'Blunt-Force Monosyllables'

“And finally I love its mood or tone. Not without reservation: being so evenly lit, it gives off little sense of brooding, mystery, or weirdness, and it lacks the expressive contrast and coiled power of English, with its blunt-force monosyllables.”

Ben Downing celebrates his efforts to master Italian in middle age in “That Soft Bastard Latin,” published in the Winter 2016 issue of The Threepenny Review. He takes his title from stanza XLIV of Byron’s “Beppo: A Venetian Story”: “I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth . . .” I have little Italian but was pleased to find Downing’s glancing homage, in the passage quoted above, to the punchiness of English. Our beautiful language packs power into small packages. Some of our best profanity is monosyllabic, as is some of our best poetry. The first example I think of is Pope’s heavily monosyllabic “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”:

“Oh let me live my own! and die so too!

(‘To live and die is all I have to do:’)

Maintain a poet’s dignity and ease,

And see what friends, and read what books I please.”

More stunt than first-rate poetry, though impressive nonetheless, is Chidiock Tichborne’s “Elegy,” written entirely in one-syllable words while he awaited execution in the Tower of London in 1586: “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, / My feast of joy is but a dish of pain . . .” His contemporary, Shakespeare, reveled in monosyllables. I haven’t counted but many of the sonnets begin with sentences written strictly with one-syllable words, as in XXXV: “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.” And here is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Clerks” from his first collection, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896):

“I did not think that I should find them there

When I came back again; but there they stood,

As in the days they dreamed of when young blood

Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.

Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,—

And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood

About them; but the men were just as good,

And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,

And you that feed yourselves with your descent,

What comes of all your visions and your fears?

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,

Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,

Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.”

I count 15 multi-syllabic words among the sonnet’s 112 words, and the effect isn’t halting or stutter-like. If you and I were told to express ourselves strictly with one-syllable words, we might be temporarily hobbled but we could do it. On the positive side, we might be less attracted to bombast. On the other, singing would be more difficult. Shit.