Wordsworth depicts the self that interprets its own history at a point in the present to a person who perceives their reflection in a river as they sit in a boat The image perceived in the river is both like and unlike the exact features of the physical form from within which it is perceived on account of the refractive properties of the water within which this image is reflected. As the boat moves on, the challenge of discerning the specificity of resemblance between images, the reflection and the reflected, is problematised by the challenge of perceiving the specificities of the reflection while the individual is in motion.

We may liken the water in which the reflection appears to the flow of memory, in which experience is necessarily refracted through the dynamic matrix of individual consciousness and the reflection in the river to the self’s memory of itself and its history. The movement of the boat and the challenge of identifying specifities of resemblance between the reflection and the reflected relates to the consistently shifting points of vantage assumed by the mind at each point as it tries to interpret its experience as it moves forward in the flow of time16.

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16 Wordsdworth develops this image in Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton 1978).but I am indebted to M.H Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York:Norton,1973)for its analysis in relation to autobiography.