DICTION

The smallest meaningful part of the poem is the word. But a single word already contains within itself more thanan unwary reader might suspect. The basic elements of a poem-image, sound, and meaning-may all be found in the isolated word, although, of course, these elements acquire richness and precision when the word is placed in the context of other words. The study of poems is necessarily a study of context, that is, of the surrounding words that modify and influence any particular word. The fabric of words that is the poem depends on the strength, color, and texture of each individual thread. The poet's manner of choosing and weaving these threads is referred to as his diction.

A word has a physical nature (its vowel and consonant structure), a history (its origin and the subsequent changes in its usage), a "family life" (kinships and affinities with other words), and a future (the new and unpredictable life that the poet can give to it). These are the conditions that affect the word's power to radiate image, music, and meaning.

DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION

The meaning of a word can reach far beyond its dictionary definition. The dictionary tells us, for example, that a rainbow is an arc of prismatic colors. This is the denotation of the word. Its connotation, however, includes feelings, ideas, and images that have come to be associated in our minds with the word.

Let us now consider the word "rainbow" as it occurs in the climax of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish":

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

The sense of excitement and elation is built up by the details of the entire narrative, but the word "rainbow" here helps to raise these feelings to the point of rapture. How does the word do this? First, there is the image projected by the word: we see in our mind's eye those brilliant melting arcs of color. Behind that image are memories and associations: the clearing away of a thunderstorm; the dispersal of gloom and discomfort; the fresh-washed air and the return of sunshine; and then that rare magical sign in the heavens. Beyond our own personal experience of this heart-lifting sight, there is the accumulation of cultural experience in traditions, songs, art, literature, and religion. Thus the rainbow has acquired such associations as happiness, peace, good fortune, beauty, victory, and divine mercy.

In the passage from "The Fish," the idea of victory is intimately associated with the rainbow. What unexpressed connections exist between victory and rainbow? Is it simply that both are usually connected with a feelig of happiness or elation? No doubt. But what kind of victory occurs in this poem when the fisherman lets the fish go? She relinquishes her initial physical triumph over the fish for the sake of a greater and rarer triumph: she pays homage to the creature link between himself and the fish. Earlier in the poem, she finds the fish "venerable" even though it is "homely" and "a grunting weight," "an object." But then she sees "five old pieces of fishline,/....with all their five big hooks/grown firmly in his mouth" and can no longer will this creature's death. Over this victory, "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" waves like a banner.

Does the poem also echo the reference to the rainbow in the biblical story of Noah and the flood? After the flood recedes, God makes a covenant with Noath, and through him, with all future generations, wih the rainbow as a token of this covenant. It is not necesssary to assume that Elizabeth Bishop was consciously thinking of the Bible story when she wrote the poem. The creative mind of the poem does not work only on the upper levels of awareness. But this is the kind of association that any word radiates and echoes from the rich stores of the reader's and the poet's experience.

We have not yet considered the physical character of the word "rainbow." It is a pleasant, "musical" word, but it is hard to say exactly why. It is hazardous to evaluate the sound and meaning of a word. "Brain gone" has almost the same sound pattern as "rain bow" but certainly sounds less pleasant!

Yet the meaning is not all important-the physical nature of the word also counts. What would happen if instead of "rainbow" Elizabeth Bishop had written "prism, prism, prism!" Certainly, a different poem-probably a spoiled one.

When Marianne Moore writes, "the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea," "twitching" conveys the required effect better than, for example, "jerking" or "fluttering" would. The sound of "twitchingg" somehow suggests precisely the motion involved, and as a rhyme-word for "itching," it suggests the right association. The critic is made to seem more laughable, and deseredly so, for while he is "immovable" (insensitive to the vlaues of the work he is criticizing), he nevertheless has an itch to criticize which is unappeasable, so he "twITCHes."

Words can "act out" or mimic the thing the name. This is one form of mimesis, which Aristotle said was a major function of poetry. Note how the italicized words of the following lines suggest texture and movement (italics added):

There is a whole class of words that imitate or suggest the sounds or motions they name: for example, crash, bang, hiss, whine, murmur, grunt, cackle, groan, roar.  Another name for sound mimesis is onomatopoeia.

