June 5, 2026

The acquisition of language by children is a Creation myth. I find myself thinking about it, time and again. In the beginning is the wordless child, whose world is that of the body and the senses. It is a world of flux, of becoming, of sensations and urges, of what William James famously called “a booming, buzzing confusion.” Language imposes order on this chaos, and brings a new world out of the old.

This is the moment of a miracle—yet we must also admit that there is truth to the contrary point of view that the acquisition of language is at the same time a Fall. We fall into language, and its structures are those of what the title of a well-known critical book called “the prisonhouse of language.” We are trapped in it, as in a labyrinth. This was the view of the Freudian revisionist Jacques Lacan. In his view, the original wordless state is called the Imaginary. To acquire language means to be initiated into the Symbolic Order. But that initiation is on an unconscious level identified with castration, and we must resign ourselves to figurative castration, which is a renunciation of childish narcissism and its feeling of being godlike and all-powerful. In Blakean terms, the child must leave the world of Innocence and “fall” into the world of Experience. Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest knows this. He rails at Prospero, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.” Something in us longs to regress, to devolve from speech and its rationality back to the original sensory state in which the animals still live. In the Odyssey, Circe turns Odysseus’ men into pigs. When they are turned back again into men, they weep for the loss of a life that consisted of the pleasure of wallowing. The 19^th century even invented a phrase for it, nostalgie de la boue, nostalgia for the mud, an idealizing of a low-level life in the gutter.

Thus is the human condition. We are, as Lacan said, “constituted by a split,” the split that Blake called the “cloven fiction,” the division between the subject and the object, the ego and that first object which is the body. The ego is alienated from the whole world that is objective to it, but the first alienation is from the body and the senses. It comes into being through that split. The bodily state is conscious, signified by Lacan as the Moi, French for Me. But with the acquisition of language, the individual becomes not just conscious but self-conscious. This is the Je, or I—Lacan is aware that the Latin word ego in fact means “I.” So we live in conflict. Part of us yearns for the wordless state in which we were once one with the body and the senses; part of us regards that as a regression to “savagery.” Language is our prison, yet language is our liberation.

But mythology and literature sometimes remember a state that was, or is, prior to the collapse into the fallen state, into what was really a Creation-Fall. We are not talking about the regression to the material and sensory level: that would just be another kind of fall, symbolized in Blake’s mythology by the fall of Tharmas, who turns into the sea of chaos that drowns paradise. There was a state before that, although “before” is misleading because that is to place it in time, and the unfallen state is prior to time and space as we know them, which were brought into being by the Fall. One form taken by the imagination’s remembrance of the original unfallen condition is of a primal, original language, whose elements were not mere abstract “signifiers” but what Northrop Frye, in the title of his second book on “the Bible and literature,” called “words with power.” This myth of an unfallen language has taken a variety of forms down through time, some of them sounding very quaint from a commonsense point of view. Sometimes it has been the dream of a lost language of Atlantis. At other times, it has been seen as somehow indwelling in actual languages. In the magical traditions of the Renaissance and later, Egyptian hieroglyphs were taken to be the characters of the unfallen language, even though this notion did not survive the actual decoding of hieroglyphics with the Rosetta stone. The Jewish visionary tradition of the Kaballah attributes enormous power to the characters of the Hebrew alphabet, so much so that God’s name, called the Tetragrammaton because it is spelled in Hebrew with four letters, dare not be uttered. Darren Aronofsky’s first film, Pi, in 1998, turns on the Kabbalistic notion of gematria, the idea that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet can be turned into numbers, making the Torah a mathematical code that is a key to the structure of reality.

