Silence and Inarticulacy in Wordsworth’s Prelude

This thesis discusses how different kinds of silence and inarticulacy function in Wordsworth’s Prelude. In this autobiographical poem, silence enables various kinds of connection at different points in the poet’s life. Silence facilitates a more immediate connection with nature for the child Wordsworth, enables the commemoration of the dead for the adult Wordsworth, and enables the older poet to reflectively compose the poem. The poet is not only interested in solitary silence. I introduce a distinction between silence and inarticulacy in The Prelude to analyse the poet’s interest in what lies beyond words in a social context. When recollecting social encounters he had as a young adult, the poet reveals a preoccupation with other people’s inarticulacy. These encounters challenge the poet to consider what can be revealed by what people do not or cannot say. As well as exploring what other people leave unsaid, the poet makes explicit his own inarticulacy. The attempted recollection of the poet’s past inarticulacy produces a poetic inarticulacy. Instead of seeing this inarticulacy as necessarily a failure, the poet connects the feeling of promise he had trying to articulate experiences in nature with the feeling of trying to articulate his own memories and imaginative thought. In these ways, the poet demonstrates a deep interest in what lies beyond sound, beyond others’ words and beyond his own. This thesis aims to reveal ways in which the poet uses silence, other people’s inarticulacy and his own inarticulacy in The Prelude to better express the nuances and power of deeper-than-verbal experience.