Languages

Throughout the poem, language is linked to elements of the natural world, creating a sense of both the inevitability of a language’s development and its (eventual) extinction. In comparing a language to “a river” (Line 4), the speaker represents language as a natural phenomenon, as something that is an intrinsic part of the world. The speaker’s likening of language to a river is also fitting in terms of the qualities the speaker attributes to language. The nature of language is fluid, not something that can be easily grasped or contained, as “There are no handles upon a language” (Line 1), and just like a river, a language can change its direction, as in the lines, “Breaking a new course / Changing its way to the ocean” (Lines 6-7). The lines, “It is mountain effluvia / moving to valleys” (Lines 8-9), suggests that, just as vapor (“effluvia”) can move down from the mountains and into the plains, so too can language change settings and transform itself along the way depending on its immediate social and geographical context.

All of the speaker’s natural imagery in the poem works to create a double meaning, first by emphasizing the idea that language is an inherent part of the world and of the human experience, and second, by suggesting that languages—like natural phenomenon—must also inevitably give way to the cycles of birth and death.