Unsurprisingly, the science of linguistics has not been interested in such speculations, as science is, by definition, only concerned with truth within the subject-object paradigm, regarding anything else as “unprovable.” Linguistics is therefore focused upon those uses of language that represent the “real world.” These are the modes of language that Northrop Frye calls the descriptive and the conceptual, the modes of fact and logic respectively. Interestingly, they are modes in which language effaces itself, suppresses and even denies its role in the construction of what we call reality. Just the facts, ma’am: journalists and other expository writers are taught to write what is called “window pane prose,” prose that is invisible, perfectly clear so that the facts and the logical inferences drawn from those facts can be seen without obstruction. From this standpoint, words are abstract signifiers, established by social convention and possessing no power. They exist to point beyond themselves to a “signified,” which is either the thing itself or the dictionary definition of the thing. There was one linguist, however, possibly the greatest linguist of the 20^th century and certainly the one whose interests expanded beyond the utilitarian use of language into other modes, who threw off some suggestive remarks that could lead us to an expanded perspective. Roman Jakobson was one of the few linguists to be interested in literature, and in the imaginative rather than practical use of language. Traditionally, poetry, especially lyric rather than narrative or epic poetry, has been taken to be the most “literary” form of creative writing. But when we say that a piece of writing has a “literary” quality, what do we mean? The “poetic” is the most concentrated form of the literary, but, again, what are we sensing when we say that someone’s style is “poetic”? Jakobson offered an evocative definition: to the degree that writing is “poetic,” the language is using words for their own sake rather than as vehicles for some factual or conceptual “message.” But why would we be interested in words for their own sake? This baffles us so long as we think of them as signifiers. Signifiers are inherently boring: they mean nothing in themselves.

Granted, there is a type of postmodern poetry in which words are just signifiers, such as in the texts of the so-called Language poets such as Charles Bernstein. This school is said to be a reaction against the extreme expressivism of some confessional poetry, as if to say, “Stop looking for expression. Words are just words, get over it.” Their motto is Hamlet’s response when Polonius asked what he was reading: “Words, words, words.” The wider context of such an experimental style is a widespread sense, not just among avant garde artists, that language in our alienated time has lost its meaning. Social media are a cataract of verbiage, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. However, the alienation precedes the internet. It is heard in the voice in Eliot’s The Waste Land that says, “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”

A poet who acquired an enormous reputation for poetry that cannot usually be construed into “meaning” anything was John Ashbery. I think Ashbery appealed to people even though there was usually no answer to the question, “What does this poem mean?” because his poetry captured the feeling of a lot of people that we live in a world that is, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “a world of words to the end of it” that nevertheless doesn’t make sense. Words can no longer order experience into meaning. And yet, Ashbery is not just an absurdist, because his words are not just dead, meaningless signifiers either. He is quoted by The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry as saying he would like to “reproduce the power dreams have of persuading you that a certain event has a meaning not logically connected to it, or that there is a hidden relation among disparate objects” (384-85). We have all had dreams that surely must mean something, we feel—but we will never know what that meaning is. Such is life. “The Tennis Court Oath,” an early poem in which his style was at its most opaque, the speaker says:

I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry

The first two lines lead the reader to expect some kind of anguished love poem, but by the end it is more than the horse that strains and is fatigued, and the speaker perhaps has cause to worry. In poem after poem, the language almost manages to mean something, and then becomes undecidable, deconstructs itself. Ashbery endears himself to readers by facing this inability to make sense with a wry, resigned, good humor. Oh well, so much for the idea that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world and all that. The speaker in The Waste Land is anguished about the loss of meaning, but how long can you grieve what is dead? Life goes on. There is a kind of self-deprecating anti-Romanticism about Ashbery that is, paradoxically, a kind of Romanticist stance, seen also in less intensive form in W.H. Auden, although Auden does not always practice what he preaches. It appeals to those who have given up on high ideals, verbal or otherwise—and that probably includes most of us in certain moments, if we are honest enough to admit it.

But I am, of course, a diehard Romantic, and insist on believing that there is something else going on in the moment of language acquisition. What the ego experiences as alienation, in which I am sentenced to the prison of the Symbolic Order, the imagination experiences as the intimation of something miraculous beyond that Order, although post-structuralist skepticism would find this to be merely “mystification.” My response is that there is a genuine mystery, something to be mystified about. Nor is this mystery merely theoretical. It is highly experiential, not an intellectual abstraction at all. Obviously, all attempts to explain what goes on in a child’s mind when encountering the meaningful sound patterns of language for the first time must be speculative. But what we do know is that language is partly innate and partly acquired from the environment. If Noam Chomsky is correct, all human beings arrive at birth with certain “deep structures” of language hardwired into their brain and nervous system. So far, neuroscience has not found the exact locations where deep structures reside, but it is inconceivable that children learn the literally thousands of rules governing all aspects of language by the age of 3 to 5 entirely by trial and error through environmental exposure. Chomsky’s theory is that the innate deep structures are waiting to be filled with the specific phonemes and rule systems of a specific language—or languages, since more children than not around the world grow up bilingual, learning two rule systems at the same time without much confusion.

