Week 36: On Reading Old Poems

Are the many meanings of words dangerous to our interpretation of poetry?

Greetings, Friends,

In 1960, Jack published two books about the meanings of words: The Four Loves and Studies in Words. You might be familiar with the former, an account of four forms of love from a Christian perspective. Studies in Words, by contrast, is read much less often, probably because it’s highly academic. It examines how particular words—Freedom, Nature, Wit, Life—accrue and change their meanings over time.

Today, I want to look at one off-hand remark from the introduction to Studies in Words and use it as a jumping off point to think about how we read poetry—especially old poetry. For context, this passage occurs just after a long discussion about our ability, in ordinary language use, to use context to distinguish which meaning of a particular word is intended. By contrast to this standard linguistic function, he brings up poetry:

There is, I understand, a species of modern poetry which is so written that it cannot be fully received unless all the possible senses of words are operative in the reader’s mind. Whether there was any such poetry before the present century—whether all poetry thus read is misread—are questions we need not discuss here. What seems to me certain is that in ordinary language the sense of a word is governed by the context and this sense normally excludes all others from the mind. (Studies in Words 11).

Note that Jack is not taking any position on whether modern poetry relies on multiple meanings more than older poetry. Later in the book, he brings up instances where older poetry (Alexander Pope, for instance) relies upon multiple meanings of words. He’s just noting that reliance on double meanings is a recognised function of modern poetry, but less so of ordinary conversation.

I would venture to say that reliance upon multiple meanings of words is one of the features that distinguishes poetry from everyday speech. This sort of linguistic move goes all the way back to classical poetry (if not further—I’ve never studied Gilgamesh closely enough to know). The Odyssey opens with a particularly important bit of verbal ambiguity: in its second line, Odysseus is referred to as πολύτροπον. This term has been translated as “many-minded man,” “man of many turnings,” “man skilled in all ways of contending,” “complicated man.” It’s hard to render in English because the word means many things. In this post, Emily Wilson (the translator who renders it “complicated man”) explains “the word πολύτροπον suggests multiplicity (πολύ-, as in ‘poly-gamy’ or ‘poly-theism’), but also ‘turns’ or ‘disguises’ or ‘twists.’” All of those dimensions of the word tell us about Odysseus—the warrior, storyteller, liar, the homebody who went to war.

(My husband wishes me to point out that he suggested this example. Which is true, but also makes me look a lot less clever. But a) he’s the linguist in the family, and b) I was the one who found Emily Wilson’s Substack first. So there.)

Of course, Jack would have been aware of this and many other examples. He himself offers instances of double meanings later in the book. His concern in Studies in Words is to explore the multiple meanings of significant words and to help his readers understand which possible meanings they might encounter when they open an old book. He wants to help readers avoid the perils of misreading due to changes in language—whether they’re reading a seventeenth-century poem or a nineteenth-century novel. He writes:

I am ashamed to remember for how many years, as a boy and a young man, I read nineteenth-century fiction without noticing how often its language differed from ours. I believe it was work on far earlier English that first opened my eyes: for there a man is not so easily deceived into thinking he understands when he does not. (311–12)

To this end, as he explores the contours of words like Sad or Conscience, he identifies their “dangerous senses”—the meanings which readers are likely to falsely assume are present when they encounter the word. For instance, the dangerous sense of “sensible” is “the opposite of silly or foolish” (161), but it can also mean “(1) perceptible to the senses, (2) sentient, not unconscious, (3) having such sensibility as Marianne Dashwood’s” (163).

(One of the fun things about Studies in Words, by the way, is how often Jack appeals to Jane Austen to elucidate the meaning of a word. The allusion to Marianne is meant to immediately illuminate his reader’s understanding of the word. If you don’t know, Marianne is highly emotional and idealistic, where her sister is calm and possessed of ‘common sense’—hence why the novel is called Sense and Sensibility.)

This sort of project is perfectly consistent with Jack’s broader scholarly agenda. He’s always interested in understanding how the writers of any period—Classical, Medieval, Early Modern—would actually have thought and felt. It makes sense that he also devotes attention to how precisely those writers used familiar words.

This is a laudable enterprise, and it’s founded on a reasonable premise: that, as much as we can, we should try to understand what an author means when we interpret their work. If you’ve never had to take a literary theory class, you might be surprised to learn that this assumption is actually pretty controversial amongst scholars. We have been arguing for at least a century about where the meaning of a text resides: is the meaning whatever the author intended? Is it something we can find by careful attention to the text, without any appeal to historical or biographical context? Is it something that unfolds through each reader’s response? And what do we mean by meaning anyway?

I’m not going to turn this newsletter into Literary Theory 101 (you’re welcome). What I find interesting about Jack’s passing remark quoted above is that it points us to two possible ways (among many) to read old poems. They’re not mutually exclusive. They both can yield interesting readings. But I think it’s to our benefit as readers to recognise which approach we’re using.

The first is the approach Jack adopts in Studies in Words and elsewhere: to try, as much as possible with the resources we have, to understand what the author meant to say. What do the words used mean, in the historical context? What in a poem would have made its original readers laugh or cry, would have offended or delighted?

