Attempts to rediscover a physical ordering of the language

i)

Erthe tok of erthe
erthe wyth wogh;
Erthe other erthe
to the erthe drogh

Erthe leyde erthe
in erthene throgh;
Tho hevede erthe of erthe
erthe ynogh

Anon.
(1300-1350)

(erthe = earth; tok = took; wogh = sin; drogh = drew; erthene throgh = grave; hevede = had;
apologies for omitting the two dots over the second 'e' in "earth")

ii)

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
With naked fote stalking in my chambre.
I have sene theim gentill tame and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.

Sir Thomas Wyatt
(1540)

iii)

“... have committed to Piero di Benedetto, painter, the making and painting of a panel which is there now, with all the material for it ... to be gilded with fine gold and coloured with fine colours, and specially ultramarine blue ...” (contract for Pierro della Francesca’s ‘Madonna della Misericordia’, 11 June 1445)

iv)

“The said master Luca is bound and promises to paint (1) all the figures to be done on the said vault, and (2) especially the faces and all the parts of the figures from the middle of each figure upwards, and (3) that no painting should be done on it without Luca himself being present ... And it is agreed (4) that all the mixing of colours should be done by the said master Luca himself...” (Signorelli’s contract for the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral, 1499)

*

Reading the first chapter Michael Baxandall’s ‘Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy’ triggered ideas in relation to the early phase of English poetry.

I ‘did’ Anglo Saxon and Middle English poetry and muddled my way through ‘Beowulf’, ‘Piers Plowman’, etc as part of the exam requirements. It all seemed to be the dreary stuff and of no interest to us ‘moderns’. Pound knew different – Canto I is but one very obvious example. We live and learn.

Looking at many of the poems of this early period* I’m now struck by what seems to be an evident astonishment at words. As if the language is still new enough to be ‘foreign’. The words are heavy in the hands (or on the tongue). Thus the delight in patterning experience evidenced by ‘Erth tok of erthe’. That words could create structures of meaning. That sense could emerge through placement. It just doesn’t seem to be taken for granted that ‘word’ and ‘world’ could connect. I’m wary of applying the term ‘childish’ to this – although it is an effect also seen in nursery rhyme where meaning evolves through pattern (“This is the house that Jack built/This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built/This is the ....”). The ‘message’ is not easily distilled. Paraphrase loses something vital – essentially the dynamic energy of language itself.

By 1540 many things have changed. I sense in Wyatt’s line a whole different ‘feel’ for words. The length of line, the arch of syntax, the sense of an ongoing argument to which words are subservient. Putting aside debates about Wyatt’s stress and musical phrasing (cf Bunting), words here seem to have been ‘domesticated’. They are coins of exchange and no longer the raw material still rough before minting.

And yet, the knowing display of language:

“They fle from me that sometyme did me seke”

The modulation of ‘ay’ to long ‘e’ sounds; the arrangement across the line of those ‘e’s. Words still possess their own qualities but must now be used decoratively, a calculated expenditure of acoustic wealth. Furthermore, the poet’s skill is now foregrounded.

I’m not trying to make absurd cross-discipline connections. Painting and poetry have their own requirements. However, in this trade off between two systems of ‘value’ there seems to be an interesting line of thinking. For the poet, the word with its own brilliance, lustre, texture, rarity: for the painter, the paint with its own value, economic and aesthetic. Against this, the more ‘notional’ values of skill. Look what I can do with the materials: the cleverness and persuasion of my argument (poet), the dexterity in execution and the visual persuasiveness of my images (painter).

At this point I pluck ‘The New Sentence’ off the shelf and find this passage:

“What happens when a language moves towards and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism”, the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.” ((p10) Ron Silliman)

Well, Alan, that gives us something to talk about over lunch on Wednesday ...

(* let’s not get all picky with dates & academic categories. I know 1066 and all that ...)