Notes on Words

Notes on Words is the successor to our feature Word of the Month which was a popular element of this website for some years. "Word of the Month" was a feature on the Norman Nicholson Society’s website from 2014 to 1018. Each entry, edited by Antoinette Fawcett, highlighted a distinctively local, or at least northern, word or phrase from Nicholson’s work, defining it for readers unfamiliar with it and discussing its significance in its context. Notes on Words is edited by Ann Thomson and picks up where Word of the Month left off but with a wider scope. Nicholson’s world is distant in time and place from many present-day readers. Cultural references his contemporaries would readily understand are no longer common currency. Social customs, childhood pastimes, work patterns, religious belief and practice, wartime disruptions … these are examples of elements that may now need unpacking.

Ann Thomson. photo: JOHN TROLL

Ann will be pleased to welcome any contributions to Notes on Words. Could you offer a short article? Or would you like someone else to explain an allusion that seems obscure? If so, please contact Ann by email at [email protected]. The first 'Note' of the new series is written by Ann herself - see below.

Notes on Words starts with: 'As Trees Walking'

‘AS TREES WALKING’

(Collected Poems pp. 239-241, from The Pot Geranium, 1954)

As a committed Christian with a background first in Methodist church life and then in the
Church of England, Norman Nicholson was thoroughly versed in the Authorised (King
James) Version of the Bible. He drew on it for numerous poems and three of his plays (plus
the title of another), and it infused of much of his diction and imagery.

Although Scripture lessons and daily assemblies were routine in mid-20 th century English
schools, and many people had at least some experience of church or Sunday School, the
assumption that ‘everyone knew their Bible’ is shaky. Nicholson attained his considerable
biblical knowledge through personal commitment and study. This poem’s title may well have
seemed as enigmatic to some of his contemporaries as it does to many later readers whose
familiarity with the source is even more sketchy.

The quotation is from the New Testament Gospel of Mark, chapter 8, verses 22 to 26. All
four gospels relate incidents of Jesus giving or restoring sight to blind people. In this
particular story the man’s new-found vision is at first blurred and the people around him
appear ‘as trees walking’ (verse 24). Jesus intervenes again, enabling the man to see more
clearly.

Taking up the story where the evangelist leaves off, Nicholson imaginatively projects himself
into a maelstrom of unprecedented sensory experiences. The speaker’s first response is
bewilderment, even fear, so that he wonders: ‘What’s the gain to the seeing?’ The titular
image of walking trees prompts an exploration of multi-sensory confusion. The adjustment is
painful and demands patience. Only gradually, ‘day by month by year’, does he learn to
integrate sight into his relations with the world. The process mysteriously energises his
other senses, sparking new interplay between them, culminating in a dazzlingly kinaesthetic
effusion of joy, where every aspect of life is a new beginning.

The painful tactile detail of the man’s newly-sighted eyes feeling as if they ‘have the skin
scraped off them’ (‘As Trees Walking’, line 4) is absent from the gospel account, but may hint
obliquely at the story of Saul (later known as Paul) in the Acts of the Apostles. On the road
to Damascus, Saul is blinded by a vision that transforms him from arch-persecutor of the
fledgling Christian movement to its most powerful advocate. When he later recovers his
sight, it is as if scales had fallen from his eyes (Acts 9, verses 1 to 18). Seeing things afresh
- whether physically or metaphorically - is not without discomfort and challenge.
Nicholson’s adopted persona in this poem is informed by experience. His memoir
Wednesday Early Closing and his poem ‘The Whisperer’ (CP p. 267) vividly relate how TB
and doctors’ orders struck him dumb - a kind of sensory deprivation. ‘The Whisperer’
evokes with particular eloquence the pain of both loss and restoration. Isolated and unable
to communicate audibly for many months, he re-enters social situations only to be ‘stunned
and baffled’ by sensory overload and distorted perception. His physical struggle to be heard
mirrors the artist’s anxious search for ‘the undeadened brow that marks an undeafened /
Ear’. Nicholson said he wrote poetry to be heard, and enjoyed performing it. Once
reconciled to his restored power of speech, perhaps he felt as liberated as the newly-sighted
man for whom life is now ‘…seen, seen, seen, / In a new sense of a new sense’.

Ann Thomson, April 2024

'Cumbrian phonetics cracked like a plaited whip'

Nicholson is by no means a dialect poet, but he does give his language and imagery a special Northern flavour in his choice of words. 'Word of the Month' took inspiration from the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies website, which for a time included a ‘Word of the Week’ article. Of course, much of Nicholson’s word-choice was completely standard – but there are enough words that might prove puzzling to the general reader without some kind of elucidation. And then, one might wish simply to explore and celebrate the Northern English energies in Nicholson’s opus – the Cumbrian phonetics which cracked like a plaited whip, as Seamus Heaney put it in a tribute poem written for Norman on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

August 2018........................

