‘No more than as an atom ’mid the vast profound’: Conceptions of Time in the Poetry of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley

Abstract

This quotation, from Book XI of the 1805 Prelude, has become one of Wordsworth’s most famous passages, one which links ideas of memory, imagination and place with the nature of time. The concept of specific points resonating beyond the limits of linear time, nourishing the past, present and future poetic self, is an enduring legacy of Wordsworth’s project in this poem. I have selected this quotation because of its importance in the Romantic canon; but, as I will argue throughout this essay, Wordsworth was not the first to draw together these concepts: twenty years earlier William Cowper published The Task, one of the central concerns of which was the connection between time and memory, and within which past and present exist simultaneously. Equidistant between Cowper and Wordsworth, sits Ann Yearsley, the ‘Bristol milkmaid poet’, who sought to further explore these complex issues in her rather shorter poem, ‘Soliloquy’, written in 1795 and published in 1796 as part of Yearsley’s final volume of poetry, The Rural Lyre. Wordsworth’s concern with the relationship between the individual and experience, between time and the development of the poetic self, can therefore be seen as a natural extension of ideas which emerged in the late eighteenth century; ideas given full form by writers like Cowper, and developed by writers like Yearsley before their adoption as key tenets of what would come to be recognized as a ‘Romantic’ movement.

There are in our existence spots of time,

Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating Virtue, whence, depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier and more deadly weight

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired

(Wordsworth, 2008 [1805], XI, 11.258–73)