The Romantic poets were obsessed with idea and one of the best poems to express this idea for me is Shelley’s Mont Blanc in which he talks about the terrifying beauty of the mountain. The sublime, says the British Library, is an aesthetic (artistic and creative) concept which “revolved around the relationship between human beings and the grand or terrifying aspects of nature” (see below for reference). For Wordsworth, these spots of time were mostly inspired by his encounters with nature and this leads us on to the second key concept when trying to understand this section of The Prelude – the sublime.

I’m sure you’ve all got your own experiences. This is not to say they are religious or supernatural, but they are special, rare, powerful: the memory of them fills our being, and we remember each moment vividly. These spots of time are moments in life when an experience might be described as spiritual or magical. When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, There are in our existence spots of time,īy false opinion and contentious thought, He talks about these earlier in The Prelude: These were dramatic moments in life which burned themselves into his memory.

One of these was his idea about ‘spots of time’. To understand this poem, it’s worth considering two things that characterised Wordsworth’s style and philosophical ideas. Wordsworth re-wrote and revised the poem but it wasn’t published until much later (in fact, just after his death). The extract from The Prelude that we will read in class is, as the title suggests, part of a longer autobiographical poem (of the same name) which begins in 1798 and, amongst other things, describes Wordsworth’s time in France before and during that most momentous of events – the French Revolution.

Wordsworth the prelude