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."

Introduction to the Sublime

This will be a sublime post--obscure, vast, infinite, difficult. Think of it more as a collection of resources and side conversations, rather than a coherent course of study.

Burke and Kant

First, let's start with some passages about the sublime from Burke and Kant.

Edmund Burke

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.

Immanuel Kant

For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation . . .

The feeling of the sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law . . . The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation. This movement, especially in its inception, may be compared with vibration, i.e., with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object. The point of excess for the imagination (towards which it is driven in the apprehension of the intuition) is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself, yet again for the rational idea of the supersensible it is not excessive, but conformable to law, and directed to drawing out such an effort on the part of the imagination: and so in turn as much a source of attraction as it was repellent to mere sensibility . . .

Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanos in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. In the immeasurableness of nature and the incompetence of our faculty for adopting a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we found our own limitation. But with this we also found in our rational faculty another non-sensuous standard, one which has that infinity itself under it as a unit, and in comparison with which everything in nature is small, and so found in our minds a pre-eminence over nature even in it immeasurability.

Some Resources on Burke and Kant

You can access the full text of Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful online at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm).

I have also posted an outline of Burke's text on an earlier version of the course web site (http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/467/Burke-Sublime.pdf).

You can access the full text of Kant's The Critique of Judgement online at the University of Adelaide (https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/index.html).

If you want to read an excellent overview of Kant on the sublime, take a look at Luke Harris' discussion (http://www.lukewhite.me.uk/sub_history.htm#kant). His resources on the sublime are also excellent for anyone wishing to dive deep into the "abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself," as Kant refers to the sublime.

If you want to read an overview of Kant's theory of the mind and how that relates to the Romantic imagination, take a look at my discussion of this subject (http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/467/Kant-ModelOfTheMind.pdf).

Format of the Midterm

Format of the Midterm

The midterm examination will consist of three sections. You will need a bluebook or several sheets of lined paper that can be stapled together. Questions will be limited to texts, authors and terms that have been discussed in class or assigned on the syllabus up to and including October 10. The exam is closed book. The midterm counts as 20% of your course grade.

Part I

20 Questions—0.5 point each (10 points possible)

The first section of the midterm will assess your knowledge of the literary texts, authors, and terms important to an understanding of British Romanticism.

• Some questions will focus on the facts of literary history, such as who wrote Lyrical Ballads (it’s a trick question).

·         Some questions will focus on the historical and social context of Romantic era texts discussed in class and specifically outlined in the “Introduction” to Volume 2A of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

·         Some questions will focus on literary forms and terms. For this part, refer to the “Terms” page listed along the top (under the picture) of the course web site (http://csula-engl4406.blogspot.com/). Be prepared to match the following terms to their definitions (some but not all of these terms will appear on the exam):

ballad

blank verse

emphasis

enjambment

Enlightenment

gothic

image

irony

persona

poetic diction

rationalism

verse paragraphs

Part II

5 Passages—5 points each (25 points possible)

The second section of the midterm will assess your knowledge of the literary texts, authors and techniques important to an understanding of British Romanticism. You will be asked to identify five out of seven passages. For each identified passage, you will need to write the name of the author (1 point), the title of the text from which the passage was taken (1 point) and a brief paragraph (3 points) explaining what the passage tells us about the text.

Part III

1 Short Response—15 points possible

The third section of the midterm will assess your ability to write a clear, detailed and coherent response on a short passage of text. The author and the title of the text will be provided.

The following scoring guide will be used to assess your response written for Part III of the exam:

15	Excellent: Fully and effectively developed on most issues; effectively organized; insightful and/or original argument; clearly and effectively written
14	Superior: Fully and effectively developed on most issues; effectively organized; clearly written
13	Solid: well developed on key issues; clearly organized; makes an argument
12	Adequate: developed on some issues, but some issues missing; organization might be mechanical; argument might be routine; language control might be an issue
11	Minimal: developed on some issues, but key issues missing; might be somewhat incomplete; simple organization or problems with organization; might not make an argument; language problems might confuse and/or distract
10	Weak: tends towards summary and simple analysis; might be substantially incomplete; might be ineffectively organized or logically flawed; might have serious problems with expression
9 and below	Inadequate: Miscontrues the question, mistaken or logically flawed; most key issues missing; might be unfocused and disorganized, or might have severe language problems

