This chapter presents a reading of three moments in Wordsworth's Prelude — ‘the Blest Babe’, ‘the drowned man’, and ‘the Blind Beggar’ — as examples of ‘performative’, ‘tropological’, and ‘inscriptional’ models of language and the text that leave something of a material residue. In doing so, the chapter also offers a ‘paradigm’ for how to read the Prelude.