It is that imagined moment when phonemes strike the child’s ear and therefore mind and register not as noise but pattern that is the moment of a miracle that fascinates me. Those of us who are old may still remember the play The Miracle Worker (1959, film version 1962) about Helen Keller’s acquisition of language. The climactic scene in that play—and later movie—is when Helen realizes that a certain sign spelled on her hand means “water.” The ecstatic excitement is contagious: we cannot help but share it, for Helen immediately leaps to the conclusion that it is not just one sign: all the signs mean something. In a split second, Helen acquires not just a word, but language, a system or webwork of meaning. And the ironists can say what they will about how language is a slave collar locking us into a Symbolic Order that is the instrument of invisible systems of power. Helen’s ecstasy is a sign of liberation, not enslavement. She has been liberated from the real prison, that of utter silence.

Yet Lacan would say that the ecstasy is delusional—he does say it in his theory of the “mirror stage,” in which the first signifier the child recognizes is its image in a mirror, not just as an image but as “I,” as an identity. The child too is ecstatic, but Lacan insists it is the ecstasy of narcissism. Who’s the fairest of them all? The child sees itself objectified, as if other, and in that moment is split. The sinister image of the double that runs throughout Romantic and post-Romantic literature is a representation of this split in the self. But, again, it is the ego that falls into that narcissistic state. The ego experiences the either-or of remaining within the Imaginary realm of solipsistic silence or of becoming an “I,” a construct ruled by the Symbolic Order, not much different from a robot or AI.

But even as the Fall into language takes place for what Paul called the natural self, there is another self, which Paul calls “spiritual” but we may call “imaginative,” that hears language but interprets it not in the reductive either-or way of signifiers and signified, but in another way altogether that takes us back to Jakobson’s definition of the “poetic” function of language as language for its own sake. Signifiers point beyond themselves to what they signify. But when they are used centripetally rather than centrifugally, so to speak, they are not used descriptively or conceptually but associatively. They begin to link up, as atoms unite into molecules, and form larger patterns. Some of these are sound patterns, some are image patterns, and some are patterns of meaning, though the meaning of “meaning” here is different. Meaning, to the imagination, is not factual, descriptive, or even ideological, but metaphorical. Metaphor is associative: it says that A is B, although—and this is important—it also paradoxically states that A and B are different. Metaphor is a relationship of two images, and thus implies spatial pattern: we speak of a poem’s “structure” of imagery. But at the same time metaphor is metamorphosis, one thing changing into another. The A and B of a metaphor perform what Heraclitus talks about: they live each other’s death and die each other’s life, by which he meant that the one dies to metamorphose into the other and vice versa. It is more than just interesting to note that what he said this about were gods and human beings. Immortals become mortals and mortals become immortals—which is the Incarnation as it is fully understood in the Orthodox doctrine of “deification.” In Christ, God becomes human, but humanity becomes divine, which is blasphemy to the authority-loving West, which could only understand deification as Jungian inflation, a will to power. At any rate, metaphor is also metamorphosis, and out of metamorphosis grow the death-and-rebirth narrative patterns we call myth.

When the imagination discovers language, its reaction is wonder. To reduce Helen Keller’s epiphany to the intoxication of the ego over newfound power shows, well, a lack of imagination. The imagination can indeed be misused, and I suppose a revisionist view of Keller could make her into a Prometheus of water rather than fire. When Frye titled his book on the Bible and literature Words with Power, he was not naive about the capacity for that power’s misuse. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus triumphs over the tyrant Jupiter not by deploying superior fire-power, but by renouncing his curse against Jupiter, an expression of would-be violence. He does so for exactly the same reason that Frodo must renounce the ring, dropping it into the crack of Mt. Doom. The power of transformation residing in metaphor is what is meant by magic. But not all magic is black magic. There is also white magic, deployed out of love and wonder, out of empathy and beauty, even if the task of using that white magic responsibly is a terrible burden, as Tolkien shows, as Harry Potter shows, as Ursula K. Le Guin shows in A Wizard of Earthsea, as, most of all, Shakespeare shows in The Tempest in the figure of the magician Prospero.

How does one become a magician? Career Services is of no help here. To enchant others, you must first be enchanted. To cast spells, you must first be spellbound. It is unfortunate that it has become so famous, for the wrong attitude toward words is that of Humpty Dumpty: “The question is...which is to be master—that’s all.” That final “That’s all,” in its absolutism, in its expression of a strong will, is chilling. That is the ego’s view of language, that I must learn to master language until it is subservient to me. This is one side of an either-or, the other being the Lacanian and post-structuralist view that we are constructed by language, mere automatons programmed to do the bidding of systemic power. Both are illusions. The true relation to language is one of love, a surrender that is not subservience.