Background to Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads

I)       The Ballad and the “Folk”

A)    Ballad Revival

i)        As early as 1711, Joseph Addison devotes to the ballad “Chevy Chase” the kind of attention formerly reserved for “serious” literature

ii)      Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) claimed that the age of realism, reason, and “good sense” had sacrificed much feeling and a “world of fine fabling”

iii)    Thomas Percy collects and “improves” local ballads, published in 1765 as Reliques of Ancient Poetry

(a)    “Sir Patrick Spence” is characteristic

(1)   medieval tale

(2)   ballad stanza

(3)   much repetition of words, phrases, whole lines

(4)   musical effects—steady meter, syncopation and so forth

(5)   archaic language and spelling

(6)   interest in the supernatural

iv)    James MacPherson—Fingal (1762): The purported native epic of the Celtic bard Ossian; completely fabricated, but even when revealed as a fabrication the poems remained immensely popular

v)      Thomas Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems (1769): late Medieval ballads supposedly authored by the 15^th century monk Thomas Rowley; fraud discovered in 1778, eight years after Chatterton took his own life, swallowing poison and dying in abject poverty in London at the age of 17

vi)    Robert Burns: wrote in Scots dialect (sometimes); singled out as “striking example of native genius bursting through the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”

(a)    tenant farmer and poor

(b)   became in his words “absolutely crazed” with collecting traditional songs

(c)    his poems often exploit existing genres, showing not an illiterate bard, but a well-read student of English poetry

(d)   his themes involve power and powerlessness, love, and the occasional earthiness of a pub drinking song

1.      The image of the poor, underappreciated poet who uses his native skills was memorably impressed on the public imagination by Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence” (see line 43-49, page 546)

2.      We can also see in Burns, Scott and MacPherson (all Scotsmen) and a figure like Thomas Moore (an Irishman), a yearning for a native culture, a nationalist desire for difference in the face of powerful London culture.

II)    Lyrical Ballads

A)    In 1797, Wordsworth and Coleridge conceived the idea of a jointly produced volume of poetry (to finance a walking tour)

i)        Originally published anonymously

ii)      sold steadily and earned some favorable reviews

iii)    Advertisement prefixed to volume claimed the poems were “experiments” intended to “ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure”

iv)    Advertisement also announces the volume’s radicalness—saying it would challenge readers’ “pre-established codes of decision”

B)    Following the initial “success” Wordsworth issues a new edition in 1800, a two volume affair with the first volume being essentially the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and the second being Wordsworth’s own poems. He also added a lengthy preface vindicating his poetic practice.

i)        This expanded edition sold well and called for a third edition (1802) (a fourth published in 1805)

C)    The “Preface”

i)        Incidents from common life (434)

(a)    throw a certain colouring

(b)   Why rustic life?

(c)    Language purified—of what?

ii)      Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (435)

(a)    feelings over actions (436)

(b)   not “gross and violent stimulants” but to enlarge our capability to feel real feeling (436)

(1)   the evil of present times (436)

iii)    The Language of Poetry

(a)    no personifications or like devices (436-437)

(b)   avoid “poetic diction” (language that is overtly poetical” (437)

(1)   avoid clichés  (437)

(2)   “have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject” and so no falsehood of description—why is this important? (437)

(c)    language of poetry like that of prose (438)

iv)    What is a Poet?

