`Lumens Are Not Luminaries'

Latin illuminates English with a bright cluster of light words. Both lumen and lux are “light” in Latin and “a unit of luminous flux” in English (OED).  To “illuminate” is “to light up,” from illūmināre, “to throw light on, light up, brighten, set in a clear light, make illustrious; in medieval Latin to baptize.” Light is a ready-made reservoir of metaphors, scientific and spiritual. “Illuminate” dates from the sixteenth century, when it meant both “to shed spiritual light upon” and “to enlighten intellectually.” Geoffrey Hill writes in section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998):

“Britannia’s own narrow

miracle of survival

was gifted to us by cryptanalysts

unpredictable Polish

virtuosi, it is now revealed,

grudgingly. One might have guessed.

Why, then, did Poland require

the last sacrifice of her cavalry

while she possessed such

instruments of cryptic-helio-

tropic strength, like the sunflower

that is both flamen

and lumen of her noble fields?

Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat.”

Hill is playing  his customary etymological games. To the Romans, a “flamen” was a priest devoted to a specific deity, and later it was adopted by Geoffrey of Monmouth. A flamen flames and Blake’s sunflower illuminates with lumens. In My Century, Wat illuminates a dark age with luminous words. Presumably, Hill puns on “Wat[t].” Anthony Hecht in “Illumination” (The Darkness and the Light, 2001) engages us in a more sober-minded game:

“Ground lapis for the sky, and scrolls of gold,

Before which shepherds kneel, gazing aloft

At visiting angels clothed in egg-yolk gowns

Celestial tinctures smuggled from the East,

From sunlit Eden, the palmed and plotted banks

Of sun-tanned Aden. Brought home in fragile grails,

Planted in England, rising at Eastertide,

Their petals cup stamens of topaz dust,

The powdery stuff of cooks and cosmeticians.

But to the camels-hair tip of the finest brush

Of Brother Anselm, it is the light of dawn,

Gilding the hems, the sleeves, the fluted pleats

Of the antiphonal archangelic choirs

Singing their melismatic pax in terram.

The child lies cribbed below, in bestial dark,

Pale as the tiny tips of crocuses

That will find their way to the light through drifts of snow.”

Hecht uses “illumination” in this sense, from the OED: “to decorate (an initial letter, word, or text, in a manuscript) with gold, silver, and brilliant colours, or with elaborate tracery and miniature designs, executed in colours.” Thus, the illuminated manuscript. Once we had illumine, enlumine and allumine to illuminate the same art, but words flare and fade. One needs light in order to read, and reading sheds light.