The Poetry of Words and Phrases

The miracle of language never ceases to beguile me. With my tongue, lips and vocal chords, I can create vibrations in the air which, when they reach your ear, are decoded into ideas and pictures and emotions. This process, already magical and wondrous, can be captured by words on a page-- so that words can travel over continents and through the ages. Every now and again, the whole phenomenon strikes me with fresh wonder.

I've written a lot about poetry on this blog. People have given various definitions of poetry, but one of the more memorable ones is "the best words in the best order". In a way, though, I think words are a sort of poetry even before they're put into any order. You might even say that every word is a poem in itself, although "detergent" and "update" aren't particularly lyrical. (Ironically, the word "poetry" isn't inherently poetic, in my view.)

On the other hand, many words are inherently poetical. Others are  more subjectively appealing.

What sort of words are inherently appealing? Well, the example that comes to my mind most readily are the names of gemstones: sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, chalcedony, emerald, obsidian, and so forth. Now, you might say these words are appealing because of their association with the gemstones they describe, but I think that's only part of it. And quite often I have no image or knowledge of a particular gemstone and I still find the word poetic.

Wilde's masterpiece of decadent poetry "The Sphinx" draws lavishly on these poetic names:

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald.

(There's a lot more where that comes from.)

This particular strain of poetry is also to be found in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation's description of the walls of the New Jerusalem: "The first foundation was jasper. The second was sapphire. The third was chalcedony. The fourth was emerald. The fifth was sardonyx. The sixth was sardius. The seventh was chrysolite. The eighth was beryl. The ninth was topaz. The tenth was chrysoprasus. The eleventh was jacinth. The twelfth was amethyst."

I'm guessing that many of these terms come from Latin and Greek, which perhaps give them that flavour of the exotic, antique and classical from which much of the poetry derives.

Colours and hues often have very poetic names, as well: indigo, heliotrope, burgundy, onyx, cerulean, turquoise, aquamarine, magenta.

Funnily enough, I would make the argument that many diseases have perversely appealing names: gonorrhea, chlamydia, rubella, melanoma, meningitis, and so forth. (You may not agree on that, though).

Another class of words that seem to be inherently poetic, although I think this certainly has a lot to do with meaning as with sound, involve faintness or obscurity: silhouette, whisper, echo, shadow, ghostly, phantasmagoric, rumour, shimmer, flicker, and so forth.

I could go on with lists of word-groups that seem to be generally appealing, but I'll move on to words and phrases that appeal especially to me.

One of my very favourite words is "lobby", and another is "foyer". Of course, "foyer" has a bit of a French glamour to it, but I think the main reason I love both these words is because they describe liminal spaces. I also love (to varying degrees) corridor, plaza, mezzanine, mall, street, alleyway, and avenue. I feel I should include "attic" in this list, even though it's not a liminal space in the same sense as the others; it's not a "between" place like the others. But it's liminal in another way, although it's hard to put my finger on its liminality. (This article addresses this very subject, although it's a bit too woke for my taste.)

Why do I like terms for liminal spaces so much? It's hard to say. There's something very exciting about a liminal space, especially one that is a mixture of "inside" and "outside". All life, all drama is lived in the space between me and you, us and them. Public or semi-public places seem ripe for this drama.

A final place-word which appeals to me enormously, even though it's not really liminal, except insofar as every place could be liminal in some way: canteen (as in, a cafeteria). I love the word canteen. It's so cheerful, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and redolent of a collective life of some kind. I like restaurants which are more like canteens, such as the restaurant in IKEA.

Here's a round-up of some other words I especially love: kaleidoscope, sepia, merry-go-round, horizon, gossamer, alabaster, brandy. I could add many, many more, and I probably will.

Poetry has already begun, in the more conventional sense, when we put words together. So perhaps it's legitimate to say that phrases are already poems, ready-made poems, as it were.

Finally, a list of phrases that excite me (mostly quarried from a previous post):

Softly-falling snow.

The cold light of day (which is supposed to be sobering, but which I find reassuring).

Deep waters.

Dizzy heights.

The morning after the night before.

Down memory lane.

The silver screen.

Till the cows come home.

All human life is there.

Blue moon. (I'm told the song of this title was my mother's party piece.)

