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experience of nature which forms the subject of Wordsworth's poetry
was an extension of a childhood vision of 'natural presences' which
surrounded the boy Wordsworth. And his decision in later life to live
in the Lake District was a decision to return to the scene of these
childhood memories which were the most important experiences
~n
his poetry. There is evidence for the importance of this kind of mem–
ory in all the creative arts, and the argument certainly applies to
prose which is creative. Sir Osbert Sitwell has told me that
his
book
Before the Bombardment,
which contains an extremely civilized and
satiric account of the social life of Scarborough before and during
the last war, wa<; based on his observations of life in that resort before
he had reached the age of twelve.
It therefore is not surprising that although I have no memory
for telephone numbers, addresses, faces and where I have put this
morning's correspondence, I have a perfect memory for the sensation
of certain experiences which are crystallized for me around certain
associations. I could demonstrate this from my own life by the over–
whelming nature of associations which, suddenly aroused, have earned
me back so completely into the past, particularly into my childhood,
that I have lost all sense of the present time and place. But the best
proofs of this power of memory are found in the odd lines of poems
written in note books fifteen years ago. A few fragments of unfinished
poems enable me to enter immediately into the experiences from
which they were derived, the circumstances in which they were writ–
ten, and the unwritten feelings in the poem that were projected but
never put into words.
. . .
Knowledge of a full sun
That runs
up
his big sky, above
The hill, then in those trees and throws
His smiling on the turf.
That is an incomplete idea of fifteen years ago, and I remember exactly
a balcony of a house facing a road, and, on the other side of the
road, pine trees, beyond which lay the sea. Every morning the sun
sprang up, first of all above the horizon of the sea, then it climbed to
the tops of the trees and shcne on my window. And this memory con–
nects with the sun that shines through my window in London now in
spring and early summer. So that the memory is not exactly a memory.
It is more like one prong upon which a whole calendar of similar ex–
periences happening throughout years, collect. A memory once clearly
stated ceases to be a memory, it becomes perpetually present, because