INFLUENCE OF WORD HISTORY

The history of a word begins, of course, with its birth; and, at its birth, as Emerson said, "every word was once a poem."  Every new word represents an exciting leap of the imagination.  As the imagination and newness go out of the words, they are no longer poems; they become the matter-of-fact names of things.  To some names, like starfish and sea lion, some original glamor may still cling, particularly if they are not part of our ordinary life.  The image-making of such flower names as buttercup, baby's breath, lady's-slipper may still seem vivid to us.  But how many of us think of the metaphor-spark that leaped in the mind of the first person to speak of the arm of a chair, the face of a clock, the neck  of a bottle,  the veins in a rock?

In certain other words, the implicit poetry becomes available to us as we learn their derivations.  We may say, "Why fret?" without realizing that it carries some of the force of "What's eating you?" The word fret in its Old English form meant "eat up," and even today, the dictionary tells us, a secondary meaning currently in use is "to cause corrosion" or "to gnaw."  Knowing the etymology of supercilious, we see raised eyebrows; influence, a flowing current; climax, a ladder; droll, a little man; cordial,  a heart; isolation, an island.

According to some estimates, the poet writing in English draws upon a language that is about 40 per cent Latin-derived (much of this by way of French).  The rest of its words are of "native" English origin (actually Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Scandinavian, or Celtic).  Of course the language is enriched by borrowings from virtually all of the other languages of the world.

Very often the Latinate words are longer, more learned-sounding, more abstract. The native words are usually shorter, plainer, more concrete.  The poet–and his knowledgeable reader–are alert to the varied shades of meaning (particularly through connotations and sound effects) of words from these different stocks.  For a famous example, consider Macbeth, who is agonizing over the blood of murder on his hands, which cannot be washed out:

The five syllables of "multitudinous" suggest vast oceans.  "Incarnadine" suggests a deeper, more permanent reddening than the native "turn red" would have done.  These two long Latin-derived words, by extreme contrast with all the other native words, make even more emphatic the slow single syllables that end the next line.

Here is an example from a modern American poem:

The Latin (in two cases, ultimately Greek) words are "precise," "counterpart," "cacophony," and "sphere."  These are intellectual, somewhat abstract words that   Williams uses to comment on the art of the orchestra.  But the sequence "bird calls/lifting the sun almighty," in entirely native English, is not about the art of the orchestra; rather, it is about the physical world of nature, and a feeling about that world.  Williams needs both classes of words because the theme of his poem is precisely the interplay of nature and art, of feeling and form.

AFFINITIES BETWEEN WORDS

In looking at the physical nature and history of the word, we have incidentally glanced at the "family life" of the word.  A more direct inquiry is now in order.  In the act of composing a poem, the poet's ideas and feelings work like magnets in searching out and attracting to themselves clusters of words with special kinships and affinities.  Some words have natural attractions for each other.  Others acquire these magnetic charges when draawn into the intense field of forces of the poet's vision.  For glimpses into this process, let us examine Herman Melville's "The Maldive Shark":

Of all the strange things to be observed in nature, this creature--with attendants--must be one of the strangest and most disquieting.  This shark, whose jaws are identified with "the Fates," is a peculiar cousin to Melville's famous whale, Moby Dick, who is also presented as an embodiment of malign fate, but on a grander scale.
 
