“Spots of Time”

It is these “spots of time” (Book Eleventh, 258) that have made indelible impressions on Wordsworth’s mind, a motif (of reliance on the sensory experiences of youth in the “ordinary intercourse” [264] of life) recurrent throughout his poetry.  Wordsworth apparently has spent his first years principally concerned only with himself and unaware of the “fructifying” (1799 Prelude [First Part], 290; [“renovating” (260) in our version]) aspects of nature, those experiences that teach one how to think and feel.  But it is when he views a lowly pool and a heightened beacon providing a background for a lone woman fighting the elements that the reader becomes cognizant of the simplistic grandeur of nature, and hence, existence.  But why does a scene of death (the beacon was an execution site) initiate such an epiphany in Wordsworth?  Is it that he wants to know why the executed man murdered his wife?  A violent end to a domestic relationship is an undesirable occurrence indeed.  But where did the relationship go wrong?  Impatience (as Wordsworth experiences himself later on)?  A lack of understanding or empathy between the two, perhaps?  It is, certainly, Wordsworth’s primary imagination that perceives and records mentally the existence of the young woman, but, more importantly, it is his secondary imagination that struggles to give the whole scene, and thusly, the world, a unifying, coherent meaning.  Here, he is—among other things—attempting to make sense of the wife’s senseless death.  The reader is made to understand that only through empathy—Wordsworth’s idea of “behold[ing] in thee [Dorothy] what I once was” (Tintern Abbey, 120) and of being spiritually renovated when looking into the eyes of a loved one—can we truly see the humanity in one another.  In other words, we are all products (man and beast, all things great and small) of nature.  Only by understanding that fact, can we come to understand ourselves.  Only by viewing the woman backgrounded by the low pool and the high summit, can Wordsworth truly know her plight and, even, his own.  For, having lost his guide, he is as alone as the “Girl” (306) appears to be.  He is as lost and alone as the Mariner and his shipmates are when they drift aimlessly near the South Pole, a wasteland, much like, given the purgatorial significance of The Ancient Mariner, the dismal wood in which Dante finds himself at the beginning of The Divine Comedy:

           When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

           I found myself within a shadowed forest,

           for I had lost the path that does not stray.

           Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

           that savage forest, dense and difficult,

           which even in recall renews my fear:

           so bitter—death is hardly more severe! (Mandelbaum trans., 1-7)

It is only when Wordsworth finds “dear Ones” (317) at side that he can roam in confidence.  Analogously, only when the albatross, a figure, according to G. W. Knight, of “Christ-like force” (English Romantic Poets, 203), appears, does the crew find their way from the “wondrous cold” (52) to a more hospitable clime.  Virgil has a similar significance for Dante, leading him out of the gloomy wood, through the miserable depths of Hell and up to the glorious gates of Heaven.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante.  The Divine Comedy.  Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.

            New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1995.

Knight, G. W.  “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy”.  pp. 202-213.  English 

            Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 

            New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.