Wordsworth and the Childhood of Language

We know that language, celebrated for its " Visionary power "1 and disparaged for its "sad imcompetence," (The Prelude, VI, 593) was frequently Wordsworth's expressed or implicit subject. But the special relationship he explored between language and childhood still needs definition, it seems to me, for Wordsworth's depictions of childhood often recreate non-verbal states of awareness or, going a step further, show us language in its first configurations with thought and feeling. The unbroken silence of the children in Wordsworth's poetry, as well as their reticent speech, simplistic declarations, syntactic confusions, and unintelligible outpourings, actually help redeem language from its bondage to the " noisy world "2 of everyday discourse.