Loving Thy Mother Tongue
Appreciating the Beauty of the English Language
Interviewer: Several times I’ve heard you refer to the Western literary tradition. You were teaching Shakespeare and sometimes you would say the Western Christian literary tradition. This is not popular anymore.
Wendell Berry: I think that the tradition ought to live, and it’s disheartening to run into young people, even practicing writers, who don’t know any writer who lived before WWII. When I was coming along, two of the great figures of poetry were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And of course if you’re going to make any sense of them you’ve got to read at least something of what they read. You’re thrown back to the tradition. Finally, both of them send you back directly to Dante. If your reading is all recent, you’re missing a great wealth, a great pleasure.
I’m rereading Tom Jones for the third time. Hardly a modern novel, but it’s so witty. Robert Frost said that what he liked for a reader to get from a poem was a sense of what a hell of a good time he had writing it. You get that from Fielding. He’s having a very good time making fun of Thwackum the preacher and Square the philosopher. The human heritage, if you have it, saves you from being too surprised. It’s a shame for somebody to have to fall in love and think that she’s the first one that it ever happened to. Never heard “My love is like a red, red rose.” It oughtn’t have to come as a big surprise. Nobody ought to have to suffer the death of a loved one without some poetry to remember, an elegy or lament.
And they need to know the King James Version of the Bible. People think that the translation has had a big influence on English. But some of it is English. ‘Intreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…’ That’s our language. ‘And there were in the same county shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown round about them: And they were sore afraid.’ How beautiful. That’s our language.”1
In this article, I want to display just a few aspects of the English language that are truly beautiful, so that you go away encouraged because you speak this language and not lamenting.
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Knowing and embracing your mother tongue gives understanding to your place in the world. It fulfills the command of the Oracle of Delphi, “Know thyself.” Knowledge creates understanding, understanding creates wisdom. To know your place in the world will give you understanding of your region, state, town, and home. From that understanding comes the wisdom of how to live in it. What would the South be without our dialect?
Language is important because it is not only how we communicate to one another but how we think about the world. If you despise the language you speak, you inherently despise the way your culture thinks about the world. As the English language is built upon the Germanic, Nordic, and Roman tongues, you would be despising Western culture and its history. Not only did these languages influence the English language, but as they were the influencing the language they were influencing the history, culture, traditions, and worldview of the Anglo-Saxon people. To despise your language is to despise the foundation of the tower you are sulking in. A sort of twisted Rapunzel story where we are in the tower protected by our sweet prince, eagerly waiting for the evil enchantress to save us. The English language is often called a “bastard tongue” for it having many roots and foundations. But if we hate our tongue, we divorce ourselves from our rich ancestry and memory, making ourselves truer bastards than the English language.
Grammar can be wrongly seen as purely clunky mechanics that mean nothing; something that is not objective and may be freely manipulated to our choosing because that is easier. It has also been seen as a boa constrictor, constricting you, the prey, to submit to its devices that may never step outside the boundaries. But this is not true. Yes, the English language may have hard grammar rules at times, but they give the language its beauty. The beautiful shape and sound of a stream is due to the barriers around it. Without them there would be no beauty. There would be no stream. Limitations do something. Grammar gives beauty. Working within the framework of grammar hews out the channel to create the tributary. Semicolons and commas create a speckled texture in grammar, as rocks and stones do in a brook.
The precise ordering of stressed and unstressed syllables produces a musical-like sound. This is seen in poetry through meter but is also seen in literature. See an example from the famed opening paragraph of William Faulkner’s Light in August. I would recommend reading it aloud to capture it:
Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old
Did you notice it? Faulkner beautifully employs the syllables to make the rhythm. Faulkner therefore sets the pace of the novel. And all of this is done with very simple words!
This can also be done with eloquent language, and is especially seen in William Shakespeare’s Richard II. The play is masterfully written in regular iambic pentameter. (Iambic means that an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed and pentameter means that it is repeated five times.) Richard II himself speaks with more eloquence than the others because he is haughtier. Through the progression of the play, which is a picture of Psalm 37, we see Richard in Act V, Scene V using the same meter as he is still haughty though defeated. He hasn’t relented. Again, read these lines below aloud as Shakespeare wrote them to be read aloud:
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars, Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame, That many have and others must sit there; And in this thought they find a kind of ease, Bearing their own misfortunes on the back Of such as have before endured the like. Thus play I, in one person, many people, And none contented: sometimes am I king; Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar, And so I am: then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king’s again: and by and by Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing:—
Both Faulkner and Shakespeare undermine the two fallacies that I presented earlier. Faulkner doesn’t always follow the rules and yet he is America’s premier writer. Shakespeare faithfully follows the rules and is the greatest writer of all time. They prove my earlier point: the English language is beautiful and its beauty must be respected.
By no means am I trying to become academic or make you academic. I hate academia and academia hates me. Academia hates English. I am merely showing you beauty of English and attempting to cultivate a love in you for it. Loving your English tongue does not make you an academic, it makes you a human being. And academia hates human beings. Love your language and rejoice in being a human.
I conclude with this exhortation:
View the English language as a palette of oil paints, not as a labyrinth. As that palette is mastered, you become more kingly and less beastly, and the man who has the beauty of his tongue suffused within himself shall slay any minotaur.
- Junius Brutus
An excerpt from an interview done by Forma: A Magazine from the CiRCE Institute, 07 The Conversation Issue, Winter 2018, page 47.