The dead of night (also the title of one of my favourite films, Dead of Night from 1945).

The middle of nowhere.

The back of beyond.

In at the deep end.

Burning the midnight oil.

The last bus home.

Night train. (There was a radio show with this title in my childhood, which was broadcast all night long-- or at least, that's the impression I got.)

The graveyard shift.

The old, old story.

The small hours.

The wee hours.

Any phrase involving "country", in this sense: bandit country, cowboy country, gator country, Brontë country, Kavanagh country, etc.

What are some of your favourite words and phrases? No, really, tell me!

Something Stupid

Going through your drafts folder is very diverting. At least, for me. And generates blog content!

I've long had a fascination with the phrase "the eternal debate", and the concept behind it. So much so, that I once started making a spreadsheet of how many "hits" I could find of that phrase on the internet, and which debates they referenced. And how often each debate was mentioned.

I'd completely forgotten about this. You wouldn't be up to me. (An exclusively Irish phrase meaning: "That person/group always has some scheme going." Usually understood disreputably, but not necessarily.)

As with most of my projects, I gave up and forgot about it. But here's my findings as they were when I gave up.

Analogue vs. digital 1

Arminianism vs. Calvinism 1

Bernoulli vs. Leibniz 1

Blonde vs. brunette 1

Cardinal vs. ordinal data 1

Determinism vs. non-determinism 1

Einstein vs. Bohrs 1

Faith vs. science 1

Female genre vs. femininity 1

Freedom vs. security 1

God's justice vs. God's mercy 1

Ideal vs. reality 1

Ketchup vs. mustard 1

Left vs. right (toilet paper hanging) 1

Mentalists vs. idealists 1

Modernism vs. Postmodernism 1

Monism vs. dualism 1

Moral universalists vs. moral relativists 2

Nature vs. nurture 2

Optimism vs. pessimism 1

Windows vs. Mac 2

Poetry vs. prose 1

Politics vs. justice 1

Privacy vs. security 2

Quantity vs. quality 2

Rationalists vs. empiricists 1

Reason vs. faith (Islam) 1

Relatives vs. friends 1

Show vs. Tell 1

Simplicity vs. customization 1

Solidarity vs. charity 1

Sovereigntists vs. Federalists (Canada) 1

Storytelling vs. gameplay 1

Strength vs. skills 1

Tea vs. coffee 1

Thoughts vs. emotions 1

Tower vs. trough 1

Renting vs. buying 1

Bartending school vs. learning on the job 1

Kirk vs. Picard 1

Java vs. C/C+ 1

Chicken vs. pig (breakfast) 1

Urbanites vs. surburbanites 1

Liberal vs. conservative 1

Index investing vs. dividend investing 1

Men vs. women 1

Republicans vs. Demorats 1

Blackwing Technician vs. Dark cultist 1

Old money vs. new money 1

Owls vs. owlets 1

Science vs. religion 1

Knowledge vs. skill 1

Mountains vs. beach 1

Lights weights vs. heavy weights (muscle growth) 1

Church of St. Philip the Apostle, Clonsilla

As this is fifteen minutes' walk from Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, I've included a picture of the shopping centre oratory at the end.

Church of St. Peter the Apostle, Neilstown

RIP Kevin Curtis. 

Sacred Heart Church, Donnybrook

I've lost interest in the Dublin churches series. I get the impression nobody is going to share my enthusiasm for more recent suburban churches.

I'd worked up a backlog in the last few weeks. I'm just going to post all the pictures today.

I feel a bit awkward taking photos in churches, anyway. I'll just visit them from now on. I still retain my ambition to see every Catholic church in Dublin.

Here is the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook. I often go to the vigil Mass here.

Amazon's AI-Generated Review of my Book, Inspiration from the Saints

"Customers find the book inspirational, intelligent, and well-written. They also describe the content as comprehensive, kind, and a great humanitarian."

From what I see of Artificial Intelligence so far, I think we have a little grace time before the machines take over the world.

Nonetheless, it's an excuse to post a photo of my favourite Terminator from the film series.

And here's the link to my book. It hasn't had a review in four years!

A Trek Through Dublin Churches V: Church of the Divine Word, Marley Grange Parish

According to the website of this parish, "Marley Grange Parish is in the Southside of Dublin, close to Dundrum and Ballinteer". It's also close to Rathfarnham and St. Edna's, where Patrick Pearse ran his pioneering Irish school. Indeed, very soon before I came to the church, I passed the area known as "Hermitage", from which Pearse took the title of his pamphlet, "From a Hermitage". It's a very green area, full of lawns and fields. The church lies at the end of its own lane, somewhat recessed.

I'd never been to the Church of the Divine Word, but I must say, it might be the most beautiful church I've ever attended.

It's quite a small, simple church. It doesn't really have any nooks and crannies, aside from a shrine of our Lady which is just behind the altar. It's rather minimalist.

It has the sort of atmosphere that I always think of as "spacey". Otherworldly, bright, sleek. I suppose I associate this aesthetic with space-ships and space stations in science fiction films and television, and it's an atmosphere (for me) full of awe and wonder and a sense of limitless discovery.

The beautiful stained glass is the most striking feature of the church, especially the panel behind the altar (below). I assumed the website would tell me the name of the artist, but I can't find it. It's very much in the style of the Celtic Revival, which I like.

What I like most about the Celtic Revival was its determination to break into a new aesthetic "space". I hate to use that kind of language, but I can't think of a better term. The attitude of the Celtic Revival (and the Gaelic Revival) seemed to be: "Everything is going to be different now, we are going to remake everything." There was a world-creating energy about it, a sort of spiritual independence, an assertion of a Celtic future as well as a Celtic past. There's a newness about everything that partakes of that aesthetic; not only a newness, but a timelessness. That's the best I can do to describe it. This church was built in the early eighties, but the stained glass certainly seems inspired by the Celtic Revival. And, even if it's not, it reminds me of it.

I went to a Saturday morning Mass at this parish. There was a good turnout. The priest preached a homily mostly on Isaiah's predictions of peace, swords beaten into ploughshares and so on. He said that Christians had to go on having hope this would happen, despite what's going on in the world today. It seemed odd to me that he was interpreting it in such literal terms. I always assumed Isaiah's prophecy referred to the end of times, or the Church, or Heaven. Perhaps I am wrong.

As it's a Servite church, there was a prayer to St. Peregrine after Mass, and exposition of a relic belonging to him.

I loved this church. "Eternal Word" is a good name for it, as it really gave me a sense of the eternal. Perhaps it would be less impressive in winter, when bright sunlight wasn't flooding into it, but I think I would still like it a lot, at any time of year.

Another Quick Thought: Empty Places

It's summer in UCD. Once again I am struck by the poetry of empty places. And what seems to me like the strangeness of empty places.

There's almost eight billion people in the world, and yet there are empty places. And not just empty wilderness (though that idea is very exciting), but empty places that are heated, illuminated, and inhabitable.

Somehow I can easily imagine a world where we are never alone, where everywhere is crowded all the time. I'm glad I don't live in that world.

I'm not making any point about overpopulation, underpopulation, natalism, anti-natalism, or anything like that. I'm just reporting a reaction. A longstanding reaction.

I am reminded of "The School in August" by Philip Larkin:

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

("Home Is So Sad", as well.)

I've always loved empty places, and pictures of empty places, and scenes set in empty places. Empty playing fields; empty cinemas; empty trains. They can be very wistful, melancholic, dreamy, exciting, and otherwise atmospheric.

Many many years ago, I remember listening to my uncle Willie singing "it's so lonely round the fields of Athenry" in the bathroom of his farmhouse. His voice echoed on the tiles of the bathroom, in the quiet house, on a farm in a quiet corner of Limerick. I was disappointed when I learned "The Fields of Athenry" is a famine song. I thought of it as an evocative tribute to some remote rural area.

For two years in a row I flew to America on Christmas Eve. The first time, I was frightened the airport would be manic. It wasn't. It was completely and utterly dead. (I took the picture below that first year.) It had a very poignant atmosphere.

Another thing that fascinates me about empty places is that they make me think of the mystery of mutability.

The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides said that, in spite of appearances, change is impossible because all that exists is uniform and timeless. It sounds crazy but he had compelling arguments to back it up. (Trying to counter them is fiendishly difficult; apparently, their successful refutation is key to Aristotle's metaphysics.)

Change is very strange. Time and place are very strange. Imagine walking through the ruins of an ancient city and thinking of how, many centuries ago, it was full of life and activity.

Well, all change is like that. A thousand years or fifteen minutes, the principle is the same. I can never quite get used to change; it's both magical and heartbreaking.

I love empty places. I thank God for them.

(Reader, you might be wondering why I didn't give this blog post the apparently obvious title "A Quiet Place", especially since I love that movie. Here's the reason: I hate headlines and titles that are mere allusions to films, books, or whatever else. It's the kind of superficial cleverness  that sickens me. The mood of this blog post is very different from the mood of that film.)

A Quick Thought

It often occurs to me that there are two main drives in social life. We can roughly call them to drive for excellence, and the drive for solidarity.

I remember reading a book about primitive man which described "the cult of excellence" as the first distinguishing feature of human beings. Even the oldest fragments of human jewellery, pottery, etc. shows evidence of an urge to make things much better than they need to be.

We all feel this urge towards excellence. Even the stereotypical dude sitting at home playing video games in his underwear. He's trying to be as good at the video game as possible. Human beings always seem to be striving towards something, no matter how stupid. (And maybe reaching the last level of a video game is no more stupid than owning your own yacht.)

And every human activity attests to this. School, work, sport, romance-- we are all striving to be the best that we can, and often competing with each other.

But then there is the counter-drive, the drive towards solidarity. Or perhaps we can simply say "love". The perception-- common to most of us-- that the value of a human being is not in their accomplishments and their achievements, and perhaps not even in their moral character, but simply that they are a human being-- made in the image of God, for Christians.

This tension even seems to exist in Christianity. Christ told us to be perfect, but he also told us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Perhaps the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee encapsulates this whole dilemma. I think we've all found this parable perplexing at some level. Isn't the Pharisee at least trying? Isn't there a danger of the tax collector saying: "Thank God I am not like this Pharisee?". There seems to be an apparently impossible balance here. Perhaps only the saints achieve it-- saints whose protestations that they are the chief of sinners seem sincere.

Every philosophy of life and society seems to hover between these poles, somehow. Socialism is obviously titled much more towards solidarity. Capitalism is tilted much more towards the quest for excellence. I would say that conservatism leans more towards solidarity, while liberalism leans more towards excellence.

This duality pervades every relationship-- parenting, friendship, all kinds of authority. Love is surely wanting someone to be the best version of themselves. But we also have to love unconditionally. We are all familiar with the pitfalls of parenting-- the indulgent parent who spoils their child, or the opposite extreme of the "stage mother" who fills them with insecurity and fears of inadequacy.

I'm reading Roots by Alex Halley. It opens in a small village in the Gambia, back in the eighteenth century. It's easy to see how, in such small communities, balancing the quest for excellence and the quest for solidarity seems much easier. How do you balance them in our huge, complex, diffuse societies? It seems like one of the eternal human dilemmas.

Autumn Sequel by Louis MacNeice: One of a Possible Series of Posts

I very often, and increasingly often, berate my contemporaries for not reading enough poetry, and especially for not reading enough long poetry. Well, just like the doctor who chain-smokes, I should also berate myself, and I do. I haven't read nearly enough poetry, and I haven't read nearly enough long poetry.

Case in point: I have been trying to finish Louis MacNeice's Autumn Sequel for about thirty years, and I only succeeded a few weeks ago.

This despite the fact that Autumn Sequel has been an extremely important poem in my life, parts of which I've had memorized since my late teens.

I first discovered Autumn Sequel because a section from it was included as an epilogue to one edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. About two pages of it was excerpted, and I'll only quote a few lines (you can read the whole excerpt here):

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not even notice when we die...

The whole excerpt thrilled me, but these lines especially. "The great fire that boils the daily pot" was the sort of affirmation of the ordinary, the daily, the social, that I yearned for as a teenager. It evoked the same mood as Chesterton's line, "The strong incredible sanities of the sun".

It's good to affirm life-- it's crucial, in fact-- but it raises problems. There are different ways we can affirm life. There's the approach taken by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, a sort of mystical affirmation of everything equally:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

Could this indiscriminate ecstasy be sustained, and does it not risk reducing everything to sameness? Indeed, it can create moral problems, as with the penultimate line of the very excerpt in the Oxford Book of English Verse from which I've just quoted, which is: "As life can be confirmed even in suicide." No, life cannot be confirmed in suicide.

G.K. Chesterton articulates the danger of affirming everything in his Autobiography, where he writes: "What could I have said, if some tyrant had twisted this idea of transcendental contentment into an excuse for tyranny? Suppose he had quoted at me my verses about the all-sufficiency of elementary existence and the green vision of life, had used them to prove that the poor should be content with anything, and had said, like the old oppressor, "Let them eat grass." "

Happily, although MacNeice certainly affirms life in Autumn Sequel-- including the ordinary, everyday things of life-- it's not an indiscriminate affirmation. He is questioning his own ideas throughout the poem, and he is not blind to the problem of banality-- real banality, the banality of commercialism and the mass media and the routine. At the time he wrote the poem, MacNeice was writing for the BBC, and in one section he describes his work on a documentary about Mount Everest. He is unsure whether he is justified in taking something grand and heroic, such as the conquest of Everest, and packaging it as entertainment:

What price

Should we demand for turning what was rare

Into a cheap couvade or proxy paradise

Just one more travelogue to make the groundlings stare?

Groundlings will never see why Mallory answered why

Men should climb Everest: because it is there.

("Because it is there" is one of the many phrases used as recurring motifs in the poem.)

But MacNeice is certainly not a snob, either. His ideal of a poet has been quoted many times, including on this blog. However, it deserves to be quoted again: "I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions."

The depth of the poem comes, among other things, from the contrast between MacNeice's immense erudition (he won a first-class degree at Oxford and was at one point a lecturer in classics) and his openness, often even his delight, in the everyday and modern.

I've written a lot about the flux of daily life on this blog, and my fascination with it. I've also written about my concept of "streams of time". This is very much the flavour of Autumn Sequel. It describes MacNeice's journey through the autumn of 1953, ending in a train journey on Christmas Day, in an all-but deserted carriage. (This part might appeal to Peter Hitchens.) We see him working, returning to his student haunts in Oxford, visiting an art gallery, attending the funeral of his close friend Dylan Thomas, and doing many other things. All the while he is pondering the meaning and value of his experiences, and applying them to the human condition in general.

Autumn Sequel is written in terza rima, a devilishly hard rhyming scheme to pull off. It's the rhyming scheme Dante used for the Divine Comedy, but it's much better suited to Italian than English. MacNeice very often has to use rather contrived rhymes to follow it. If you're bothered by (for instance) the use of the word "fife" to rhyme with "life", you might not like this poem. But why should you be bothered?

Why is it called Autumn Sequel? Because the poem is a follow-up to a previous long poem, Autumn Journal, which is critically much more highly regarded. (I'm not sure I can add "popularly", since neither of them seem popularly regarded at all.) I recently read a diary entry by an Irish writer, who recalled telling MacNeice that a friend of his had been reading Autumn Sequel. "I suppose he prefers Autumn Journal, like everybody else", said MacNeice. He was pleased to hear the contrary.

I hope to return to Autumn Sequel in future posts, but I will finish this one with a section from Canto 23. Since the European Championships are currently taking place (soccer, in case you didn't know), I thought MacNeice's meditation on sport might be suitable:

I slip off to where the unlettered hinds
And miners watch an oval ball cavort
In a huge roaring box, a black shirt grinds

A red shirt in the mud; the joy of sport
Identifies oneself with X or Y
Or even with that ball, which one minute gives short

Change with its bounce and at the next will fly
Madly beyond and over; while this crowd
Also is something to identify

Oneself with, lose oneself in, on one loud
Raised beach one pebble in fifty thousand, tinted
Pink by the sinking sun; those muddy but unbowed

Players are me, this crowd is me, that undinted
And indestructible mischievous ball is me,
And all the gold medallions ever minted

By sinking suns are mine..

[..]

Is it absurd
To have preferred at times a sport to works of art?
Where both show craft, at times I have preferred

The greater measure of chance, that thrill which sports impart
Because they are not foregone, move in more fluid borders.
Statues and even plays are finished before they start,

But in a game, as in life, we are under Starter's Orders.