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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472120536 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2014 |
| Series: | Poets On Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 761 KB |
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Windows and Doors
A Poet Reads Literary Theory
By Natasha Sajé
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12053-6
CHAPTER 1
Roots in Our Throats
A Case for Using Etymology
Every piece of writing depends on two language tools — diction and syntax — tools so basic that writers often don't think about them. But poets in particular need to pay attention to syntax and diction. While the teller of a story may successfully employ very simple syntax and diction — as in the folktale — the poet is ever intent on refining these tools, even in the seemingly simplest of poems. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Table Talk, July 12, 1827, says as much: "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order."
Our focus, then, begins with diction — the deliberate choosing of the "best" words. An understanding of diction is rooted in understanding the very origin of those words, that is, with etymology. Because English words have origins in Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek, a writer can often choose between these "families" to achieve a particular effect. Moreover, understanding etymology allows a writer to tap into buried or historical meanings of words, thereby amplifying the effect of a single image. And finally, etymology provides access to history and an understanding of ideological change.
Because language changes more slowly than culture, etymology reveals surprising disparities between the two. The word "malaria," for example, comes from the Italian ("bad air"). When the word was coined, the disease was thought to be caused by the air around Roman swamps, but we now know the disease is caused by mosquitoes carrying protozoa. The word "pride," for another example, referred to the "first sin" during Milton's era, but today "pride" connotes a badge of honor, as in "gay pride." In the case of "pride," a change in context appears to have risen from a change in thinking about individual power. Thus a contemporary American reader might consider Adam's "pride" ("man's first disobedience") as a positive attribute, akin to taking initiative. Etymology, we see, is the tool that helps writers to understand their cultures.
My personal understanding of etymology and the ideological nature of language has been shaped by philosophy, specifically by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida. In his essay "Building, Thinking, Dwelling," Heidegger writes that language "tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man." Language represents ideology, a web of assumptions about the world, a web too large and powerful for any one person to change. In this respect, language supports the status quo, the best example being the case of English, a language that represents a patriarchal ideology. And so by providing access to ideology, language helps us understand problems in the status quo.
Families of Words
The English language is lexically rich because of its history. From Old Norse influence we get basic words such as "she" and "they," plus everyday nouns like "skin" and "egg." When the Norman French invaded England in 1066, French became the language of the English court and the ruling class, and Germanic-based Old English was relegated to "the common people." For a period of four hundred years, English both lost distinct letters and gained new spellings from the French. By Shakespeare's time, English had also absorbed many Latin and Greek words. By the time Samuel Johnson wrote his dictionary in 1755, the challenge was to standardize what had already become an unruly — or gloriously rich — language, infused with new words prompted by colonization, exploration, and technology. Meanwhile, as English entered the New World, it was further enriched by Native American words (such as "canoe" and "moccasin") and borrowings fueled by British colonialism, such as "dinghy" and "pajamas" from Hindi. Like French, German, and Italian, the English language has Indo-European roots, but English diction is less pure — and more interesting — because its synonyms have roots in both the Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate/Greek, and because it has also absorbed "New World" words.
Until our era, most writers learned Latin and Greek. They were trained, too, in the history and structure of English, and in etymology. Even William Blake, who was not trained in classical languages, taught himself enough about Latin and Greek to use the devices of etymology in his poems. Times have changed, however. While a good portion of high school students do study a foreign language, we know that only a fraction of them (about 1 percent) study Latin, and still fewer study Greek. Fewer still have exposure to the history of English. This means that most contemporary readers and writers must make a conscious effort to learn etymology by looking up words in a dictionary that lists word roots.
That conscious effort pays off for the writer who chooses words with an eye (and ear) to their history. Consider, for example, the word inculcate, which is sometimes used as a synonym for teach. The root of inculcate is the Latin word for heel (calx), and so when it is used as a synonym for teach it bears within it that image of a heel pressing something into the ground, and its metaphorical meaning is colored by that violence. The first listing for inculcate in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1550 use by Coverdale: "This practyse dyd the holy elect of god in the olde time not onli inculcate and teach with words but also expresse and performe in dede."
Like Coverdale, contemporary writers can choose words from one or both families of our language. For example, the Anglo-Saxon word woods suggests something different from the Latinate forest, even though the two are equivalents. Imagine the Latinate version of Frost's poem, "Stopping by the [Forest] on a Snowy Evening": "whose [forest] this is I think I know." Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon branch of our language is a boon to poets in particular because of its many monosyllabic words, which are easier to work with in metrical verse.
