Chemical reactions

Words are not hard BBs of meaning. Nor are words like the atoms of ancient atomic theory - impermeable bits of matter. Words are like atoms as understood in modern physics, taking on new properties when they are in the vicinity of other words.

Or, if you like, words are like your fickle friends who change their behavior and likes and dislikes depending on what crowd they’re in. My wife is not fickle, but her accent changes depending on who she’s talking to on the phone. Words are like that: They change their accent and tone depending on what company they are keeping.

Word have dormant properties that only come out when other words are present. Words have backgrounded meanings that come to the foreground when another word joins them on stage.

Take the word "lamb," for example. Isolated from any context, the word is a noun, and names a young ovine.

But what happens when we say not "lamb" but "lamb white." What's happened? For starters, the noun has turned into an adjective. Plus, connotations of "lamb" that were initially dormant have come alive. When we see "lamb" by itself, we may not even have thought of its color. Now we do. And "lamb white" not only describes a color (not dirty white, but pure white) but also begins to suggest connotations of purity, cleanness, perhaps even innocence.

What happens when we add the word "days" to this phrase, as Dylan Thomas does in his poem "Fern Hill": "lamb white days." This is an unusual phrase both because it uses "lamb" as an adjective (or adverb, modifying "white") and because it describes days of a certain color.

What connotations of the word "lamb" are being brought to the fore here? It's no longer simply a young ovine, and in fact that meaning recedes from the front of the stage and takes a place in the background. It's still there, and essential, but not the most essential. Other potential connotations are released by the chemical reaction that takes place when another words is brought into play. These connotations are "there" in the word, "indwelling" the word, but they are not released until another words comes into close contact with it.

What would be missing if Thomas had written only "white days"? what would that connote? Perhaps purity, brightness, winter and Christmas? "Lamb" connotes innocence, youth, vulnerability; it might gesture toward William Blake, or to various nursery rhymes; we might also think of religious connotations, of Passover and of Jesus. In any case, that innocent word "lamb" has become quite rich in significance, but mainly because the surrounding words called out its latent meanings.

This is an illustration of how "near" literary context affects the interpretation of words, but even here "distant" literary context is in play. The cultural, religious, and other connotations of the word "lamb," drawn from other texts and cultural phenomena, are in play in the near context of the line. The near literary context is indwelt by distant, and the way the word "lamb" works here depends on other texts that use the word lamb in various ways.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 06:49 AM

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