In 1951, Dylan Thomas replied to a research student who asked him how he began to write poetry:

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window-pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose and the rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes. I realise that I may be, as I think back all that way, romanticising my reactions to the simple and beautiful words of those pure poems; but that is all I can honestly remember, however much time might have falsified my memory. I feel in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words....I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever....That was the time of innocence; words burst upon me, unencumbered by trivial or portentous association; words were their springlike selves, fresh with Eden’s dew, as they flew out of the air. (154-55)

Roman Jakobson might have appreciated this rhapsodic expression of love of words for their own sake. And so might Helen Keller, because she is implicitly included in the reference to the deaf person.

Poetry is not always poetic. Thomas is perhaps the foremost member of what the poet James Dickey called “magic language poets,” contrasting them with another type of poet that uses language more like an expository prose writer, turning it away from sound towards sense, away from enchantment towards ordinary experience. There is nothing to prevent a poet from writing in both styles. Coleridge is perhaps best known for his magic-language poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan.” But, along with Wordsworth, he was also one of the inventors of the “conversation poem.” The quiet blank verse of “Frost at Midnight” sounds so much like speech that, read aloud, it could almost be mistaken for prose. Since the free verse revolution beginning in the 1960’s, conversational style has so predominated in the poetry journals that I think some poets no longer even know what is meant by word magic, which to them simply seems old-fashioned. The result, in my view, is a lot of what reads pretty much like chopped-up prose.

Dylan Thomas was already complaining of this in a review written in 1934, in which he says that “ ‘The Death of the Ear’ would be an apt subtitle for a book on the plight of modern poetry” (166). He goes on to say,

It would be possible to explain this lack of aural value and this debasing of an art that is primarily dependent on the musical mingling of vowels and consonants by talking of the effect of a noisy, mechanical civilization on the delicate mechanism of the human ear. But the reason is deeper than that. Too much poetry to-day is flat on the page, a black and white thing of words created by intelligences that no longer think it necessary for a poem to be read and understood by anything but the eyes. (166)

This actually became a debate, and Thomas’s debating opponents were the English poets of the Movement, such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. They popularized the view that Thomas was simply a fraud like his Welsh counterpart Owen Glendower in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, who claims to be able to summon monsters from the vasty deep by the power of his eloquence. To the Movement poets, Thomas was dishonestly striking the pose of the neo-Romantic Celtic bard. The Movement poets were post-war disillusioned skeptics who did not believe in magic. The contemporary poetic scene in the United States clearly does not believe in it either. Yet there have been some great poets, Wallace Stevens for example, who were word-magicians that nonetheless cannot be accused of self-bardolatry.

Word magic not only contrasts with conversational verse but itself divides into two tendencies that are what Blake called Contraries. One is what Northrop Frye called “charm.” Charm is the emphasis on the patterns of sound in poetic language for their own sake. These include alliteration, assonance, stanzaic patterns, refrains, and may go beyond these to what Dylan Thomas lists to the research student as “old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paranomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm” (158). Charm is spellbinding: it uses those elements to conjure with, to summon up a world by the power of the word. Yet the world conjured is not the ordinary one but an Otherworld of strangeness and beauty. The intricate patterns of language form a temenos or closed magical circle, akin to the pentagram in magic. James Dickey, from whom I have taken the phrase “magic language poet,” was one himself, and the very first poem from his first volume of poetry exemplifies what Frye calls “charm.” “Sleeping Out at Easter” describes an epiphany on the part of a speaker who awakens at dawn to feel that both he and the world are transformed:

All dark is now no more.
This forest is drawing a light.
All Presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
Where the earth turns, waking a choir.
             All dark is now no more.

Birds, speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
Where my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
            Birds sing, their voices beyond them.

All the speaker is doing is camping out in his backyard, yet the dawn light transforms everything. But we experience that transformation through the incantatory power of the language, the sound patterns. The short, three-beat, largely end-stopped lines create a ritual effect, reinforced by the refrain, and practically every phrase takes on a double meaning, to show that the profane is also the sacred. What rises is a “king” because it is Easter, yet Dickey is not a traditional supernaturalist Christian like T.S. Eliot—or even Milton, though this poem is a kind of counterpart to Milton’s Nativity Ode. Dickey’s Word is “The source of all song at the root,” and it rises from below. It is immanent, not transcendent, so that the human speaker and nature are the resurrected body.

