:1:
From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water.
Wordsworth's account of this latter incident begins with a brief definition of the term:
There are in our existence spots of time,The talk of psychological or, if we prefer, spiritual nourishment and repair sells this experience hard as a ‘virtue’; but the actual spots of time themselves are neither happy nor sad in the moment, in the conventional senses of those words. In this example: Wordsworth recalls the day he went for a trip across country. He was a young child, barely old enough to hold a pony’s bridle, and his ride across the moors was to be accompanied by ‘an ancient servant of my father’s house’. But the child and his guide get separated, and young Wordsworth rides alone down into a valley where in older times there had stood a gibbet upon which a murderer had been executed and his body left to rot. The frame and bones are long gone, ‘but on the turf,/Hard by … some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name.’ Alarmed by this grim memorial, young Wordsworth rides up out of the valley up to the higher ground:
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. [Prelude, 12:210–221]
Then, reascending the bare common, sawAnd that’s the moment. The phrase, ‘visionary dreariness’, there, is the nub of the matter: ‘it was, in truth,/An ordinary sight’ says the poet, as if he himself is as surprised as we are that something so trivial could affect him so hugely, and moreover that it continues to affect him: ‘I should need/Colours and words that are unknown to man,/To paint the visionary dreariness’. Markus Poetzsch excellent monograph Visionary Dreariness (Routledge 2006), frames the experience as a kind of Sublimity (his monograph’s subtitle is: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime). And of course the Sublime is, for both Burke and Kant, at root a glimpse of God, something towering over mundanity (though Burke is insistent the Sublime can inhere in small things as well as great, in scorpions as well as Mont Blanc and the night sky). In another celebrated spot of time from the poem — my favourite in the whole Prelude, actually — young Wordsworth the schoolboy is waiting at term’s end for the horses that will take him home from school for the holidays. The spot-of-time here inheres in a drystone wall, a single sheep, a ‘blasted hawthorne tree’ and strong wind, all of which the boy stares-at from his waiting place. Now: we later learn that this particular Christmas holiday was the time Wordsworth’s father died, which in a way associates the spot-of-time with death; but it is not that death, or Wordsworth’s reaction to it, that the poem itself recalls: it is very particularly the dreariness of the long wait, bored and anxious and constantly checking up the road to see if the horses are coming, staring at the sheep and the tree. The scene is ‘a dreary time’, yet afterwards —
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
An ordinary sight; but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
The beacon crowning the lone eminence,
The female and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. [Prelude, 12:253–265]
… afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,Michael O’Neill makes what is, really, a rather obvious, yet often ignored, point about the spots of time. He notes that The Prelude is subtitled ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’, and often reverts to the primacy of mind (‘the mind’ we are told ‘is lord and master, and that outward sense/Is but the obedient servant of her will, Prelude, 11: 271–3). But, as O’Neill says,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes;
All these were kindred spectacles and sounds
To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,
As at a fountain [Prelude 12:321f]
the spots of time proper precede and outstrip the analysing that would keep pace with them, and complicate Wordsworth’s moral, if by ‘the mind’ is meant the faculty that allows comprehension …. Enigma attaches to the ‘visionary dreariness’ experienced by the poet in the aftermath of and possible reaction against the experiences of disorientation in stumbling upon a place where ‘a Murderer had been hung in iron chains’. Enigma also pervades the bewildered, charged location of all that coheres in memory as powerful in the Waiting for the Horses passage. [O’Neill, ‘Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge and Shelley’, The Wordsworth Circle, 46:2 (2015), 82]‘These moments are still among the most arresting and haunting in English poetry,’ says O’Neill, ‘because they refuse to obey any evident pattern of conceptualization.’ He goes on, rightly I think:
They educate the poet in the fact that the ‘mind of man’ needs to confront greater mysteries than have been dreamt of in previous philosophies. Signposts such as ‘sublimity’ or ‘the numinous’ neutralize the shock of Wordsworth’s writing. Recollection confers barely graspable significance. Intimations of uniqueness embody themselves in a near monosyllabic bareness: ‘The single sheep, and the one blasted tree.’This gets at something important about the spot of time: it is localised and specific, but yet general; it happened at a particular moment in time and yet suffuses the whole of Wordsworth's life; it is both unique and universal. But though it is the Sublime, which is to say God, it doesn't entirely apprehend Wordsworth's actual poetry merely to peg it to that term.
