'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!'

A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. It entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a liquid solution. Salts, for instance, are readily deliquescent. Figuratively, it came to mean, the OED tells us, “dissolving, disappearing, or melting away . . . Frequently humorous.” The Dictionary tells us Sydney Smith used it in a letter: “Striding over the stiles to Church, with a second-rate wife—dusty and deliquescent—and four parochial children.”

We can all think of poets who would find a place for deliquescent and its related forms – Wallace Stevens, Turner Cassity, Richard Wilbur, among others. A brief search uncovered it in Eric Ormsby’s  “Six Sonnets on Sex and Death” (Daybreak at the Straits, 2004). Here are the final lines of the fifth sonnet:

 

“Mortality was frisky in the lines

of telephones where drowsy mourning doves

felt final conversations in their claws

transmitted in designer valentines.

 

“O deliquescence of our quartz-like loves!

His heartbeat hovered in two grimy paws.”

 

I also happened on the word in Louise Bogan’s review of Finnegans Wake in the May 6, 1939 issue of The New Yorker. Comparing the novel to Ulysses, she writes:

 

“Finnegans Wake takes up this technical skill as it existed at the end of Ulysses and further elaborates it. Then Joyce’s mastery of structure and his musician’s feeling for form and rhythmic subtlety are here in a more advanced—as well as a more deliquescent—state of development.”

 

[Bogan’s review is collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]