Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: "Spots of Time," the Fragment and the Autobiography

1370
Mikyung Park

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Wordsworth’s logic that “the mind is lord and master__outward sense /
The obedient servant of her will” (12.222-23) divulges not so much the
rhetorical nature of the reconstruction as an emotionally loaded despera-
tion involved in the event. In the urgent efforts to translate his former
experience into language at the present moment, the persona is willing to
rewrite lines 225-53, this time more succinctly:
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. (12.253-61)
Apart from his testimony that it was an “ordinary sight,” the persona
bears witness to a demand for a language that is not known to humans;
that is, remembered experiences require more than human language. The
rewritten lines embrace the repetition of the first version but simultane-
ously reject the details of the young boy’s psyche, which is deeply dis-
turbed by his guilty reassessment of “proud hopes” (12.227), separation
from his “encourager and guide” (12.230), the “letters” and “characters”
of the murderer’s name (12.241, 245), and his fleeing “Faltering and
faint, and ignorant of the road” (12.247) from the scary gibbet-mast.
Diverting his attention from his intimidated mind to “the visionary drea-
riness,” the persona refers to the reiteration as a sign of surplus meaning.
On the second look at the first spot of time, the persona’s depiction is
concerned more with external objects than with his own subjective feel-
ings; this time, it is not the young boy but the guide that is lost. The
ostensibly unrelated transference from the gibbet-mast to a girl with a
pitcher on her head leaves an indelible mark on the young mind. 
The origin of the strong recollection constitutes the young mind pre-
sumably since it involves the impropriety of the thought of mounting the
horse independently. His ambition to be a sovereign person leads him to
a threatening experience. This is associated with a moment of self-
reproach when he fearfully faces “the summit of a craggy ridge” (1.370)
after stealing a boat. The voluntary reprimand corroborates guilty feel-
ings both in the young mind and in the persona respectively. Not only
Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1371

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handling a horse with inexperienced hands but stealing a boat appears to
the young boy as violations of boundaries, signs of his audacity to dis-
obey time by desiring to be an adult in advance. This impulse to fracture
his own corporeal frame provides the young mind with the possibility of
breaking through and liberating itself but also alerts him to the necessity
of self-discipline that regulates the unmanageable expansion of his pride.
The second “spot of time” exhibits the excruciating process of becom-
ing an independent person, a status the young boy was destined to occu-
py in the aftermath of his father’s demise during the Christmas holidays.
Although the process must be painful for him, he does not pour forth
excessive grief on the scene of memory. Rather, the persona replaces
extreme sorrow with “trite reflections of morality” (12.314), which lead
him to a heart-rending jump of logic back to his weary waiting.
Accordingly, the re-written lines foreground a waiting scene:
And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of 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; (12.317-23)
The scene unfolds “kindred spectacles and sounds” to which the per-
sona repeatedly returns (12.324). The persona regards “the event, / With
all the sorrow that it brought” as a “chastisement,” God’s correction of
his “desire” (12.309-12, 316). The equivocality of both the “event” and
“desire” echoes the persona’s painful remorse about his impatience to see
beyond the limitations of his eyes the horses that have yet to arrive to
take him home. His wish to rectify the previous desire implies that he
might have thought of himself as a future orphan ahead of time. The ret-
rospective narrator emphasizes the deserting atmosphere of the waiting
scene as if the boy were already abandoned amid the wilderness despite
the apparent presence of his two brothers in the scene of his longing
expectation of the palfreys that will take him home. In the inclement
weather, the young boy appears as a helpless missing child while he “sat
half-sheltered by a naked wall; / Upon [his] right hand couched a single
sheep, / Upon [his] left hand a blasted hawthorn stood” (12.299-301). In
retrospect, the environment seems to make him feel already forsaken.
The instinctive sense of omen means too much for a young boy.