Interpretive Exercise #1: Diction

Please respond to the prompt below by sending me an email. Your response should appear in the body of the email, not as an attachment. The subject line should read, “Yourname Diction Exercise” (e.g., “Carens Diction Exercise.”) I will not give credit for late responses, even if they are caused by computer glitches or other horrendous technical issues. I will respond to your message to let you know I have received it.

These email exercises will NOT be graded individually, but I would like you to put some thought and effort into them. Your responses over the course of the semester will influence your class participation grade. I expect that a thorough response will take about 20-30 minutes of your time, maybe a little bit more or less depending on how fast you work.

I see these emails as a way to extend the classroom a little bit, to give you some guidance with concepts that I don’t have time to cover in class and to give you all an opportunity to show me your interpretive skills.

OK, on to the heart of the matter . . .

Good writers, as you know, choose words carefully. The selection of words, or diction, is the most basic of all literary devices. To understand a poem, we have to understand why a writer chooses one word rather than another.

We have a very powerful tool to help us understand the significance of words. That’s right: your old friend, the dictionary. And, luckily, you have online access to the mother of all dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary or OED, as it is known. I would like you to get into the habit of using the OED – if possible when doing reading for class, but certainly when you are writing your essays. To access the OED, go to the library home page, click on the “Find and Search” link in the left-hand column. On the next page, click on the “databases” link and find the OED in the alphabetical list of databases.

The more I study literature, the more I realize how essential the dictionary is. It is essential when you encounter a word you don’t know, of course. But I also use the dictionary constantly when I am attempting to unpack the significance of words that I already know – or that I think I know.

For example, consider the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “Nurse’s Song” from Songs of Experience:

                       When the voices of children are heard on the green

                       And whisperings are in the dale,

                       The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,

                       My face turns green and pale.

This is a very short poem so we can take it for granted that any word that gets repeated is pretty important. In this stanza, the word “green” pops up twice. What could be simpler than the word “green,” you ask? Well, it’s not just a color. It is used in two separate senses in this poem, and both of them will help us understand the poem better if we look into them a little bit more carefully.

If you go to the OED, you will find about 400 (a slight exaggeration) distinct senses of the word as an adjective and noun. The noun forms include such interesting slang uses of the word as “marijuana of poor quality” (B 7 f) and “sexual activity, especially intercourse” (B 11 f). Who knew? I am not suggesting that Blake’s poem puts these odd definitions into play. Indeed, the lesson here is that the context in which a word appears helps you to exclude many meanings from consideration.

When, in the first line of the poem, the Nurse refers to the “the green,” she probably does not have sex or drugs on her mind, but rather “a piece of public or common grassy land situated in or near a town or village” (B 12 b). This definition helps us to visualize the setting of the poem, a place associated with a community, a place that is natural, a place where children might congregate and play.

More interesting stuff turns up in relation to the second use of the word, when the Nurse says that her face turns “green and pale.” This strange assertion, which would be difficult to take literally, should make us wonder and send us to the dictionary to find out more. In this case, the word is used as an adjective, so we should look in that section of the definition. We don’t have to read far before we see a definition that seems to apply. When referring to the complexion, the word signifies “having a pale, sickly, or bilious hue, indicative of fear, jealousy, ill-humour, or sickness” (A I 3 a). This definition of the word really helps me to understand further the psychology of this experienced and “ill-humored” speaker, who is apparently sickly jealous of the innocent freedom of the children who play on the green. (If you click the button at the top of the window that reveals quotations, you will see that the “Nurse’s Song” is cited as an early instance of this use of the word.)

The general point here is that using the dictionary – especially the OED – can deepen your understanding of a poem. Sometimes the information you discover will confirm suspicions you already have. Sometimes it will really change your interpretation or open it up it in surprising ways.

OK, sorry to blab on for so long. This is what I would like you to do: read back through the Blake poems you liked most and find a word that strikes you as important, interesting, or puzzling. Look up the word in the OED and read through all the definitions. Then go through the process I’ve demonstrated above, telling me in writing how your dictionary work has expanded your understanding of the poem.

Remember that many words, like “green,” are sometimes used as nouns, sometimes adjectives, sometimes verbs, etc. You should limit your research to the definitions associated with the part of speech of the word as it appears in the line you have chosen to analyze.

If you are stumped for a word to research, check out the word “worm,” which appears in “The Sick Rose” from Songs of Experience.