Auden, of course, was much concerned with language. Here's a link to my humble "Homage to W.H. Auden," written in 1981 and posted on this blog on 21 February 2012.
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Milton eight thou. words:
Shakespeare twenty-one thousand!
The grammar school oik
(And Papist-tainted) quite swamped
The orotund Puritan!
Luculent wordists,
Laptop-lorn, drudged by candle
Computing the Bard’s
Wort-fest – wide-eyed at the scoped
Terrains his weirdings revealed;
Yet in Stratford’s rents
The lumpen trammelled their lives
With a few hundred
Words at most: how, we puzzle,
Did the Swan’s epi-massive
Fructions of language
Emerge: some sprite chromosome
Knacked as Ariel?
It matters? It does: the tribe’s
Width of being – its far fetch,
Its fulled purposes –
Grows from, expands, its self-heft
Torso’d in language,
Mutter not diener of thought
(Kraus noted); and thought parents
The anguishing will,
Its conundrums and turn-’bouts,
Whose nose-taut searchings
At last might inhere the veld,
Tiptoeingly adequate
To all that’s the case.
World-historical Virgil,
Then, mything the brute
Growings of tough-shouldered Rome,
Abundanced its can-do speech
To fount that telos
Which, historied, now insists
As Rome’s foredained “Thus.”
And Rilke, tranced in a rose,
His teetered syntax torqued to
Grasp Dasein, aweing
Youth to saltimbanque featings
That body’s autumned
Sadness might, thought-forced, bud-burst
To soul’s glad terror, light-laved
By a dread Angel –
Oh, his words lived what they knew!
Well, by mind’s reachings
Language has birthed from clod things
An Ideosphere, where what’s
Mental blooms a world
Broader, deeper, than physics’
Navelling. It’s here
That the throned Word, contexting
All words, is gaspingly known,
Silencing tattle
Which false-steps the unwary,
Chorusing with mates
At table in bombast rounds:
At end the fullest words are
Wordless. A peasant
Hours-long sat before the Host:
When asked what he did
He replied, “Just this: I looks
At ’Im, ’an ’E looks at me.”
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© August/September 2022 & January/February 2023
