Wordsworth's maculate exception

achieving the "spots of time"

pp. 119-131

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Wordsworth's 'spots of time" occupy a fault line between trauma and aspiration, between the struggles of existence and the pathos of any wishing to be. The spots have been seen as 'signs demanding interpretation," both by the poet constructing the text of his own life and by the reader; the theme of The Prelude can be encapsulated as the "problematic relations between experience and interpretation."¹ The formulation of the 'spots of time" marks a brilliant moment of nominalization and interpretative invention integral to the poetic texture of The Prelude. Alan Richardson notes that the phrase 'spots of time" is an oxymoron, an "enigma designed to halt the reading process and challenge conventional categories of literary experience."² Wordsworth had a liking for oxymoron and phrases like "anxiety of hope" or "the stationary blasts of waterfalls," which occur in two of the 'spots of time" episodes, repeat the structure of the nominalization that has captured them, setting off a mutual attraction between the vignettes we identify as 'spots of time," however disparate one from another. Through the 'spots' Wordsworth sets an interpretative charge that pulses through his "Poem to Coleridge" in the very act of lengthening itself out, distributing, and reassembling the episodic climaxes it has so named.