But this makes “charm” sound like a set of sophisticated techniques employed by self-conscious poetic virtuosos. It can become that: a poet like W.H. Auden seems to have been determined to utilize every poetic device ever invented. But it begins before a child can even walk—when all it can do is lie there and listen to the sound of caretaker speech, especially that which is directed toward the child itself. It begins to hear repeated sounds and patterns of sound—and then it begins to imitate them. As Aristotle saw, mimicry, mimesis, is a basic human trait, and perhaps it begins with language itself. The child has somehow to hear not just noises but phonemes, units of significant sound that combine into words. Linguists say that language acquisition goes through two initial stages. The earlier is called by the highly technical name of “cooing,” in which the child is learning to make vowel sounds. This is followed by the stage of “babbling,” in which the child is practicing consonant sounds, which are more difficult because they involve actually impeding or stopping the voice from the vocal cords. Linguists describe all this as work: the child is laboring to master techniques that will be useful, Robinson Crusoe in a cradle, a castaway on this island world working to develop a set of tools.

I wonder about this. Linguists, like most social scientists, seem to be invested in the notion of evolutionary psychology that everything human beings do is towards some practical end that will further the survival of the fittest. Against this prejudice, I would set one of the great scholarly books, Homo Ludens (English version 1949), “man the player,” by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. If you have ever listened to a child by itself babbling and cooing away, you will probably get the impression that it is playing with sound, fascinated and delighted by its patterns, not trying to crack a code. Social science mostly does not understand play because play is not utilitarian: it is the primary expression of the imagination. As such, it is deeply suspect, because it not only does not relate itself to reality but actively turns away from it. It chooses a separate world of imagination over the “reality principle.”

There are two aspects to this turn, and they are, not sound and sense, but sound and non-sense. We may examine these separately, beginning with sound. A child babbling and cooing (and sometimes singing, or chanting) may first of all be wallowing in sheer sound the way Odysseus’s porcine crew wallowed in mud, out of the sheer pleasure principle of it. Poets are those children who have refused to grow up and are still luxuriating in the sensuousness of words, which are those aspects that relate the words to music on the one hand and the visual arts on the other. Thomas told his researcher:

I do not like writing about words, because then I often use bad and wrong and stale and wooly words. What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound... (155-56)

This kind of sensuous delight is characteristic of those poets fond of what Frye called “imitative harmony,” in which the words actually imitate the world of the senses. Onomatopoeia is a kind of miniaturized version of imitative harmony. Imitative harmony can be virtuosic, even a kind of verbal showing off, yet inherent in it is a childlike delight that, as Alexander Pope put it, “The sound becomes an echo to the sense.” In his Essay on Criticism, Pope goes on to give some examples, ones that arose from his project of translating the Iliad:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.

For some poets, imitative harmony becomes a signature technique. Spenser is one of them, and in his section on imitative harmony in Anatomy of Criticism Frye includes a catalogue of examples from The Faerie Queene. For example, in “The Eugh [yew] obedient to the bender’s will,” Frye observes that “the line has a number of weak syllables in the middle that makes it sag out in a bow shape,” yew being the wood used for bows. In his late, pastoral poetry, Thomas himself is a master of imitative harmony, speaking of “The silk and ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.” The technique is not confined to verse, but appears in certain types of poetic prose, as in the opening of Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter’s-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishboat-bobbing sea.

The response to such language is delight, a delight that carries us back to when we were very young and language was just this amazing thing. It is an old conundrum what language Adam and Eve spoke, but it was an unfallen language which we seem to hear echoes of when poetic language condenses into such richness. It is why students always love Edgar Allan Poe, which mostly means “The Raven.” They are right to love it, despite the attempts of creative writing teachers to convince them that it is naive, and that “poetry” doesn’t mean that kind of thing anymore. It doesn’t, but so much the worse for poetry. “The Raven” has moments of imitative harmony:

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flit and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore....

The verse flits, flutters, and steps stately. “The Raven” is delightful in its verbal play though not its mood. It is actually close to being a mad song, a sub-species of magic language poetry that we will arrive at eventually. The word patterns do not evoke beauty but obsession:

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming...

