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One striking fact about William Wordsworth's Prelude is the provocative contrast between the eloquent outpouring of sound on the one hand and the earnest expression of the poet's desire for silence on the other. "Yet wherefore speak?" Wordsworth goes so far as to ask at one point, "Why call upon a few weak words to say / What is already written in the hearts / Of all that breathe?"(1) A potent example of what Anne K. Mellor calls English Romantic irony (5), the ambiguity of sound and silence seems to be at the same time a key explanation of the poet's great achievements in his song of himself.
As a palpable source of irony, the implicit use of sound to privilege silence can be seen immediately in the brief depiction of the poet's own early infancy which begins the two-Part Prelude of 1799 and which marks the true take-off point for the poet's autobiographical poem in both its 1805 and 1850 versions. Addressing himself and then the Derwent River, Wordsworth asks:
Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,
Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves. (I:269-281)
Here, the voice of the poet outside the narrative contrasts sharply with the silence of the poet's younger self inside the narrative. Clearly a mythologizing of the poet's own poetic origin, what is so curious about this narrative is how poeticizing is employed to eulogize a situation where there is no such poeticizing but where poetry is said to be made possible precisely because the infant Wordsworth/future poet is silent or has been silenced. Not concerned at all with the biological capability of the young Wordsworth for human speech, the narrative depicts a certain strange transformative interaction of the Derwent River with the baby Wordsworth and...