Matt Garland and Adam Roberts point below — absolutely rightly — to the near-physicality of these spots of times, as though they were actual locations we could visit in memory for their "renovating virtue."
I was going to launch here into the modern philosophical innovation achieved by Descartes, who really does treat the mind as though it were a landscape we could walk through and observe. (This is how his proof for the existence of God from the idea of infinity works: As we stroll through the mind we find an object that we are incapable of having created ourselves; also how the cogito works, in a complicated performative way, "each and every time we think it.")
The power of their "renovating virtue" might be usefully be understood through the via negativa: John Henry Newman once mentioned what he called the "stained imagination," injured by some witnessed vulgarity — say, a teenager’s first encounter with violent pornography. Whatever the damage of such a memory, a Spot of Time is the reverse: a sight of reality that endures in recollection as a redemptive place we can visit to repair the mind.
What a tremendous poem The Prelude is! "The Growth of the Poet's Mind" occurs over time, but the series of "spots" seems more like the deepening of an early revelation, as if he goes back again to the same spot and experiences its meaning more fully. Periods of alienation are part of the process. Eventually he discovers his vocation to be returning from alienation to experience and explicate "the spot."
I'd like to put in a plug for The Excursion, which is what The Prelude is the prelude to. It's more outwardly oriented than The Prelude, in which the growing poet encounters the damage inflicted by poverty, war, and revolution on people he has encountered. He attempts an answer that is not a justification of the ways of God to man, but a call to maintain hope in our slow progress--a Victorian liberal epic. You could also describe it as a collection of pathetic anecdotes tied together by the poet's experience presented in Wordsworth's mature, masterful blank verse.
Why does Wordsworth at his most doctrinal (the mind is lord) pick such eldritch examples (gibbets, storms, etc)? Maybe to show the "the mind" is not "our mind", and an encounter with its power is not comfortable.
Just the phrase "spots of time" is brilliant. A spot is spatial, while time is, well, temporal. The phrase implies that certain moments can be revisited like we revisit a place, and that place or space is outside of time. A well of inspiration, as it were.
"In 'Spot of Time' spot, here, means location (locus), not, as it might be, stain or disfiguring mark (macula). You might want to argue, and I might even want to join you, that Wordsworth is playing with the ambiguity between these two English meanings of ‘spot’; but the most obvious thing about the phrase is that Wordsworth has coined it as an analogue for ‘spot of delight’, locus amoenus. This is of course a poetic trope of very long standing: Ernst Robert Curtius’s discussion of it in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953) encompasses fully twenty pages (pp.183–202). Curtius calls the locus amoenus ‘the Pleasance’, which has a nice archaic ring-to-it in English, and says that ‘from the [Roman] Empire to the sixteenth-century it forms the principal motif of all nature description’. Its ‘minimum ingredients’ are, Curtius notes: ‘a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added’ [Curtius, 195]. We can see how Wordsworth reconfigures the Pleasance into something more bracing, with the emphasis not on sensual enjoyment so much as spiritual stimulation, without sacrificing the conventions Curtius lists: most of his spots of time entail landscape, water, a tree (in the waiting for the horses episode quoted above, it’s a single blasted hawthorne tree; in the girl with the pitcher episode, the gibbet) and song, even if it is only the sound of wind whistling in an old stone wall."
To risk a sidenote with regard to the locus amoenus: some years ago I was intrigued by a statement by E.O. Wilson in Harvard Magazine (2012): "Studies have shown that given freedom to choose the setting of their homes or offices, people across cultures gravitate toward an environment that combines three features, intuitively understood by landscape architects and real estate entrepreneurs. They want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean." He attributed this preference to "those environments [in Africa] in which our species evolved."
I'd already read Curtius, but never till now have I connected the two similar approaches to the desirable landscape. I don't recall whether Curtius mentions a height in his treatment, though I think not; but it's interesting that at least some Persian gardens appear to feature water and trees overlooked by a tall pavilion.
I do think the "macula" part of spots of time matters. So many of Wordsworth's "spots" have to do with scary, superegoistic interruptions and corrections and fears. Young Wordsworth had a deep, moralizing sense of awe. I feel it when I read the poetry, but I've never understood it.
Maybe it has to do with his entire poetic project, to bring the epic blank verse of Milton--and the religious power of Christianity--to a mere man's common life. His turns Milton into psychology. And when he does, awe and fear become less explainable.