There are three themes or motifs dominating the poem: the shark's listlessness, his deadliness, and the innocent liveliness of the pilot fish.  There are powerful ironies in the situation, for we tend to expect that destructiveness will manifest energy and demonic activity.  However, here deadliness is almost corpselike in its inactivity, so that there is something revolting as well as frightening about the combination.  A further irony is that the monster is served by the pretty innocents who not only lead him to his prey--and since they do, can we still call them innocent?--but are themselves safe in his very jaws.  If we make a chart of the words clustering about these three themes, we may be helped to perceive how connotation is an organizing agent in the poem:
 
Listlessness Deadliness Innocent Liveliness
phlegmatical glittering gates liquidly glide
sot saw-pit sleek little
lethargic dread azure
ghastly flank Gorgonian slim
haven serrated teeth alert
port  jaws of the Fates nothing of harm
asylum ravener friends
dotard horrible meat treat
dull maw
charnel

The words interact, reinforce, and influence each other in ways that a chart cannot show--hence the metaphor "family relations."  The subtle dynamics can be felt only in the poem itself.  For example, what makes "glittering gates" a chilling image of deadliness?  Only its association with "serrated teeth."  Likewise  "treat" is a benign word in itself, but rhymes with, and refers to, the deadly "horrible meat."  A Gorgon, though deadly, was also passive; without any action on her part, the snake-locks of the Gorgon turned her victims to stone.  Perhaps the most active of the deadly words is "ravener," which is related etymologically to "rape" but which can connote a scavenger, one who eats corpses.  It calls to mind the behavior of beasts who tear and devour their prey, like "Maw" which gives the image of a large, devouring mouth but which originally meant "stomach."  So, mouth is instantly stomach, prey is instantly corpse, but the deadly creature hardly bestirs itself.

Under "listlessness" we have "sot" and "dotard," both selected with uncanny connotative precision.  The sot is a confirmed drunkard; the dotard has become weak-minded with old age.  Neither can find his way without aid; each has to be led, as the shark is piloted by the pilot-fish.  This sot, this dotard, is called "pale" twice and "ghastly" once.  He has the pallor of the zombie or the vampire.  He is "phlegmatical" (sluggish, like thick mucous); "lethargic" (a word derived from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades); his maw is a "haven," "port," "asylum" for the pilot fish, but a "charnel" (place where the dead are deposited) for his victims.  Melville's task is to make us see the ironic wonder of his shark and his alliance with the pilot fish.  He makes us share his own paradoxical response, partly repulsion, partly fascination.

DICTION FURTHER DEFINED

The choice of words in this particular poem is merely a selection, appropriate for the occasion, from a broader word fund characteristic of Herman Melville's work.  In the most ancient of English poems, those written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon), the phrase most often used to describe a poet beginning a poem was, "He unlocked his word hoard"--his treasure chest of words.  Diction is the term applied to such characteristic vocabularies and to the way in which writers use words and phrases in particular works.  Every good poet must be a master of diction--of his own special diction--developed in a lifetime of "hanging around words," as Auden puts it.  The poet devotes his or her craft to the development of a word hoard not just to have such a treasure chest of his own, but because that is the necessary equipment for the representation of his or her vision of life.  In understanding why a poet's repertory of language includes or privileges certain words and kinds of words, rejects or uses sparingly other kinds, we go a long way towards understanding that poet's art.

Diction involves phrases as well as individual words, as we have already seen in Melville's case.  Just as the word must be chosen, so the phrase must be shaped, with a "wise heart."  We have seen that even a single word carries within itself something of image, music, and meaning.  A phrase unites these three elements in a more ponderable, more memorable, because more sizeable, part of the poem.

EPITHETS

In the earliest poetry, we find a love of the terse and impassioned phrase.  For example, in The Odyssey, an oral composition from about the tenth century BC, written down at a much later date, there is a lavish and affectionate use of the epithet.  The epithet sums up in a brief phrase a salient trait of a person or thing.  In oral poetry, it was desirable and necessary to repeat these key traits frequently.   Thus, over and over again, Odysseus is referred to as "that kingly man," 
"raider of cities," "master-mind of the war," or "the wiliest fighter of the islands."  These epithets were often small poems in themselves--the "wine-dark sea," Troy, the "wild-horse country."

Anglo-Saxon poetry was so much based on these metaphorical epithets that they have a special name, kenning.  Examples include "the whale road" (i.e., the ocean); "the helmet of the air" (fog); "the sweat of war" (blood).  Some present-day set phrases are also implied metaphors: "cold war," "paper tiger," "satellite nation."

