The romance of poetry – and guidebooks

The Romantic English poet William Wordsworth was carrying a copy of a travel guide as he did a walking tour of the Wye valley in 1798 when he composed the lyrical poem Tintern Abbey. The guidebook was William Gilpin's ‘Observations on the River Wye’. In his poem, Wordsworth paints a portrait of the abbey ruins and the surrounding valley that is far more romanticized than that depicted in Gilpin’s book. Wordsworth writes of steep and lofty cliffs, the wild green landscape, and the fair river. In reality, the ruined abbey served as a home to the poverty-stricken, the destitute, beggars, and vagrants, and not far away noisy iron-smelting furnaces puffed out putrid-smelling smoke from the factory’s location on the riverbank, while the river’s water itself was polluted. A romantic, Wordsworth didn’t want to acknowledge the social realities of the time, the damage to the environment by new industries, unemployment, and homelessness. Gilpin’s guide is a rarity, even now. These days the situation is reversed – we’re more likely to read truths in a poem than in a guidebook.

Spots of time and memory making

I’ve experienced so many ‘spots in time’ as we’ve travelled around Crete and Cyprus these last couple of months that my spirit if visible would appear polka-dotted. According to the poet William Wordsworth, ‘spots in time', discrete critical moments that we experience, such as a few minutes in the countryside taking in a bucolic scene, can number among some of the most significant moments in our lives. I'm more conscious of these 'spots of time' now than I used to be so when we have a "stop the car!" moment, I make an effort to fix the image in my memory. I gaze as long and hard as I can, I take a photo (or two or three) and I make notes about the light, smells and sounds around me.

Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
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.

The film ‘Spots of Time’ explores Wordsworth’s ideas and attempts to translate his poetry into film while the ‘Spots of Time’ photography project captures images of the Lake District at night, when all the tourists have gone home, as it would have been in Wordsworth's time. Alain de Botton reflects upon Wordsworth and his 'spots of time' in The Art of Travel, and you can download Wordsworth’s poems at Project Gutenberg.

Reasons to be alive: spots in time

I’ve been dipping into Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel, as I do when I travel and reflect upon the nature of travel. De Botton tells us that the poet William Wordsworth believed that certain scenes stay with us throughout our lives and each time they enter our consciousness they offer a contrast to and relief from the present. De Botton writes about his own ‘spot of time’ during a visit to the Lake District, when, sitting on a bench in the late afternoon, he looks at a clump of trees by a stream and suddenly appreciates their “sharp gradations of green, as if someone had fanned out samples from a colour chart”. He wants to bury his face in the trees and be restored by their smell, and it strikes him as extraordinary that nature could “have come up with a scene so utterly suited to a human sense of beauty and proportion.” De Botton admits to being unaware of having fixed the scene to memory until one afternoon when he’s stuck in a traffic jam in London, “… the trees came back to me, pushing aside a raft of meetings and unanswered correspondence and asserting themselves in my consciousness. I was carried away from the traffic and the crowds and returned to trees whose names I didn’t know but which I could see as clearly as if they were standing before me. These trees provided a ledge against which I could rest my thoughts; they protected me from the eddies of anxiety and, in a small way that afternoon, contributed a reason to be alive.”