Waiting for the Right Word to Swim into the Net
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published August 30, 1979
2/23/2016
I will make the assumption, not entirely outrageous perhaps, that you have no great matter on your mind at the present moment and so have time for a word on the subject of writing.
This has been my profession for 40 years or more — and that in itself is a vast tribute to the tolerance and toughness of the reading public.
But it is not with writing to make a living that I want to deal, but writing as a form of pleasure. For although great sums of money have been earned by writing, there isn’t as much pleasure in it as would bait a mousetrap, supposing the pleasure were cheese.
Well, then, what do you do if you want to sit down and write something and just get pleasure out of it? There’s more than a hint of what you do in a poem by an Irish hermit who lived in the sixth century A.D. or maybe it was the seventh. When you get that far back, a hundred years is but a flicker in time.
This hermit lived alone with a white cat he called Pangur Ban and here is what he wrote:
I and Pangur Ban, my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at.
Chasing mice is his delight;
Hunting words, I sit all night.
Many times a mouse will stray
In the Hero Pangur's way.
Many times my keen thought set
Takes meaning in its net.
The translation is maybe by James Stephens, whom they would call “a darling man” in Dublin today (he wrote The Crock of Gold and you ought to read it if you haven't done so), or maybe Padraic Pearse, who was shot after the Easter Morning rising.
But now that I come to think of it, I believe it was by Robin Flower, who was an Englishman who taught himself ancient Celtic for the sheer love of the language.
But the point is that much of the pleasure of writing comes from setting your thoughts like a net and waiting for the right word to swim into it.
Lots of wrong words will come, to be sure, and those you must throw away, though they have pretty scales and eyes as iridescent as opals.
When the right word comes, your heart will open up with joy and you will know it is the right word because of the size of it and the heft of it and the shape of it and the way it glistens in your mind.
Think for a moment of Herrick, who, when writing about the dress of his mistress, put down:
When clad in silks my Julia goes
Ah then, me thinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
That is the only instance in all the English literature known to me of so apt a use of the word “liquefaction.”
It is hardly a word one associates with poetry, for it has a kind of chemical smell to it, as if one were turning oxygen into a fluid or making great boiling vats of tar out of the silent coal.
But no other word will suit. “The silken shimmer of clothes” is not good and is two words anyway and having selected the right word one can forgive Herrick his dalliance and assure him a place in Heaven though he was an erring minister of the established church, here on Earth.
Similarly, there is a story by Robert Louis Stevenson called, The Sieur de Malatroit’s Door which he describes the poet Francois Villon searching for succor in the snowclad streets of medieval Paris, fearful of the wolves which invade the city after dark and feast on the homeless.
He has left the refuge of a snug tavern in which he was writing a poem about a fish and he has left it because a man who was with him has had his throat cut in an argument. The man had the bad taste to have red hair and it outrages the poet that a red-haired man should lie across the table with his throat slashed.
Well, you can see that the poet was a man of deep sensitivity and suffered more than most of us.
Anyway, Villon sees at last a sanctuary light of a church and many a writer would have been content to call it a tiny light or a bud of light or a flicker of light. But Stevenson had the net of his thought well spread and, although all those words may have swum into it, he threw them away and waited for the right one. And the right one came along.
It was “peep.” Yes, the poet saw a “peep of light” in the fearful dark and the whole scene becomes immortal because Stevenson got the right word.
So that is the whole thing in a raindrop. None of us writing for pleasure are ever going to get the right word more than once a week. But when we do get it, it is worth more than a door of burnished gold.
Well, try me with a door of burnished gold.
PHOTO CREDIT: Image by CJ from Pixabay.
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