Languages

Time is one of the dominant motifs in the poem. The speaker repeatedly stresses the inevitable changes time brings both to the natural world and to language itself, reminding the reader of the inevitable cycles of birth and death in both natural and linguistic terms. The speaker uses large units of time three times in the poem, and these references correspond to past, present, and future. In the first reference, the speaker describes a language emerging like a river “Once in a thousand years” (Line 5), capturing the moment in which a language is born and starts to gain dominance. In the second reference, the speaker looks to the future, in which “Words wrapped round your tongue today” (Line 13) shall be reduced to “faded hieroglyphics / Ten thousand years from now” (Lines 17-18, italics added), as a warning that living languages of the present will become, like the Ancient Egyptian “hieroglyphics” (Line 17), mere relics of lost languages and civilizations with the passage of time. At the poem’s end, the speaker compares human song to the wind, warning that the song someone sings today “is not here to-morrow / Any more than the wind / Blowing ten thousand years ago” (Lines 21-23, italics added). In alluding to the winds of the past, the speaker is reminding the reader that although the wind is always present in some form as a natural phenomenon, it is never the exact same wind experienced thousands of years before. It is, the speaker claims, the same with languages: While language is natural and will always exist in human society, it will never be the same language known and used by prior generations and civilizations.

Like time, transformation is the other dominant motif in the poem. The speaker depicts the essence of language as its mutability. In “Breaking a new course / [and] Changing its way to the ocean” (Lines 6-7), the speaker likens the life cycle of a language to that of a river, in that it can change directions and break through new terrain with use. Languages can also change their social and geographical context, as the speaker acknowledges the power of languages to move between countries (“from nation to nation,” Line 10) and to allow peoples from diverse backgrounds to find a common means of expressing themselves to one another, as referenced in the phrase, “Crossing borders and mixing” (Line 11). The speaker also alludes to the ways in which a living, spoken language can become a written one, in the reference to the “faded hieroglyphics” in Line 17. Such transformations even in written form are, however, ultimately futile, as “There are no handles upon a language” (Line 1) due to its fluid and ever-changing nature, and therefore even writing may fail to “mark it [a language] with signs for its remembrance” (Line 3).