Phrases such as “the pallid bust of Pallas” disclose a process of verbal association on the verge of going out of control.

In all of Poe’s most famous poems, the speaker circles back again and again to one feeling: loss. The hypnotically repetitive language is not intended, as some critics seem to think, to be merely ornate and lapidary, but to create the sensation of being trapped in a labyrinth of sound that suggests a labyrinth of feeling in which the speaker always finds himself back at the same point. This is literally true in the most notoriously incantatory poem of them all, “Ulalume,” in which the speaker realizes at the end that he has unconsciously wandered back to the tomb of his dead beloved. The speaker is as depressive as the speaker of “The Raven” is manic, so the repetition suggests a mood so melancholic and heavy that it struggles to move forward, and has to keep starting again:

The skies they were ashen and sober;
           The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
           The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
           Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
           In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber
           In the ghost-haunted woodland of Weir.

We will return later to this darker aspect of “charm.” For the moment, however, we turn to its other aspect, which is not sense but non-sense. With a hyphen, for we are not talking about mere incoherence, the reduction of language to mere noise, and the resigned reaction to this reduction by poets such as Ashbery. A child’s first encounter with the sound of language is wonder and delight. There is a comparable reaction to its first encounter with the semantic aspect of language.

It is striking how much of children’s poetry is either nonsense verse or so silly as to be close to it. To mean something is hard work, and very serious work, the work of anchoring language to the “reality principle.” “High seriousness” is one of the marks of greatness in literature according to highly serious critics like Matthew Arnold, who denied Chaucer entrance to the first rank of British poets because Chaucer had a sense of humor. What is the appeal of nonsense verse, which does not reward us with deep thoughts? Nonsense verse, and light verse in general, are a holiday from deep thoughts. What they give us instead is absurdity, silliness, and laughter. They are another manifestation of the spirit of play. The spirit of play is a Trickster spirit, personified by Dr. Seuss as the Cat in the Hat, who teaches children to romp while mother is away. But adults love romping too. E.e. cummings, another poet students always love, breaks all the grammarians’ rules about language, such as the rule that our language must always appear in public properly dressed in capital letters, also the rule that there must always be a clear and proper distinction between serious and light verse.

Light verse may be pressed into serious purposes and become satiric. The Romantic exemplar is Byron in Don Juan, an anti-epic about an anti-hero. There are plenty of absurd situations in Don Juan, but the main source of the humor is the poem’s comic rhyme, as when Byron expresses a sexist disapproval of intellectual women:

But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?

Byron’s target in the poem, though, is not just highbrow women but highbrow, period. The opening of the first canto, in which he mulls over various possibilities for a major poem, expands into a high-spirited attack on all poets and philosophers of high seriousness and their attempts at Deep Thoughts:

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
           But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood,—
Explaining metaphysics to the nation—
           I wish he would explain his explanation....

And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion”
           (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
Has given a sample from the vasty version
           Of his new system to perplex the sages;
‘Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,
           And may appear so when the Dog Star rages—
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Byron finally chooses to write about the funniest topic in the world, which is of course sex, knowing that sex is funny because it undermines our pretensions at Higher Things. Sex makes the world go round, making the human race dizzy, turning the human story into a farce rather than the noble tragedy we pretend it is.

Over in Germany, the great epic was Goethe’s Faust, which is also a satire against intellectual pretensions with a seducing anti-hero as its main character, one in which Byron in fact appears in disguise as the child of Faust and Helen of Troy. A good part of Faust is written in the crude, old-fashioned form called knittelvers, a kind of naive folk-verse consisting of loose four-stressed rhymed couplets, as when Mephistopheles confounds an idealistic student who naively believes that “Yet with each word there must a concept be”:

Oh, quite—no need, though, to be racking
One’s brain, for just where concept’s lacking
A word in time supplies the remedy.
Words are good things to be debated,
With words are systems generated,
In words belief is safely vested,
From words no jot or tittle can be wrested.
           (1995-2000, Walter Arndt translation)

The lightness of light verse comes from its release from the heavy weight of meaning, until with nonsense verse it becomes zero g, so to speak. Meanings are a burden. Nonsense verse is funny because of the disjunction between what sounds as if it should make sense but in fact doesn’t. Children, who are still learning, find it hard to remember the meanings of all those words plus the grammatical rules for putting them together. Nonsense verse is a temporary freedom. It reproduces the state before language acquisition, when the child hears the cascade of syllables but has no idea what they mean. Hearing speech in a foreign language that we do not speak likewise turns it into nonsense. We know we are supposed to respect other people’s language, but it sounds funny to us if we will admit it. Writing nonsense verse liberates us to create our own language system. We can make up words, make them mean whatever we want, and we don’t have to obey all those grammatical rules. There is a gaiety about it, comparable to acting silly, making faces or what not. Children love the liberation from being “mature”—and we do too. Children’s verse occurs spontaneously in children’s games. There is a song I love to sing, “Green Rocky Road,” made famous by folk singer Dave van Ronk, whose verses were collected by folklorists from a children’s game:

When I go by Baltimore
Need no carpet on my floor
You come along, follow me
We’ll go down to Galilee

Green green rocky road
Promenade in green
Tell me who ya love
Tell me who ya love

It alternates between the hauntingly suggestive and the downright silly:

Hooka-dooka soda cracker
Does your mama chew tobacco?
If your mama chews tobacco
Hooka-dooka, hooka-dooka soda cracker.

There are two types of nonsense verse. We might—playfully—relate them to Freud’s two mechanisms of the dream, displacement and condensation. In displacement, one thing is put for another, as when anything longer than it is wide substitutes for a phallus. In the displaced variety of nonsense verse, the source of the humor is when something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t real is substituted for what we would expect. The substitution may be an invented word, a famous instance being in Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” in which it is said of the titular creatures that

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
           Which they ate with a runcible spoon...

“Mince” and “quince” are substituted for something it would make sense to eat, and are clearly chosen for reasons of sound, not sense. And “runcible” is a pure coinage, one of which Lear was so fond that he used it in other poems. The subversion of reference is a subversion of the reality principle, which brings us close to the mad song again. Lewis Carroll’s “The Mad Gardener’s Song” in Sylvie and Bruno and its sequel is a goofy mad song in which, in each stanza, the gardener discovers to his dismay that in his madness he has substituted one thing for another:

He thought he saw an Elephant,
           That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
           A letter from his wife.
“At length I realize,” he said,
           “The bitterness of Life!”

Absurd as it all is, there is a lurking satire on humanity’s very serious quest for meaning:

He thought he saw a Garden-Door
           That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
           A Double Rule of Three:
“And all its mystery,” he said,
           “Is clear as day to me.”

But of course he’s mad, even though the Double Rule of Three is an actual rule in mathematics.

There is nonsense prose as well as nonsense verse, and John Lennon perpetrated both in his two books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Here is one example that my friend Dennis and I used to laugh over when we were in high school, from “At the Denis”:

Madam: I have a hallowed tooth that suffer me grately.

Sir: Sly down in that legchair Madam and open your gorble wide —your mouse is all but toothless.

Madam: Alad! I have but eight tooth remaining.

Sir: Then you have lost eighty three.

Madam: Impossyble.

Sir: Everydobby knows there are foor decisives two canyons and ten grundies, which make thirsty two in all.

Madam: But I have done everything to save my tooth.

The other type of nonsense verse (or prose) condenses words together, making puns. The inevitable example is of course Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Slithy” fuses “lithe” and “slimy”; “mimsy” fuses “miserable” and “flimsy.” And so on. Carroll called these “portmanteau words,” two words packed up in the same verbal suitcase. The words are nonsense, but combining words is an actual method of word coinage, as “smog” is a combination of “smoke” and “fog.” The fact that I have been using Freudian terminology hints at something of some importance, that we will follow up on next week. The “language” of the unconscious is largely one of images: it is the images that follow the mechanisms of displacement and condensation. That makes the language of the unconscious fluid and metamorphic, rather than conventionally fixed as with ordinary language. Possibly the most ambitious literary work of the 20^th century, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which Joyce labored over for 17 years, is written entirely in an language of displacement and condensation, so that every word, every sentence, means two, three, or even more things at once. Next week, we will embark upon a descent journey into those depths of language, and will examine what Frye deemed the counterpart of “charm,” namely “riddle.” A riddle seems to be nonsense, but it makes sense if we can solve the riddle. So, the theme for next week will be the riddle of why we are fond of riddles. We will not be surprised to find that the answer has something to do with the spirit of play.

References

The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, vol. 2. 3^rd edition. Edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. Norton, 2003.

Thomas Dylan. Early Prose Writings. Edited by Walford Davies. Dent, 1971.