But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
The second half of the stanza, on a conspicuous level, describes the craft of a poet. It also insinuates language as a form of magic, as if poets are magicians who have power over the natural world. The third stanza links directly back to the title of the poem, describing language as a ‘cool web’ that ‘winds us in’. It also carries a warning of withdrawing too much from emotion, joy or fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
Language is here described as an Ocean, one that if we immerse ourselves too deeply in, we drown in ‘brininess’ and ‘volubility’. Graves’ choice of elaborate words demonstrates the power of language.
The final stanza is also a warning, a warning that without words and language to provide rationalisation, form and structure to our thoughts and emotions we ‘shall go mad no doubt and die that way’. The poet is ambivalent in his viewpoint, arguing that we need a balance between verbosity and losing self-possession of our tongues, that without the escape language and poetry offers we are like children, dumb to express ourselves.
In Edward Thomas’ poem, ‘Words’, he suggests that eloquence and language are not voluntary. The poem uses enjambment, reflecting the flow of inspiration and free thought. Addressing words directly in his poem, he asks for inspiration:
Will you choose
Sometimes –
(….) Choose me,
You English words?
Thomas insinuates that words choose the poet or writer, contrasting with Grave’s opinion (as suggested in his poem ‘The Cool Web’) that we have control over our use of language. Thomas compares inspiration coming to the poet as wind, ‘whistling through’ as if through a crack in a wall, or a drain. The imagery of words being weightless and almost supernatural is amplified by their comparison to ‘light as dreams’. The reference to words being as precious as ‘poppies’ can be interpreted perhaps as opium dreams, and ‘corn’ is the basis of bread. Through these comparisons the poet implies that language and words are a basic need of human culture, as necessary as bread and dreams – the allusion to ‘dreams’ being an escape from reality, and also a source of inspiration. An ‘old cloak’ implies familiarity.
The majority of the second stanza appeals heavily to the senses, using aural imagery:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer
Thomas also describes the mystery of words and language by comparing them to the races of the ‘dead and unborn’. The similarities between words and the dead and unborn alludes to the idea that there are poems and books not yet written, the ‘dead’ implying potentialities not reached and the ‘unborn’ suggesting poems and inspiration growing and developing within poets. The verse describes natural beauty, depicting roses, yew trees, hills, and streams after rain – implying that words are also natural beauty.
In the third stanza, Thomas alludes to the different dialects of Wiltshire, Kent and Herefordshire, drawing attention to the diversity of the English language. ‘From the names, and the things / No less.’
The final stanza eulogizes the act of writing a poem, addressing inspiration directly as ‘you’ again.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
Thomas personifies language and inspiration a tactile being, ‘Let me sometimes dance / With you’, also reflecting back on his previous description of poetry being dream-like, ‘Or stand perchance in ecstasy’. ‘Fixed and free’ describes the rigid backbone of a poem, the technical structure and form, but also the freedom the language gives it.
