Trailing Clouds of Glory do we come

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

From Intimations of Immortality from Recollections, 1807, William Wordsworth

The poem above struck me so much when I first read it, that two songs I have written contain it. In one of those songs, Daughter, the line from Wordsworth is in a verse where I recall the loneliness I perceived in my infant daughter.

When she was six months old, I noticed it clearly one day. At that age, she had learned enough through observation and the use of her muscles how to see the world, and how to interact with it. When I carried her past the roses from our wedding, which my wife had hung on the wall, she would reach out with her hand and smack them back and forth - how she loved to do that!

But I could not help but notice how alone she seemed. One day at the park, I sat her on a picnic table under the open gazebo, and as a breeze began to blow, she smiled. And it struck me - she did not yet understand language. She was alone in her mind - unable to communicate to anyone else what she thought, other than by smiling or crying. And I was alone - unable to truly reach her without language. I could reassure her with the physical signs of parental love - cooing, kissing her cheek, carrying her - but I could not share with her what she meant to me, how instantly we came to adore her when she joined us in this world.

Wordsworth I admire because he sees it more optimistically than I did at the time. In these verses I quote above, Wordsworth suggests that the child who does not yet speak is still bathed in heaven, closer to God than we older ones who have forgotten coming from Him.

Maybe that is why my daughter smiled at the breeze. She was still young enough to realize what a joy this new sensation is, what a wonder to the senses. How lucky then a baby is!