Walk-through of One of the Spots of Time (XI, 345-397, pages 533-534)

1. Begins with details of place and time ("One Christmas-time" and "There was a crag"); note the specificity of each and note also the unusual formulation of the phenomena itself, which Wordsworth calls "spots" (i.e. places) of "time" (obviously time), not moments of time or spots of earth, but spots of time.
2. Note the attention to the mood or attitude of the poet, specifically his mood at that time: feverish, tired, restless, impatient.
3. The poet enters the scene ("Thither I repair'd"). Again we have mostly descriptive language, but occasionally something more ("wild," "naked," "shelter'd") and the language which reminds us of the first few lines of the passage ("straining," "intensely").
4. Note the "mist" (obscuring, baffling--a key Wordsworth word) and how it introduces uncertainty into the scene.
5. The word "dreary" is pretty interesting, especially its etymology. Note that it echoes the rich phrase he used in discussing the first spots of time episode--"visionary dreariness"
6. Sudden shift: " . . . ere I had been ten days / A Dweller in my Father's House, he died / And I and my two Brothers, Orphans then, / Followed his Body to the Grave. The event /". 
1. In terms of form, note how the caesura (the mid-line pause) accentuates these words: he died, Orphans then, the event. The attention here is on cause-and-effect: the event, the father's death, made the children orphans. That seems obvious, but if so, why accentuate it?
2. Note also the plain language used to describe "the event" (which must have been traumatic, of course).
3. Why does he call himself a "Dweller in my Father's House"? Note also how "House" and two lines later "Grave" occupy the same location in the line. 
7. He calls "the event" a "chastisement"--a great Wordsworth word. Why should he feel so humbled? The issue for the poet is the contrast between "the event" and its consequences, and the pre-event poet/child who stood on the crag waiting for the horses to take him home. Remember the mood of the child (feverish, tired, restless, impatient), which he now calls "anxiety of hope" and "trite reflections of morality." 
8. What then is a spot of time? Because of the conjunction of a particular place and a particular time and a particular mood and a particular event, the place and the memory of the place has become saturated with the mood, the event, and the memory of them all. A spot of time is an example, according to Wordsworth, of the power of the imagination to invest, alter, endue, combine (words he uses in Book XIII) the material world (i.e. our perception of things) with our feelings, moods, desires, and in this case our humility and chastisement. A place is never just a place--it is always "our" place, written over with our moods, our attitudes, our feelings. The boy and the man feel the huge distance between the "trite reflections" of the anxious boy waiting impatiently for a ride home and the world after the death of his father when the "Dweller in my Father's House" becomes an orphan. That huge distance occasions the feelings of chastisement--as if Nature itself lectures the boy about the things that matter. Compare this moment to the episodes in Book I, specifically when the young Wordsworth steals a boat and feels as if the mountains themselves are chasing him.
9. A spot of time is an example of the way in which the world in which we move is everywhere written over with our feelings and with our pasts. There is no crag, or "single sheep," or "one blasted tree," or "old stone wall" that isn't also a memory, a reminder, a chastisement of some past mood, or failure, or joy, or desire to somebody. To Wordsworth, the world we move through is a world everywhere marked by human presence. In short, there is no world (or we can know of no world) other than the world that we perceive, not just objectively through our perfectly machine-like senses, but also subjectively through our moods, attitudes, beliefs, past experiences, and in this case the conjunction of a foolish child worried about his ride home and the death of his father a few days later, which for a time ended for the newly-orphaned all possibility of "home."