If a consensus understanding of English literary history represents decadence as a “late” or “decayed” romanticism, both adjectives claim their status as relational. When does “late” begin, after all, and what specifically has “decayed” from an earlier, presumably better state? The readiest answers to these questions represent understandings that are durable but presumptive. The major developments are regularly seen as occurring in the generation of Swinburne and Rossetti, extending in one direction back to De Quincey and forward in the other to the poets of the English fin de siècle, most notably Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Symons. The sense of decay is usually attributed to those aspects of character and activity that are manifestly counterconventional, sometimes scandalous and sometimes tragic, in these latter-day figures. While those metrics of calibrating literary time are obviously inexact, the categories for sorting poetic identity are equally rough, and the understanding of the relation between the lateness of historical time and the presentiment of moral loss is also undeveloped. In the effort of drawing out a longer story of literary generations, I will refine this consideration by shifting the frame of reference from the external instances and typical figures of a standard literary history. I will focus instead on the internal record of temporality, on the imaginative apprehension and literary representation of time itself – in one of its most meaningful and influential configurations in poetic romanticism.

This is the “spot of time,” which may be tracked from its inception and consolidation in early romanticism. Here, as we know from familiar formulations in Wordsworth’s autobiographical Prelude, the spot of time represents an integration of the various times of the poet’s ongoing life, joining the present thoughts of the adult to the remembered experiences of the child. The tasks and possibilities that are centered in this act of imaginative memory are complex, and so their accomplishment is far from assured. The spot of time thus provides the occasion for a major drama of consciousness:

1. The days gone by

2. Return upon me almost from the dawn

3. Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power

4. Open; I would approach them, but they close.

5. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,

6. May scarcely see at all …