A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski

from the chair, and is it fair or simply an affair at which we all stare because it is there? And doesn’t all this explain the moment, the actual and transcendent reality?

    The rhyme, the song and the dance are after all the child’s
first play with her world and her language. These are the first understanding of the rhythms of the planet, the beat of the heart, the drum of the feet on the earth, the sound of her own blood rushing through her with a murmur like the sea’s as she lies on her pillow afraid now of the sound of her own being. She’s afraid and excited by her own breath which comes and goes so evenly as she sleeps, so quickly and jerkily as she runs and dances in her dream. Is the stitch in her side the pain exacted for her understanding of the world? The giddy fit as she twists in the swing, the fall to the ground, are these the causes of or the payment for the clarity of her inward seeing?

    Now and then she becomes preoccupied with the passing of time. Sunday, Monday, Solomon Grundy… In April first hear his trill, in July away I fly. None of us can be surprised at all this for such is the power of our first rhymes, our first poems. They are counting games, naming games, skipping songs. And so to Blake: “Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the Sun…”

    I once had a conversation with a woman who thought rhymes unsuitable for the sophisticated ears of her twentieth-century daughters. She had in fact rewritten Mother Goose for her little ones without the rhymes and rhythms which she judged offensive to the poetic times we live in. I have always thought of this as one of the worst crimes committed against childhood and the innocent ear.

    Not for me those prose poems of the nursery. I’m grateful for Mother Goose as she was first written and of course for things like Sunday School hymns: “All things bright and beautiful / All creatures great and small / All things wise and wonderful…” Later came psalms and canticles – “All ye works of the Lord… Sun and Moon praise ye the Lord” – and lewd rhymes full of hilarious tarts and knobs, that my brothers brought home from school.

    From there back to Blake: “O Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm…” From there to James Joyce: “Lean out of the window, / Goldenhair, / I hear you singing / A merry air. // My book was closed; / I read no more, / Watching the fire dance / On the floor…”

    All this before the child herself can read or write. She can only recite her poems and remember them by the rhymed couplets placed here and there as signposts amongst a field of words. At age five the little gold-rimmed granny glasses are placed upon the reluctant nose. Now the easy task of learning to read, the hard and weary task of learning to write, the sad knowledge that these written poems are dull indeed compared to the earlier spoken ones. The book of innocence has been closed. The book of experience has been opened. “Lean out of the window, / Goldenhair, / I hear you singing / A merry air /…Singing and singing / A merry air...”

    (1987)

Essay on language
    “I was in a printing house in hell and saw the method by which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”
    – William Blake, A Memorable Fancy

    Somewhere else I have written on the possibility, which appears to me every day as more of a probability, that a written language existed before humans could form words in their minds and utter them as sounds. This will not surprise anyone. Of course there was such a language. Many languages in fact. Systems of gesture, systems of drawings and symbols scratched in sand or painted on rock. And of course these pre-languages influenced the later spoken ones. This is not difficult to prove, for there still live on the planet today peoples whose spoken language is a secret one and whose only communication with other tribes, even those in the vicinity, is in