Today’s Poem: Spots of Time

Wordsworth, The Prelude, and the power of memory

Derwent River and Borrowdale, T.A. Picken, 1859 (Wikimedia Commons)

From the end of the 1790s to the end of his life, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) labored at his enormous, climactic, blank-verse opus, The Prelude. As early as 1798, in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, with his sister Dorothy to share his house (and his notebooks), and with Samuel Taylor …