This line always stuck with me: There r in r existence spots of time. Why is that double r so powerful? And why do I pause after existence and before spot, which makes spots land harder? I think that line has been a spot of time for me.
'And why do I pause after existence and before spot, which makes spots land harder?' Because the verbless subordinate clause is inserted in the middle of the main clause, creating a feminine caesura.
Instead of offering us a simple sequential Main Clause {Subordinate Clause}, like so...
"There are spots of time {in our existence}"
..., or even plonking the subordinate clause at the front...
"{In our existence}, there are spots of time"
..., Wordsworth instead slides it into the middle of the main clause:
"There are {in our existence} spots of time"
This creates a caesura (a subtle, unpunctuated caesura) after the final offbeat syllable of "existence" - which in turn serves to prick out the immediately following beat: "spots". The affect is somewhat similar to "hard onset", as Sally calls it: the omission of the opening offbeat, resulting in the line commencing on a firm beat. But here the effect is achieved via syntax rather than metrical variation.
If it were a masculine caesura (after a beat) - for instance, if the line began...
"There are {within our lives}..."
..., one would instead have to recoil the following beat to achieve a similar pop on that word "spots", e.g.:
"There are {within our lives} spots of bright time"
Though some modern metrists (and Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists!) will on occasion, when it's warranted for effect, simply omit the offbeat:
"There are {within our lives} _ spots of time" (the underscore marks the missing offbeat).
And as you pointed up, Matt, this rearrangement of syntax also brings two homophones in close proximity:
There are
in our existence
Because of the "are...our" homophones, those last three words feel like an extended version of the the first two, and this expansion provokes a sense of expectancy in the reader. Clever, yes?
Matt Garland and Adam Roberts point below — absolutely rightly — to the near-physicality of these spots of times, as though they were actual locations we could visit in memory for their "renovating virtue."
I was going to launch here into the modern philosophical innovation achieved by Descartes, who really does treat the mind as though it were a landscape we could walk through and observe. (This is how his proof for the existence of God from the idea of infinity works: As we stroll through the mind we find an object that we are incapable of having created ourselves; also how the cogito works, in a complicated performative way, "each and every time we think it.")
But that's a little far afield, maybe, for talking about poetry, so I'll just mention that "Spots of Time poetry" is a topic Sally Thomas and I have been discussing, in our far-too-rare get-togethers, for a few years now. It's shown up, for example, in our discussions of Edward Thomas's "Adelstrop" [https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-adlestrop] and Robert Hillyer's "Early in the Morning." [https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-early-in-the-morning]
The power of their "renovating virtue" might be usefully be understood through the via negativa: John Henry Newman once mentioned what he called the "stained imagination," injured by some witnessed vulgarity — say, a teenager’s first encounter with violent pornography. Whatever the damage of such a memory, a Spot of Time is the reverse: a sight of reality that endures in recollection as a redemptive place we can visit to repair the mind.
What a tremendous poem The Prelude is! "The Growth of the Poet's Mind" occurs over time, but the series of "spots" seems more like the deepening of an early revelation, as if he goes back again to the same spot and experiences its meaning more fully. Periods of alienation are part of the process. Eventually he discovers his vocation to be returning from alienation to experience and explicate "the spot."
I'd like to put in a plug for The Excursion, which is what The Prelude is the prelude to. It's more outwardly oriented than The Prelude, in which the growing poet encounters the damage inflicted by poverty, war, and revolution on people he has encountered. He attempts an answer that is not a justification of the ways of God to man, but a call to maintain hope in our slow progress--a Victorian liberal epic. You could also describe it as a collection of pathetic anecdotes tied together by the poet's experience presented in Wordsworth's mature, masterful blank verse.
Why does Wordsworth at his most doctrinal (the mind is lord) pick such eldritch examples (gibbets, storms, etc)? Maybe to show the "the mind" is not "our mind", and an encounter with its power is not comfortable.
Just the phrase "spots of time" is brilliant. A spot is spatial, while time is, well, temporal. The phrase implies that certain moments can be revisited like we revisit a place, and that place or space is outside of time. A well of inspiration, as it were.
