《英诗理解指南》(续)

A Guide to the Understanding

of English Poetry

(Continued)

3.2 Denotation and Connotation

    Poets pay much attention to the literal and literary meanings of a word, that is, the denotation and connotation of a word. Every word has at least one denotation, a meaning as defined in a dictionary. Denotation is the basic meaning of a word, but the English language has many a common word with more than one denotation. If we look up the word spring, for instance, in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English with Chinese Translation (Revised Third Edition, Hong Kong, Oxford University Press 1984), we will find that it has 12 distinguishable meanings: 6 as nouns and 6 as verbs.

    The connotation of a word is its overtone or shade of meaning that has acquired through association and historic use or by the way and circumstances in which it has been used. Take the word home for an example. By denotation the word means only a place where one lives; by connotation it suggests family, comfort, love, and security. Both of either the word childlike or childish mean characteristic of child, but childlike suggests innocence, meekness and wide-eyed wonder; while childish connotes pettiness, willfulness and temper tantrums.

    If we name over a series of coins, such as nickel (美国和加拿大的五分镍币)，peso (比索,中南美洲各国及菲律宾等国的货币单位)，lira (里拉，意大利的旧货币单位)， shilling (先令),  sen (日本铜币单位，1%日元), doubloon (从前西班牙金币的名称）, the word doubloon will immediately suggest pirates, though one will find nothing about pirates in looking up its meaning in the dictionary. “Pirates” are part of its connotation.

    Connotation involves many factors, such as romance, emotion, favorable or unfavorable, complimentary or derogatory, and many other associations. For example, steed and Cathy are more romantic than horse and China; mother is more emotional than female parent is. Between the terms secret agent and spy, the former is neutral, while the latter is derogatory and unfavorable. The adjectives sad, dejected, depressed, melancholy, and blue, are all used of unhappy or despairing states of mind, but each of them has a shade of slight difference in extent and depth of emotions. Sad is the mildest and most general term, and also the least explicit. Dejected, with a literal meaning of “cast down in spirits”, suggests a temporary state of disappointment and discouragement brought on by some external event. Depressed describes an emotional state in which both physical and mental activity may be slowed down, and it is applied to a more prolonged state of sadness. Melancholy suggests a habitual pensiveness and sadness that may not necessarily be unpleasant; it only stresses the presence of sorrow rather than of pain. During the Romantic period it was fashionable in literature to take a melancholy outlook on the world and to turn one’s back on liveliness and joy. In the past, melancholy has been applied to persons suffering from the marked lowness of spirits associated with mental illness. Blue is a loose synonym for the above words, and it tends to sound informal.

    Following are more examples concerning denotation and connotation of words.

There are a number of synonyms that denote “dog”, such as canis, canine, hound, cur, whelp, dingo, doggy, pup, puppy, mongrel, and bitch. But they have different connotations. The first two words canis and canine are associated with science, so they are often used in scientific contexts as in “Canis Major”（大犬座） and “Canis Minor” （小犬座）, and “canine madness” (狂犬病) and “canine-tooth”（犬齿）. A pretentious or facetious person might use the expression “canine quadruped”, because the word quadruped refers generally to an animal with four legs. Hound is a special kind of dog for hunting, therefore when it is used it often associates with hunting. The original meaning of whelp is the young of various flesh-eating mammals, especially a dog; but it is often used with a derogatory sense to refer to a disagreeable child or youth (“狗崽子”). The word mongrel has apparently an unfavorable association, too, because it refers to a dog resulting from the interbreeding of diverse breeds or strains（杂种狗）. Cur is a kind of inferior dog; and we might call a surly or cowardly person as “a cur”. Pup and puppy are young dogs. Doggy is an informal word, often used by children. For dingo, it is a wild dog, Canis dingo, and in Australia, it often refers informally to a worthless person.

    In understanding, and, further, in appreciating a poem, the reader depends much on his grasping the connotations of its words than on his knowing their denotations, for connotation is one of the means by which a poet concentrates or enriches his meaning. Take the following poem for example.

There Is No Frigate Like a Book

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll;

How frugal is the chariot

That bears the human soul!

    In this poem the poet is describing the power of a book or of poetry that can carry the reader away into a world of imagination. To do this the poet compares poetry to various means of transportation: a boat, a team of horses, and a wheeled land vehicle. But the poet has been careful to choose kinds of transportation means so that they would bear romantic connotations. “Frigate”, a fast sailing-ship formerly used in war, suggests exploration and adventure; “coursers”, swift horses, suggest beauty, spirit and speed; “chariot” suggests speed and the ability to go through the air as well as on land with a mythological implication. (A “chariot” is originally a two-wheeled horse-drawn seatless vehicle used in ancient times in wars and races, and it also involves the myth of Phaethon who tried to drive the chariot of Apollo, and the famous painting of Aurora with her horses, once hung in almost every school). How much of this poem's meaning comes from this selection of words related to vehicles is apparent if we try to substitute for them, say, “steamship” for frigate, “horses” for coursers, “streetcar” for chariot, “miles away” for lands away, “cheap” for frugal, and “moving” or “running” for prancing.

    The variety of denotation, complicated by additional tones of connotations, makes language confusing and difficult to use. Any person using words must be careful to define by context precisely the meanings that he wishes. There is the difference between a prose writer and a poet in using words. A practical writer, say, a scientist, always wants singleness of meaning and attempts to confine each of his words to one meaning at a time, while what a poet wants is, on the contrary, richness of meaning, and often he would take advantage of a word that has more than one meaning so that he can mean more by saying less. A scientist needs and invents a strictly one-dimensional language, while a poet needs a multidimensional language and creates it partly by using a multidimensional vocabulary and adds the dimensions of connotations and sound to the dimension of denotation. Thus, when Edith Sitwell in one of her poems writes, “This is the time of the wild spring and the mating of tigers,” she uses the word spring to denote both a season of the year and a sudden leap; and she uses tigers rather than lambs or birds because the word tiger has a connotation of fierceness and wildness that the other two lack. In “When did my colds a forward spring remove” (The Canonization by John Donne), the same thing happens: “(a forward) spring” means either “a fountain” or “a season”.

    In William Blake’s The Echoing Green, the word green, when used as a noun, denotes the color and a smooth stretch of grass. But beyond its denotations it also suggests youth and vitality (stanza 1), freshness of memories (stanza 2), and pale complexion as from the aged, the sick, etc. (stanza 3).

    The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings that words have are an obstacle to the scientists but a source to the poets. Poets are of course not the only people who care about the connotations of language. But poets like to play “a many-stringed instrument,” and they like a word to sound more than one note at a time. The first problem in reading poetry, therefore, is to develop a sense of language, a feeling for words. One needs to become acquainted with words' multiple meanings, their shape, their color, and their flavor.

(To be continued)