Below is a list of some Anglo-Saxon words alongside Latinate or Greek "equivalents":
fear phobia
truth veracity
mad insane
lazy indolent
fat obese
woods forest
shit excrement
worry uneasiness, anxiety
speak discourse
dark obscure
greedy rapacious
short insufficient
light illumination
fire conflagration
eat consume
weird idiosyncratic
sorrow anguish, melancholy
green verdant
skin epidermis
chew masticate
heart cardio
water aqua
first primary
horse equine
thrill ecstasy
fair equitable
will testament
Football coaches would be more likely to use Anglo-Saxon diction. Bureaucrats load up Latinate diction because — pun intended — it obfuscates. And lawyers, who have a tendency to play it safe when conveying ideas, often use both at the same time, as we see in the last two entries in the above list.
Writers in English may choose between Anglo-Saxon words that are more of the gut and the body, and Latinate or Greek words that seem, at least to an American ear, to be more of the head and therefore more intellectual. A native speaker of Italian once pointed out to me that, to her ear, Latinate words actually sounded more natural and body-centered, and so it seems that even within cultures, people may hear words idiosyncratically, based on regional, family, and bodily differences. But these differences are subtle. In the end, English is a dance between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate/Greek.
Some writers do tend more toward one or the other. Look, for example, at these two-second sentences from stories by Henry James and Raymond Carver:
1. The pair of mourners, sufficiently stricken, were in the garden of the vicarage together, before luncheon, waiting to be summoned to that meal, and Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it the expression, of feeling something or other.
2. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin.
James and Carver set up their stories in an identical journalistic fashion, laying out who's doing what, and when and how. But James is more inclined toward Latinate/Greek words, while Carver, with his spare sentences, is more inclined toward Anglo-Saxon. Neither inclination should come as a surprise, given that we know on the one hand of James' concern with consciousness and his distaste for the body's grossness, and on the other of Carver's pride in his working-class roots. Most writers tend not to be so clearly inclined toward the one or the other. In fact, art depends on balancing the two, using an Anglo-Saxon word when it might carry more weight or fit the meter and using the Latinate word when it might surprise or suggest a shift of thought — or fit a different meter.
Look at what happens when the poet Josephine Jacobsen purposefully restricts herself to Anglo-Saxon diction:
The Monosyllable
One day
she fell
in love with its
heft and speed.
Tough, lean,
fast as light
slow
as a cloud.
It took care
of rain, short
noon, long dark.
It had rough kin;
did not stall.
With it, she said,
I may,
if I can,
sleep; since I must
die.
Some say,
rise.
I often refer to this poem when I teach diction. I ask my students to "mess up" Jacobsen's poem by substituting Latinate or Greek words for her monosyllables. The results are often hilarious and always instructive. The word die, for example, has a different connotation and sound than terminate or expire. The word rise is very different from ascend. Anglo-Saxon diction, as Jacobsen demonstrates, does indeed have "heft and speed." Moreover, using it exclusively in a poem like this dictates a shorter line. Imagine the poem with pentameter lines: "One day she fell in love with its heft and speed." Because the monosyllables are more concentrated, because they pack more meaning into the line, the reader needs white space surrounding them in order to have time to absorb them. If the monosyllable were not Jacobsen's point, a Latinate word or two might actually provide merciful relief.
A telling fact to keep in mind: 60 percent of English words have Latin roots, but if we narrow the search to English words that contain more than two syllables, we find that 90 percent of those words come from Latin.
Embedded Meanings
The etymology of a word can deepen the meaning of a poem by carrying an image, as in the poem below by Madeleine Mysko. See if you can guess which word carries an important image here.
Out of Blue
It wasn't wind or thunder; color foretold
A summer storm. The orange tiger lily,
The yellow black-eyed Susan, the pink phlox
Were too much themselves in the charged light.
The trees to the west sharpened against the sky.
The sky was exaggerated, a purple hue.
I set out to gather toys from the yard
And towels from the line, but at the hedge was struck
By hydrangea blue. I felt it travel,
Through me, toward the ground of a day
I couldn't quite remember, and I was left
Bewildered, bereft of I didn't know what.