:2:
I'm now going to ask a very elementary question about this key Wordsworthian trope, something I'm uninhibited from doing because it seems to me nobody else has asked or attempted to answer it: why spot of time? Why that particular phrase? What does it mean, exactly, and from where did Wordsworth get it? As to the last part of the query, perhaps he simply made it up, although I'm going to hypothesise that he drew it from a particular source: from, in fact, Nicholas of Cusa. But before we get to that, I'll say a few more things.
The first thing is that 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.
But a spot of time is not the same thing as a spot of pleasance. And this is where I bring in Cusa, for the relevant Latin equivalent to locus amoenus would be locus temporis, and, so far as I can discern Cusa was the only Latin writer who used that phrase (indeed, it's a rather self-contradictory phrase in Latin, mixing up time and space in a muddling way).
The problem is: I can find no evidence that Wordsworth read Nicholas of Cusa, and it doesn't strike me as terribly likely that he would have done so. Which brings me to Coleridge, the topic of this blog more generally: because here the likelihood turns about. It's certainly possible that Coleridge read Cusa; for he is exactly the kind of writer and thinker Coleridge found congenial. That means that it's possible Wordsworth picked up the idea of the locus temporis from his friend. Then again, I can't find any direct evidence Coleridge actually read Cusa either, which is a little irksome.
What there is in Coleridgean criticism is a conviction, amongst certain writers, that Cusa is the sort of writer and thinker that Coleridge would have found fascinating, and that he might have read him. Philosopher and Inkling Owen Barfield, who certainly did read Cusa, spends quite a lot of What Coleridge Thought (1971) speculating on the ‘dynamical’ relationship between Cusa's thought and Coleridge's, without ever producing evidence that the latter read the former. In a ‘non-static interpretation’ of the two thinkers, he proposes Cusa's argument ‘that relation between the whole and the part, by virtue of which the whole is present in each part, and ultimately the infinite is present in the finite’, Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum, radically informs Coleridge's own thinking on these matters [Barfield, 189]. We can agree that it certainly looks very Coleridgean.
But did STC actually read the echt Cusa? We know he had a strong interest in the German mystics (Protestant mystics; but Cusa in many ways anticipates those figures). Moreover there was a seventeenth-century tradition of reading Cusa as a kind of Neoplatonist. Chance Woods [‘Infinite Horizons: Nicholas of Cusa and Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonism’, American Cusanus Society Newsletter 35 (2008), 14-23] shows how much Henry More and Ralph Cudworth owed to Cusa, and Coleridge was certainly a great reader of both those Divines. But, lacking a smoking gun (as it might be: an edition of Cusa's Excitationum ex sermonibus or De docta ignorantia annotated by Coleridge in the 1790s) Coleridgeans are reduced to pointing out the parallels: ‘Both Coleridge and Cusa,’ says Douglas Hedley, ‘are metaphysicians of unity and their theological speculations concerning the Trinity belong within a Pythagorean-Parmenidean-Platonic framework [which] Coleridge inherited from seventeenth-century Divines’ [Hedley, ‘Coleridge and Theology’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (OUP 2009), 482]
I don't mean to make heavy weather of this. Let's go back to Wordsworth. Imagine him getting ready to write The Prelude in 1798, in close consultation with Coleridge (who, of course, was the initial impetus for the project, urging his friend ‘to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’). Early in the process, it even looked for a time as though the poem might be co-authored, although of course in the end it was written by Wordsworth alone. In conversation, as Wordsworth tries to pin-down the enigmatic yet vital experiences that have punctuated his life, the retelling of which will be key to his project—universalising experiences of time that are nonetheless tied to specific incidents and moments and above all specific places—Coleridge suggests that this sounds like a concept out of Nicholas de Cusa, the locus temporis. Wordsworth agrees to thumbnail the experience with the English translation of that phrase: the spot of time.