Here are some examples from famous poems:

As can be seen from these examples, the grammatical form of the epithet tends to be adjective + noun or noun + preposition + noun, with, of course, any number of possible variations.

Perhaps no other poet has made the phrase, almost independent of sentence structure, deliver so much poetic power as has Walt Whitman.  An example is this passage of thirteen lines from Song of Myself:

A sequence of seven "night epithets" is followed by eight "earth epithets."  The repetitions, far from being monotonous, are full of richly varied images impelled by passionately felt personifications.  The long chain of phrases about the earth hangs, grammatically, from a single hook: the verb "Smile".

THE EPIGRAMMATIC QUALITIES OF PHRASES

The power of the poetic phrase is present also in the vigor and impact of popular sayings, slogans, and proverbs.  Phrases of color and verve originating with "anonymous" indicate that the impulse to poetry is wide-spread, perhaps universal.

Consider what elements give effectiveness to the following expressions.  Group slogans: "Remember the Alamo! "    "Burn, baby, burn!"  Colloquialisms: "Money thinks I'm dead." "With a friend like that, who needs enemies?"  Proverbs: "Marry in haste, repent at leisure."  "To sup with the devil, you must use a long spoon."  Aphorisms: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" (Theodore Roosevelt). "Seek simplicity and distrust it" (A.N. Whitehead).

All epigrams, whether of popular or literary origin, have the qualities of form, rhythm, terseness, and aptness--essentially poetic qualities as we can see from the following examples from various poems:

The effective phrase is usually concrete and projects physical images.  But powerful lines can be made with abstractions, as in the proverb-like  Blake example, or by juxtaposition of the abstract and the concrete, as in Eliot's "life" and "coffee spoons."

Here are two famous epigrams in verse that derive their power not from imagery, but from the whiplash of motion and counter motion:

Nouns and verbs usually constitute the strength of the poetic line, but no rules can be made.  Consider the adjectives in this passage from Macbeth: Macbeth wants to convey his shock and profess his love for his liege-lord by representing him as precious and royal.  Simplicity is not always the best policy.  Here, the ornate effect of "silver" and "golden" is memorable--even if we suspect that Macbeth "doth protest too much," as Hamlet's mother says of the Player Queen.

FAILURES OF DICTION

One way of arriving at an appreciation of effective diction is to examine the vices and weaknesses of ineffective diction.  In the examples below we display faults of diction in deliberately spoiled versions, set beneath the original versions.

In the first spoiled version, "juicy bunches" falls short of conveying richness of taste and luxurience of growth, as the real poem does.  In the second, "slithery" is descriptive, but conventional, whereas Dickinson shows the snake's movement in the lines of the whole poem.  Moreover, the spoiled version contains a cliche, something of which Dickinson is never guilty, especially when the cliche is totally inappropriate to the context, which here is to admire and appreciate the snake, not to use him as a stereotyped negative figure.  "Approaches" has no imagistic power, unlike "rides," because it is relatively abstract.  "Denizen of the deep" is another cliche, and again, the cliche is inappropriate not only because it adds nothing, but because, just  by being a set, glib phrase, it takes away from the particularity of the animal the poet is describing.  "Encrusted," a good, particular image in itself, describes this animal falsely; it is only "speckled" with barnacles.  Bishop's words--rosettes, lime, white, infested, sea-lice--are particular, whereas the substituted words are looser and more general.  "Tiny" is smaller than "small."  In the final example, "canine existence" is an example of the writing "sin" of "elegant variation"--changing words just to be fancy, not to represent a distinction in meaning--and "rubs itself" sounds like a euphemism for the down-to-earth "scratches its behind."  It is also less horselike--the fog-cat who "rubs its back against the window-pane" in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," however, illustrates that "rubs" can be a powerful imagistic word in the appropriate context.

In this chapter we have tried to show how the effectiveness of a poem depends very largely on its diction, and why the readers' full enjoyment of the poem depends on their sensitivity to the nuances of diction.  The diction of a poem is also crucial to its tone, to which we will return in a later chapter.