I had to lean into the broad leaves, to reach
Deep, to snap stems until my arms
Were filled with blooms as big as baby bonnets.
The broken-green odor blessed the air
As I carried that crucial blue across the lawn,
And the maples blanched at the first gust of wind.
The poem tells the story of a woman who goes into her yard to gather toys before a summer storm. "Bewildered, bereft," she snaps some hydrangea blossoms to carry back into the house, and is consoled. The color of the flowers is "crucial blue." The word crucial comes from the Latin crux ("cross"). Of course a reader can understand the poem without the etymology of crucial, but the reader who sees the image of the woman carrying the blossoms as a suggestion of Christ carrying the cross, reads "Out of Blue" more clearly as a poem of faith and redemption.
Paisley Rekdal's "Stupid" also contains embedded etymological meaning. The poem refers to the Darwin Awards, which commemorate "those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it in really stupid ways." The poem relates several Darwin Award stories, including those of one man who drowned in two feet of water and a second man who was stabbed to death by a friend while trying to prove a knife couldn't penetrate a flak vest. Rekdal has braided these instances of human stupidity along with the story of Job, "that book of the pious man/who suffered because the devil wanted to teach God / faith kills through illusion." Toward the end of the poem Job is directly addressed: "Job, you are stupid for your faith as we are stupid for our lack of it, / snickering at the stockbrocker jogging off the cliff, though / shouldn't we wonder at all a man can endure/to believe."
The etymology of stupid, which doesn't actually appear in the body of the poem, deepens its meaning. The word stupid comes from the Latin stupere ("to be astonished"), which comes from the Greek typein ("to beat") — the root of our words stupefy and stupendous. Rekdal's "Stupid" considers the borders between faith and insanity, joy and despair, life and death. The image of a person being astonished (the origin of "stupid") affects how the reader evaluates the behavior discussed. Consequently, in the poem, winners of the Darwin Award — like Job — seem to be acting on faith rather than merely exercising poor judgment.
Examples of embedded etymological meanings are abundant in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Thanks to his knowledge of roots, prefixes, and suffixes, Milton coined many words, including "pandemonium," "disfigurement," and "displode." The prefix "dis," Neil Forsyth tells us, is related to the Greek dis, "but picks up the flavor of the Greek prefix 'dys,' meaning unlucky or ill." "Dis" is also the name of the inner city and principal inhabitant of Dante's Hell. This understanding gives the first line of Paradise Lost ("Of man's first disobedience and the fruit") deeper significance. The writer who uses etymologydraws upon deep resources. The reader who understands this web of etymological connections has a richer experience than one who does not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's much-quoted line — "Language is fossil poetry," from his essay "The Poet" — speaks to his understanding of the primacy of etymology. Emerson argues that the poet's power comes from his ability to use the archetypal symbols that are words. The poet, Emerson says, is "the Namer, or Language-maker" and the etymologist "finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture." Walt Whitman also championed the use of etymology, arguing that "the scope of [English] etymologies is the scope not only of man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments, and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are comprehended in words, and their backgrounds." In discussing Whitman's project, Joseph Kronick goes as far as to argue that it "will be to refashion the language through an etymological uncovering of origins. This presumptive historical task will, however, be conducted on common speech, American slang to be precise, rather than within the Indo-European family of languages."
Gerard Manley Hopkins is a poet whose interest in etymology is well documented in his diaries. For instance, the entry for September 24, 1863, is an etymological riff on the word "horn":
The various lights under which a horn may be looked at have given rise to a vast number of words in language. It may be regarded as a projection, a climax, a badge of strength, power or vigour, a tapering body, a spiral, a wavy object, a bow, a vessel to hold withal or to drink from, a smooth hard material not brittle, stony, metallic or wooden, something sprouting up, something to thrust or push with, a sign of honour or pride, an instrument of music, etc. From the shape, kernel and granum, grain, corn. From the curve of the horn, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], corona, crown. From the spiral crinis, meaning ringlets, locks. From its being the highest point comes our crown perhaps, in the sense of the top of the head, and the Greek [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], horn, and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], head, were evidently identical; then for its sprouting up and growing, compare keren, cornu, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], horn with grow, cresco, grandis, grass, great, groot.
The above passage is only half the entry, but we can see Hopkins' mind ranging over the word and its histories, even inventing etymology as a way of combining images with history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Windows and Doors by Natasha Sajé. Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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