(a)    Man speaking to men (439)

(b)   Empathetic—negative capability (?)—slip into “delusion” and become the subject to feel what the subject must feel (439)

(c)    High calling of the poet—“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science” (441)

v)      Emotion Recollected in Tranquility (443)

(a)    Sympathetic identification with subject

(b)   imaginative re-creation of scene, feeling, character

D)    Jeffrey’s review (468) was in response to the third edition (1802)

i)        Jeffrey claims they are not original

ii)      He equates simple language with vulgarity (469-470)

iii)    Jeffrey’s key assumption: “The language of the higher and more cultivated orders may fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors”—but what is meant by “better”? (470)

iv)    Also a class argument: “The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench” (470)

v)      But finally a political argument: “A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments. Instead of contemplating the wonders and the pleasures which civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended” (471)

E)      “Simon Lee”

i)        Simple language

ii)      variation of ballad stanza

iii)    Use of feminine rhymes—falling off at the end of the lines, produces a mild comic or light effect

iv)    Simon Lee’s story—68 lines of description

v)      Turn to the reader for 12 lines—part of the LB project—“you would find / A tale in everything”

vi)    Emphasis on “silent thought” key—this is the wise passiveness that will come up later

vii)  What is the “action” of the poem? Is the action important? No. Later in the Preface, Wordsworth will claim that “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and the situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”

viii)            So what is the feeling developed by this poem?

III) Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Upon Revisiting the Banks of the Wye, July 13, 1798

A)    Form

i)        blank verse—iambic pentameter

ii)      Ode-like without the technical structure of an Ode—high impassioned language

iii)    Yet language almost conversational; but elaborate, much higher, philosophical; but not “poetic” in the traditional sense (i.e. without tricks, personifications, apostrophes, etc.)

iv)    Not allusive—figuration more real

v)      Five verse paragraphs

(a)    First sets the scene

(b)   Second—removes from scene to show use of memory

(c)    Third—short questioning which gives over to affirmation

(d)   Fourth—back to here; the story of development which culminates in the “now” of the poet

(e)    Fifth—turn from memory to the present, from the scene to the poet’s “second self” (i.e. Dorothy)

B)    Landscape/Nature

i)        What is the relationship between the landscape and the speaker?

ii)      What was he like when young? What was wrong with his relationship with Nature?

iii)    What has happened to change him? What is his new attitude?

iv)    What has he learned? Where did he get this knowledge?

v)      How do we get this knowledge?

vi)    Is the invocation of Nature a withdrawal from the social/political?

(a)    homeless becomes hermit

(b)   hedgerows become little lines of sportive wood run wild

(c)    date—revolution but shaped into “still, sad music of humanity”

C)    Development

i)        How many “versions” of the speaker are present in the poem?

(a)    Speaker—present time of the poem

(b)   Poet in the city—next most previous time

(c)    Poet at some point in time matured (“learned to look on nature”)

(d)   Poet when he visited in 1793 (“Five summers . . .”)

(e)    Poet as young man (17? that would be about 1787)

ii)      How do we know who we are? where we came from?

iii)    What was wrong with the earlier visits?

iv)    How is he better now?

D)    Memory

i)        What does memory do?

ii)      Where does “continuity” come from? (the connection to “one life”)

iii)    We would see a “tale in everything”

E)     Restoration/Redemption

i)        Nature restores/refreshes; food for after-thought (“when oft upon my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood” / They flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”)

ii)      Also the “still, sad music of humanity” and a “presence that disturbs me”—these thoughts redeem the physical world from its appetite, lust, animal passion, reason, the domination of the senses, because it is only through the senses that one can eventually go beyond them (imagination provides access to Nature but also eventually overcomes Nature)

iii)    Worshipper—deeper zeal of holier love

iv)    Turn to Dorothy—who is redeemed? Can we be?

IV)    General Concerns

A)    Reforming the Reader

i)        the turn to the reader in “Simon Lee” shifts the burden of understanding onto the reader’s capacity for “silent thought”—we will be judged not by our knowledge but by our ability to respond

ii)      this occurs as a kind of sacred initiation into secret knowledge; first we must be humbled then exalted

iii)    The experiment of LB then challenges readers to become sensitive and skilled enough to fill in the gaps, understatements and misdirections

(a)    The difficulty of the poems stems not from allusiveness or complexity of language, but from an audacious minimalism—good reading depends not on good education but on the qualities of your soul

iv)    As seen in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth more concerned with the observing self than the landscape that the self observes (recall the shift to “I” in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind")