With the aid of Kate, I have been able to make forays into the new and wonderful world of metrical poetry. This brings me to the realisation that, once his metre is selected, the poet has in many respects far less control over what he says than we would expect. Countless perfectly good words, sentences, sometimes even whole topics, get thrown out the window because the don't match the da-dum-ty-dum pattern Kate keeps reiterating.
Which is fine, because what we're writing is light and fluffy. But most "serious" poetry out there is metrical. English students- and academics- spend hours and weeks, even whole careers, agonising over a poet's choice of one word rather than another.
Did Wordsworth, wandering lonely, really feel like a cloud? Or did "I wandered lonely as an albatross" simply not fit? Was he really lonely, or merely solitary? I don't get the impression from the oft-quoted first few lines that he regretted his lack of company. In prose, solitary would have been the optimal choice, if one didn't regret one's isolation.
Rhyme messes things up even more. Then think about alliterative verse... AS poetry has quite a rigid alliterative pattern. Can we really assign all that much importance to the selection of one word over any of its near synonyms? (Although it's a fair point that, even if the poet picked a word for metrical reasons, it will have changed the nuances of the poem as the audience heard it)
I'm in the begining stages of a research task on the AS verb Þyncan, which gives us our word thought* but in fact means "to seem, to appear". The mind is always the object** of Þyncan- giving us the old-fashioned phrase "methinks". It's shaping up to be a rather different task to last semester's grund shennanigans, with the word itself having a far smaller semantic field. So I'm going to have to dig further into the grammar and the textual contexts. Funfun.
Anyway. I'm begining my research with Antonina Harbus' The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry, which sadly says nothing much about thought-verbs. Still, good background. She attempts to contstruct a picture of how Anglo-Saxons thought about their minds, by reference to the mind/soul/heart/breast nouns. These are a clump of words, including heorte- modern "heart", mod- mind, and breost- breast, which have all shifted and solidified their semantic boundaries a great deal in the intervening millenium. The modern "mind" is the seat of rational thought, located in the head; distinct from the soul, which has no location; and both distinct from the "heart" which is the seat of emotions, or at least emotins we like. Emotions we don't like get shifted up to the mind, where rational thought can deconstruct them, but that's another matter. Point is, the Anglo-Saxons didn't draw these distinctions, but may have (probably did) draw other distinctions which are alien to us. (We do know with relative certainty that their mod was situated in the breost. Try, for a day or even a few minutes, to think about your mind as situated anywhere bit in your head. Trippy, isn't it? Heart and stomach are bad enough- yet we still believe in our hearts and have gut instincts- but try your big toe. or elbow.)
Back to Anglo-Saxon mind nouns. There are lots of them, esp. in poetry. The question which bugs everyone, particularly translators, is: what is the semantic field (range of meaning) of any one of them? To what extent do they overlap? Are they distinct at all?
Harbus takes the line that they are distinct, and has a decently sized book to prove it, so I'm not about to argue. I was amused to note, though, that she talks about a school of thought which says that this clump of synonymous nouns, like the big clump surrounding man/lord/warrior/hero, and various other smaller or less closely related clumps (treasure is one that i've come across a lot lately, and verbs for instruct/ordain/intend/order), exist for alliteration. Basically, if you need to talk about mind but you need an s word, there's sefa just waiting for you. There are a few weird things about that theory, at least as Harbus summarised it. Does that mean a language grows new words to meet the needs of poets? Don't poets live to exploit the language, not the other way around? But there is also the good explanation for the narrowing of a lot of semantic fields with the arrival of rhyming verse- one didn't need fifty trillion words for the one idea, so the extra ones, the ones found only in poetry, fade out. I like the fact that it actually acknowledges the strictures of metre and alliteration, thought it sounds like a cop out. Harbus points out that a lot of apparently unnessecary AS compounds actually serve the purpose of shifting stresses or creating alliteration. (want to say sefa but an extra syllable? ferðsefa!)
I wonder, though, if an oral society placing a high value on poetry within such a tight form goes some way to creating very flexible words- ones with wide semantic fields- as well as creating a need for a lot of words with overlapping, if distinct, semantic fields.
In the case of words surviving only in poetry... Were they dead words already? Had mod and a few others subsumed all of their previously discrete categories, leaving the rootless words vulnerable to exploitation by poets?
*Correction- according to Skeat's Etymological dictionary, the modern verb
to think comes from
Þencan, and the word
thought from one of its past tenses. Methinks, however, comes from
Þyncan, and during the middle english period the spellings got messed up, the pronunciation got messed up, and eventually the latter word was subsumed by the former.
**Indirect object, to be exact. me, in
methinks, is in the dative case. not that you can tell by looking at it.
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