This is exactly right. I've written about this:
"In 'Spot of Time' spot, here, means location (locus), not, as it might be, stain or disfiguring mark (macula). You might want to argue, and I might even want to join you, that Wordsworth is playing with the ambiguity between these two English meanings of ‘spot’; but the most obvious thing about the phrase is that Wordsworth has coined it as an analogue for ‘spot of delight’, locus amoenus. This is of course a poetic trope of very long standing: Ernst Robert Curtius’s discussion of it in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953) encompasses fully twenty pages (pp.183–202). Curtius calls the locus amoenus ‘the Pleasance’, which has a nice archaic ring-to-it in English, and says that ‘from the [Roman] Empire to the sixteenth-century it forms the principal motif of all nature description’. Its ‘minimum ingredients’ are, Curtius notes: ‘a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added’ [Curtius, 195]. We can see how Wordsworth reconfigures the Pleasance into something more bracing, with the emphasis not on sensual enjoyment so much as spiritual stimulation, without sacrificing the conventions Curtius lists: most of his spots of time entail landscape, water, a tree (in the waiting for the horses episode quoted above, it’s a single blasted hawthorne tree; in the girl with the pitcher episode, the gibbet) and song, even if it is only the sound of wind whistling in an old stone wall."
https://medium.com/adams-notebook/the-spot-of-time-is-eternity-wordsworth-coleridge-and-nicholas-of-cusa-8c501c77ca7
To risk a sidenote with regard to the locus amoenus: some years ago I was intrigued by a statement by E.O. Wilson in Harvard Magazine (2012): "Studies have shown that given freedom to choose the setting of their homes or offices, people across cultures gravitate toward an environment that combines three features, intuitively understood by landscape architects and real estate entrepreneurs. They want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean." He attributed this preference to "those environments [in Africa] in which our species evolved."
I'd already read Curtius, but never till now have I connected the two similar approaches to the desirable landscape. I don't recall whether Curtius mentions a height in his treatment, though I think not; but it's interesting that at least some Persian gardens appear to feature water and trees overlooked by a tall pavilion.
I do think the "macula" part of spots of time matters. So many of Wordsworth's "spots" have to do with scary, superegoistic interruptions and corrections and fears. Young Wordsworth had a deep, moralizing sense of awe. I feel it when I read the poetry, but I've never understood it.
Maybe it has to do with his entire poetic project, to bring the epic blank verse of Milton--and the religious power of Christianity--to a mere man's common life. His turns Milton into psychology. And when he does, awe and fear become less explainable.
This line always stuck with me: There r in r existence spots of time. Why is that double r so powerful? And why do I pause after existence and before spot, which makes spots land harder? I think that line has been a spot of time for me.
'And why do I pause after existence and before spot, which makes spots land harder?' Because the verbless subordinate clause is inserted in the middle of the main clause, creating a feminine caesura.
Instead of offering us a simple sequential Main Clause {Subordinate Clause}, like so...
"There are spots of time {in our existence}"
..., or even plonking the subordinate clause at the front...
"{In our existence}, there are spots of time"
..., Wordsworth instead slides it into the middle of the main clause:
"There are {in our existence} spots of time"
This creates a caesura (a subtle, unpunctuated caesura) after the final offbeat syllable of "existence" - which in turn serves to prick out the immediately following beat: "spots". The affect is somewhat similar to "hard onset", as Sally calls it: the omission of the opening offbeat, resulting in the line commencing on a firm beat. But here the effect is achieved via syntax rather than metrical variation.
If it were a masculine caesura (after a beat) - for instance, if the line began...
"There are {within our lives}..."
..., one would instead have to recoil the following beat to achieve a similar pop on that word "spots", e.g.:
"There are {within our lives} spots of bright time"
Though some modern metrists (and Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists!) will on occasion, when it's warranted for effect, simply omit the offbeat:
"There are {within our lives} _ spots of time" (the underscore marks the missing offbeat).
You will not see this metrical variation in The Preludes! But J.C. Scharl repeatedly uses this technique in a very intentional, patterned way in the wonderful sonnet Sally recently shared: https://open.substack.com/pub/poemsancientandmodern/p/todays-poem-annunciation?r=9w4rx&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=103633517
And as you pointed up, Matt, this rearrangement of syntax also brings two homophones in close proximity:
There are
in our existence
Because of the "are...our" homophones, those last three words feel like an extended version of the the first two, and this expansion provokes a sense of expectancy in the reader. Clever, yes?
Thanks! Mystery dispelled. This is a good reminder that the syntax can affect the beats and sound, too.
Absolutely!
Thank you: Wordsworth's The Prelude is my 'recurring' poem. At any of my ages, it has 'nourished and invisibly repaired' whatever was troubling.