My sense is that most readers who pick up an old poem desire this sort of understanding, even if we feel helpless to actually achieve it. I’m curious if this is true for you: when you’ve had to read a “classic,” do you wonder what it meant to its earliest readers? Have you ever set an old book down because you just couldn’t understand it, or you felt like you might need to read a history textbook to grasp what was going on?

I have nothing to say against this way of reading. It’s one I aspire to, to whatever degree I can. I value the work of scholars like Jack which can help translate for me works and periods I might not otherwise be able to understand. I need a lot of help, for instance, to enjoy medieval English literature: I often feel repelled by Chaucer or bewildered by the symbolism of Arthurian romances. When I read these books, I do the best I can with the knowledge I have, and I usually find a great deal to appreciate.

But this quest for understanding is not the only way to read. Jack’s off-hand remark about double meanings in poetry points us to another.

Imagine, for a moment, that English poetry prior to the twentieth century just… didn’t use double meanings. (This is a total counterfactual. Go with me here.) What would happen if readers trained on modern poetry to consider every possible meaning of a word at once, circled back to read older poems and started seeing double meanings where none were intended. What would happen?

Well, some confusion might arise. The reader’s own habits would make it almost impossible for them to grasp the intention of an author or the experience of a poem’s original readers. But by bringing their own meanings and their own interpretive lens to the text, the modern reader would probably also find lots to interest them. They would connect with old poems in new, unintended, interesting ways.

Let me give a real life example of how these two sorts of reading overlap. There’s a famous Anglo-Saxon elegy called “The Ruin.” It’s a beautiful lament for a ruined city, but its most distinguishing feature is that it survives only in fragments: it was recorded in the Exeter Book, which suffered considerable damage to the back pages, and as a result, parts of the poem are irretrievably lost.

There are many approaches to reading “The Ruin,” of course, but two in particular are worth noting here. The first is the careful work which many scholars of Old English have undertaken over the years, to reconstruct the meaning of the poem as best as possible around the damage, and to put it in conversation with other comparable elegies. This work is invaluable: you and I can read “The Ruin” in translation because of these scholars.

But a reader trained on modern poetry probably won’t experience the damage to the text as primarily a frustrating obstacle. Or at least, I don’t. To me (and to many other readers), the form of “The Ruin” mirrors its content in a very satisfying way. I like that this poem about a ruined city is itself a ruined poem. I prefer translations that foreground this damage, that render the language in terse and fragmentary ways.

I recognise that my approach isn’t particularly rigorous: indeed, if scholars recovered the full original text of the poem, I might be less interested in it. My modern delight in poetic fragmentation removes me from the poem’s author and its original readers, and removes me from scholars devoted to understanding the poem in its Anglo-Saxon context. But I don’t really mind, because I get to enjoy an evocative, haunting reading experience.

I’m unapologetic about this bias, but I’m also aware of it. I know that my reading is imposed on the text, layered atop it like a palimpsest.

And that’s the thought I want to leave you with. Literary scholars are typically different from ‘ordinary readers’ (perhaps I should say ‘normal people’) in the degree of our obsession with books and the amount of time we’ve had to read, but we’re also very aware of how we are reading and why. And I think that sort of awareness—without the jargon of literary theory—can be useful to anyone who wants to read old books.

It’s always worth asking yourself as you read how you might be imposing modern values and expectations on the text. Most often, we recognise the gap between our modern vocabulary and older usages of English, but it can be easier to overlook differences in values and expectations. Often what clues us in to those differences will be a sense of dissatisfaction or alienation.

When you recognise those gaps, that’s where things get really exciting. Do you need to interrogate your own beliefs? Do you need to gain a better understanding of the author’s values? Is your misreading producing something interesting?

In my experience, that’s the real goal of literary scholarship: whether a reading produces something interesting.

But ordinary readers don’t pick an old, dense, difficult book up just to find an exciting interpretation: we want wisdom, illumination, perspective. And attending to moments of confusion and discomfort can guide us into that richer reading experience.

This whole newsletter might have felt a bit dense. If so—if you’ve read this far—my apologies. But I’d love to know what you think: do you read old books, and if so why? Do you ever feel that you’re misunderstanding or misinterpreting a book? Does it frustrate you? Does it ever excite you?

Wishing you each a moment of insight this week—be it into the meaning of a word, or the meaning of the world,

Sarah

P.S. I wrote this whole post, only to discover the next day that Jack had already said something very similar, much more clearly than I can say it. This passage comes from An Experiment in Criticism (which, by the way, is a fantastic book—highly recommended if you’re interested in ‘how to read and why’). I think you’ll discern the differences between Jack’s priorities and mine (and his context and mine) from the way he frames the issue here:

The literary sometimes ‘use’ poetry instead of ‘receiving’ it. They differ from the unliterary because they know very well what they are doing and are prepared to defend it. ‘Why'', they ask, ‘should I turn from a real and present experience—what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—to inquiries about the poet’s intention or reconstructions, always uncertain, of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?’ There seem to be two answers. One is that the poem in my head which I make from my mistranslations of Chaucer or misunderstandings of Donne may possibly not be so good as the work Chaucer or Donne actually made. Secondly, why not have both? After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text, this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions, and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience were due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, my own one? (100–1)