I think verbs are sexy. Well, at least I find them attractive and interesting. They do exciting things. They make things happen. They are like a kind of moving or magnetic force in the language universe. Describing them as ‘doing words’ is like calling the Mona Lisa ‘a painting’ and the Sistene Chapel ‘a building’. There’s so much more to know and explore.
Sometimes I find it helpful to divide them into two types. There are those that are relatively straight forward, no ambiguity. You can tell from their clothes that they are looking for a good night out. They laugh brashly and flutter their eyelids. There is no mistaking their intentions. They are looking to connect. In the here and now they want to find you and take you somewhere. These are the finite ones. They exist in time and space. They tell you that someone or something is doing, is existing, and they tell you whether this is happening in the present or past or future. They link in a real, concrete world.
In the phrase ‘you call’ we know a lot about actor, action, and time. A person called ‘you’ is doing something called ‘calling’ and it is happening in the present. In the phrase ‘you had changed’ we know that a person called ‘you’ had done something called ‘changing’ and it was done in the past. There is no ambiguity here. It is clear; it is precise.
The other kind are different. They are the non-finite ones. They just don’t want to be pinned down. You hear their laughter in another room, but when you get there they are gone. You catch a glimpse of their tantalizing beauty and run after them only to see them disappear, leaving you with a degree of uncertainty about what has happened. They flirt and tease, but do not stay still long enough. You are always looking for them. They definitely do not want to connect, and if they inspire you to take a journey after them, you are never quite sure where you are going. They are not sure about space or time. They exist in an ethereal world of fleeting substance and indeterminate time. If you catch a sense of action, you never know who is doing the action or whether it is happening in the present, or the past, or the future. They are the mistresses of ambiguity.
In the phrase ‘faltering forward’ we know that someone is faltering, but we do not know for sure who. We could make an intelligent guess that it is someone or something nearby, but it would have to be a guess. The link is not spelled out clearly for us. We are not told ‘I was faltering forward’. We have no clear sense of actor, and neither do we have a clear sense of time. It was not ‘was faltering’, just ‘faltering’. It is hanging there only connected by implication to definite time or space. The same could be said for ‘leaves falling’ - not ‘the leaves are falling’, just ‘leaves falling’. We can infer that the leaves are/were falling, but there isn’t the definite grammatical link of ‘are’ or ‘were’, and without that link we also have no clear reference to time. There is ambiguity, implication, a lack of definition.
So, there are two types of verbs - the finite ones with clear links to time and space, and the vaguer non-finite ones that leave things more open to ambiguity. If you want something that is clear, you could use grammatical structures to emphasize that clarity. Finite verbs would be the logical choice. If you want something to sound vaguer, you could use grammatical structures to enhance that lack of clarity, and non-finite verbs would be a logical choice.
Now enjoy this short poem. I would encourage you to read it through several times.
The Voice
By Thomas Hardy
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.
Thomas Hardy wrote some good lyrical poems when he was young, but the most moving poems of all the thousands he produced were a little batch that appeared in his Satires of Circumstance when he was 72. Suddenly, it seems, memories of the youthful sweetheart, Emma, who became his first wife welled up in him, with an overpowering surge of happiness and grief. He invokes her immediate presence and then this is followed by the pain of the loss of that presence.
In the first half of the poem Hardy recalls her waiting for him. She is much missed. He can hear echoes of her voice (enhanced by the echoing repeated phrases of the first line). The memory is vivid - he remembers her in the ‘original air-blue gown’. Almost up to this point the verbs have been finite. The vision is relatively concrete. And given the relative simplicity of the language, the introduction of colour is dramatic and vivid.
However, almost as soon as she is remembered she begins to fade. The immediacy of this is suggested in the same stanza as the one describing the gown. Even here one of the verbs starts to stray into the vague non-finite form. ‘Let me view you, then, standing as when …’. It isn’t ‘Let me view you then when you were standing …’. Already the verb is losing connection with her and she is losing connection with time. She is starting to float away. And the vivid gown is also ‘air-blue’ - on the one hand vivid in colour, on the other suggestive of something ethereal and ghostly.
From this point on, the woman who was much missed definitely becomes the misty woman. The concreteness of the first half is replaced by listlessness and existlessness, and all the verbs are non-finite - ‘travelling’, ‘being consigned’, ‘[being] heard’, ‘faltering’, ‘falling’, ‘oozing’, ‘calling’. Not only is the woman and her world disappearing, but the poet’s clarity and sense of composure is also dissolving. The poet faltering; the woman calling.
words are sexy.
I would have loved to have been in one of your English lessons,if this is how you would have approached the subject from a teaching view point.
There is an air of seduction about this blog. I absolutely love it. I have only read the poem once and can see some of what you are saying. More analysis on my part is required.
What I love most about this though is the way you can make English come alive. I have never thought about verbs-groups etc being sexy, or anything else for that matter. Just a means of describing/doing what you want to say, in a certain way to make sense.
I do love poems, including Hardy, Brooke and Tennyson. I like to write them sometimes too, though I would not show them to most.
I will have to look at other groups of words in a new light.
Thanks for this excellent lesson, though you probably did not intend it as such. It would have taken me ages to write something like this(well, I could not have anyway), when probabley for you, no more than half an hour!
What a beautiful poem! And your analysis really brings it alive for me. Sexy Verbs! Who woulda thought?
the chaplain: Sexy verbs indeed. Frank Palmer’s The English Verb is kind of linguistic porn. The best and most satisfying kind I always think!
[...] a previous posting I described how he used verbs to convey the powerful impact of his loss (see The Misty Woman). Here I want to briefly explore his use of noun phrases to achieve a similar [...]