Spots of Time
Although
I had years ago read the “spots of time” section of The Prelude, it must have been done quickly or I must not have
thought about it very deeply, because this time it struck me as very odd. In the preceding stanza, Wordsworth
describes how he purified himself of the business of the world through a
re-immersion into “Nature’s presence” by which he is made “ a sensitive and
creative Soul.” This theme of
revivification carries into the discussion of “spots of time,” which nourish
and repair him. The memory of
these spots brings “a renovating Virtue.”
We might expect these experiences to be rapturous, mystical, and/or
affirmatory – some kind of Maslowian peak experience. But upon scrutiny, they
don’t seem life-affirming – quite the opposite. They are experiences imbued with fear, death, doubt,
discomfort, pain. Paradoxically,
the memory of them brings pleasure.
He
offers two examples of such spots of time. In the first, as a six-year-old, he has strayed on horseback
from his accompanying servant. He
sees the place where the name of a murderer who was executed has been carved in
the ground. Then, proceeding
uphill, he sees a “naked pool,” a beacon on a “lonely Eminence,” and a girl
with a pitcher on her head struggling as she walks against the wind. The scene indicates frailty,
loneliness, nakedness, lostness. Yet
when this scene of ineffable “visionary dreariness” comes to mind later, when
he is in the same place with his sister and fiancée, it becomes a source of joy
and strength. Why? It is not that
the pleasurable feelings of the present have, through association, transformed
the memory of the past experience.
Indeed, it is the difference between the feelings of the present and the
past that is essential. The
present feeling “comes in aid” of the past feeling and so provides him with
“diversity” of strength. So the restoring potential of the spots of time has to
do with the overcoming of pain and suffering. A joy is felt through the awareness of one’s emotional and
spiritual strength. This strength
proves that “mind is lord and master,” and therefore we are not entirely
subject to contingency.
That the consciousness of freedom
brings pleasure and power is not strange.
However, that Wordsworth – if we can generalized from his two examples –
would seek these spots of time as “hiding places of my power” and sources of
joy seems strange to me. The
second example emphasizes this strangeness. Wordsworth and his brothers await a carriage to bring them
home for the winter holidays. They
ascend to an eminence. Like the
landscape of the first spot of time, the environment is naked, dreary, and
lonely: the day is stormy and windy, there is a single sheep, they shelter
behind a “naked” wall, the bare hawthorn bush whistles in the wind, the woods
are enshrouded by mist. Within ten
days of returning home, his father dies.
The death seems a “chastisement” and the landscape of a few days before now
takes on more articulate meaning.
Wordsworth thanks God “who thus corrected my desires.” He seems to mean
that God has taught him not to be overly eager to have his expectations met –
that is, to trust more in God rather than follow his own impulses. One might think that the memory of the
landscape, so closely associated with his father’s death and an awareness of
his selfishness, would be painful. On the contrary, he often repairs to those sights and sounds and drinks from
them “as at a fountain.”
I am glad to find Wordsworth’s
poetry so odd because it shows that he is much more complex than I realized as
an undergraduate. These spots of time suggest that for Wordsworth, whatever
truth or meaning exists in life, although it may ultimately lead to joy and
strength, arises from moments of intense suffering, confusion, doubt, and fear. His spots of time push up against the
limits of our comprehension of experience – or rather the limits of thought and
language to interpret experience.
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