Words are sounds, and as such may mean something besides what they denote. Azure, indigo, ultramarine are more than blue. They echo, somehow, the sound of the infinite.

Not surprisingly, those who are fond of poetry — and poets themselves, of course — seem peculiarly sensitive to words as sounds. One Saturday night, when I was in my early teens, I read all of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. During the night I found myself waking up with snatches of his poems still running through my head, and the next morning there were some I just couldn’t get out of my  mind — the way it is when you keep hearing a tune over and over.

This was especially true of “Romance.” Certain phrases from it — “a painted paroquet … eternal condor years … trembled with the strings” — just wouldn’t go away. And it was the sound of them, not the sense — after all, what exactly are “eternal condor years”? — that enthralled me. Earlier, nursery rhymes had had the same effect. “Hey, diddle, the cat and the fiddle …” — I could repeat that one to myself endlessly. There is a phrase from Keats’s  “Ode to a Nightingale” — “O for a draught of vintage!” — that from the first time I read it to this very day casts a magic spell over me, transporting me simply by its melody and rhythm to a sunny day in a sunny clime in a time of romance.

W.H. Auden says somewhere that certain lines of poetry transcend language, that you don’t have to know the language or what the words mean in order to know immediately that they are poetry. The line he cites is one from Rilke’s “Vor dem Sommerregen” (“Before the Summer Rain”): “das ungewisse Licht von Nachmittagen.”  The line is practically untranslatable into English, thanks to that ungewisse modifying Licht. Ungewisse literally means “unknown” or “uncertain.” But neither of those words gets across quite what Rilke is getting at. The only way you can latch onto that is to fix in your mind’s eye the shifting tones of light and shadow as afternoon nears its end and in which, as Rilke says in the next line, “one scared oneself as a child.” But if you learn how to say it properly, or hear someone recite it, the line is likely to lodge permanently in your consciousness, conjuring its own aural magic.

Heidegger thought that poetry was the essential form of speech and the best evidence for that, I think, is found by listening to an infant in its crib saying the same sounds and syllables over and over again without regard, obviously, to any sense they may convey, but just for the sheer pleasure of it.

I was thinking of this the other morning while I was cutting up bread for the sparrows that congregate in my backyard. I had a busy day ahead of me and I wanted to get this minor task out of the way as soon as I could. And I suddenly realized that if I were a kid entrusted with the knife I had in my hand and charged with cutting up the bread, I would draw the task out for as long as I could and enjoy every minute of it. When we are young we take pleasure in doing things for the sake of doing them. As we get older we become preoccupied with just getting them done and moving on to the next one.

Jesus famously observed that you had to become as a little child if you wanted to enter the kingdom of heaven. Heaven, of course, has come to be thought of in terms of an afterlife, but maybe Jesus was suggesting that whatever afterlife there may be is conditioned by one’s state of being here and now, and that the way to arrive at the proper state was to regain the freshness of apprehension we had when very young.

One way of doing that might be simply to listen more carefully to the words we speak. We are used to seeing an object in terms of the articulable sound by which we designate it, but imagine what it must have been like when humans could make the sounds but hadn’t yet come to designate any objects by means of them. Perhaps we should spend more time just listening to words, and wondering how these sounds we make with lips and tongue and breath became connected to the things and creatures of this world of wonders we inhabit.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

Tags: language & grammar, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson // 3 Comments »