Fanciful, alas; and certainly wholly unevidenced. Still, not only can I find nobody else who talks about the locus temporis in neo-Latin writing (theological or otherwise) other than Cusa, it strikes me that what Cusa says speaks directly to Wordsworth's conception.
Here for example is one of Nicholas de Cusa's sermons from the early 1450s: Ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum, ‘Where it is that the King of the Jews was born’. The answer to this titular question is, obviously, more than merely: ‘Bethlehem’. Cusa's point is that the identification of any particular location, and particular time, for the coming-into-being (the birth) of an infinite, atemporal God strikes a suggestive paradox. Here's the sermon:
In loco, omnia sunt in quiete: & extra locum suum, omnia sunt in inquiete, quia non sunt quo tendunt. Sicut Salomon vidit, omnia flumina reverti ad locum unde exeunt, sic omnia revertuntur ad locum unde exierunt. Omnia autem ut sunt, ab essentia sunt, sicut alba ab albedine, &bona à bonitate, & vera à veritate. Essen tia igiť, à qua omnia que sunt exiverunt, est locus ad que omnia tendût. Ex quo enim extra locum suum omnia sunt inquieta, & ad locum suum omnia tendunt & recurrunt, & in proprio loco tutantur, & tuta quiescunt universa: ideò Deus non inconvenienter potest dici locus, supra modum conceptus nostri infirmi. Sic loannes in Apocalypsi ait verbum dixisse: ego sum A & Ω, principium & finis: sed finis, requies, & bonum, sunt idem. Deus enim est locus animæ, ut Psalmista, & Augustinus, & alii fatentur. Sed quia Deus est, unde omnia recipiunt ut sint: ideò requietio omnium est. Quae enim non sunt, ad seuocat ut sint: esse autem, est ad quod omnia vocatur ut sint. Et extra esse: sunt inquieta: nam quae non sunt, non appetunt nisi ut sint, ubi quiescāt. Esse igitur quod est principium omnium quae sunt, est finis, locus, seu requies omnium: uti in omnibus, quae ab arteuel natura siunt, conspicimus, cum sunt, tunc in esse quiescunt. Locus temporis est æternitas, sive Nunc, sive præsentia: & locus motus, est quies: & locus numeri, est unitas. [Nicholas de Cusa, Excitationum ex sermonibus (1457) Book 7; ‘Ex sermoné: ubi est qui natus est rex Iudæorum’]The phrase that my slightly halting translation renders, in that final sentence, as ‘the location of time’ is locus temporis, and could just as easily be Englished as spot of time. And this whole passage glosses The Prelude with remarkable metaphysical penetration, I think: Wordsworth's autobiography is not a narration of the events of a dead past, but on the contrary a vivifying account of how the past remains vitally alive in the present; it is not a list of particulars but an account of how particularity of lived experience touches the universal and transcendent. The spot of time, the Prelude is saying, is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the place of motion is rest: and the location of all the many numbers is unity.
In their place, all things are at rest, and outside their place, all things are in restlessness, because they are not where they tend. As Solomon saw, all rivers return to the place from which they issue, so all things return to the place from which they issued. But all things, as they are, are from their essences, as white from whiteness, and good things from goodness, and truths from truthfulness. Being is such a place, from which all things that are came forth, and it is the place to which all things tend. For where all things are restless out of their place, and as all things tend and return to their location, and are secured in their proper place where all things rest secure: therefore it is not inappropriate to call God a place, beyond the scope of our feeble conception. Thus John says in the Apocalypse that He declared: I am ALPHA and OMEGA, the first and last: where the end, the rest-point, and the good are the same thing. For God is the place of the soul, as the Psalmist, Augustine, and others tell us. And because he is God, from whom all things receive their being therefore he is the place-of-rest of all. For things that are not, he calls them to be; and to be is that to which all things are called. And to be outside makes things restless: for things that are not only desire to be, where they rest. Being, therefore, which is the beginning of all things that are, and is also the end place, or rest of all things: as in all things that come from art or nature we see that when they are, then they rest in being. The location of time is eternity, or the Now, or the present: and the location of motion is rest: and the location of number is unity.
