No amount of familiarity can deprive
such words as "death" and "love" and "God" of their emotional value.
Words like these must forever recur in the vocabulary of poets. Yet,
since in living discourse a meaning is seldom complete in a single
word, but requires several words in a phrase or sentence, a word which
by itself would be cold may participate in the general warmth of the
whole of which it is a part. Consider, for example, the last line of
the final stanza of Wordsworth's "The Lost Love":--
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and O!
The difference to me!
The first three words, by themselves, are completely bare of emotional
coloring, yet, taken together with the last, and in connection with
the whole stanza, and in the setting of the entire poem, they are aglow
with the most poignant passion.
As for the image, the last of the aspects of a word, the judgment of
Edmund Burke, in his "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" still remains
true: in reading words or in listening to them, we get the sound and
the meaning and their "impressions" (emotions), but the images which
float across the mind, if there are any, are often too vague or too
inconstant to be of much relevance to the experience. They are,
moreover, highly individual in nature, differing in kind and clearness
from person to person. The recent researches into imageless thinking
are a striking confirmation of Burke's observation.
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