LILE/LYLE (adj.)
by KATHLEEN MORRIS

The raven flew above the screes, above the rocks,
…………………………………………………
To where green oats were sown on the brant fell,
And the lyle herdwicks fed in the wet pastures …
(‘The Raven’, in Five Rivers (1944), Norman Nicholson’s first published poetry collection)
Lyle. Or lile, laal, la’al, or lal. Or indeed any other spelling which conveys the general sound of the word. It is simply the Cumbrian version of ‘little’. By the time Norman Nicholson’s Selected Poems was published in 1966, the spelling in the quotation above had become ‘lile’. ‘Lyle’ was restored in his Collected Poems (1994) where ‘The Raven’ appears on page 59.

It is possibly the most widely used dialect word in Cumbria, even by people who would not otherwise use dialect. So it is perhaps a little surprising that it crops up only this once in Nicholson’s poetry, given that it was certainly a word he heard used in speech every day.

Is it justifiable to treat a word as dialect when the word itself does not change, but merely the pronunciation of it? I would argue yes, if it needs an explanation, and experience shows that ‘lile’ often does need to be explained. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says it is a contraction of ‘little’, of Norse origin. An interesting online source, www.urbandictionary.com, proffers ‘lile’ as a word used chiefly in Whitehaven, but this very much underestimates the spread of the word. It crops up throughout Cumbria. The Lakeland Dialect Society spells it as ‘laal’, with no indication that it might be geographically restricted. Brigham Kirkby’s Lakeland Words (1898) lists it as ‘lal’. According to William Dickinson’s A Glossary of the Words and Phrases Pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland (1878), ‘laal’ is used in the central part of the county and ‘lyle’ in the south-west [which explains why I grew up with ‘laal’ in Workington and was surprised to find Nicholson using ‘lyle’ – Ed.]. Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary does not include the word, while Robert Backhouse Peacock’s A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale notes that a ‘lile-house’ is a privy.

‘Lile’ is one of the few Cumbrian dialect words that have made it into broader acceptance. Possibly one of the reasons for this is the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, under its well-known popular name of the Laal Ratty. The railway extols the use of its nickname on its website, which must make it familiar even to people who have not visited Cumbria. Given the number of tourists who use the Ratty, ‘lile/laal’ has probably travelled further and wider than most dialect words, even if it is only used when referring to the narrow gauge railway and not transferred into people’s everyday speech.

Herdwick above Crummock Water. Photo: Judith, London (Creative Commons)

is a word that has demonstrably been around for some time. The OED’s first recorded example is from 1633. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s son (born 1796) was known as Laal Hartley. The word also makes a brief appearance in William Holloway’s Telling Dildrams and Talking Whiff-Whaff: a Dictionary of Provincialisms, first published in 1839. Recently republished with a foreword by David Crystal, it includes numerous words from Lakeland dialect. Sadly, the entry for lile is one of the shortest:- ‘Lile, adjective – little. Northern’.

‘Little’ is a word which has been mangled by many accents. In the form of south-eastern English generally known as Estuary English, the sound of the double ‘t’ is replaced by a glottal stop, but the length and pronunciation of the ‘i’ remains the same. In American speech, where the double ‘t’ is elided, the word is usually represented as li’l – the ‘i’ remains short, rhyming with ‘still’. So why Cumbrian dialect chose to do something different with the vowel, lengthening it and changing it to something nearer to a rhyme with ‘stile’, is an interesting question. Vowels are often lengthened in rural speech and shortened in urban speech, but this might only be a partial answer.

Whatever the reason, ‘lile’ is word which has been taken up with enthusiasm in a wide variety of circumstances in recent years. There is the La’al Big Band, who play jazz and swing. At least one small Cumbrian house in Keswick is called Laal Yan, as well as a racehorse. Another house in Matterdale is Laal Steans. And, perhaps best of all, you can buy a toy sheep called La’al Herdy – Little Herdwick. Whether the toy would survive being left to feed in wet pastures, as the sheep in Nicholson’s poem did, I don’t know, but it seems fitting that it should exist. A coincidence, surely, but one which NN would probably have found amusing.

Editor’s Note
The eponymous Raven spots ‘a man sitting beside the beck’ in an unmistakably Cumbrian landscape. The bird ‘know[s] neither/The man’s face nor his name’, but we recognise Elijah, an Old Testament prophet who in 1 Kings chapter 17 announces a drought because of King Ahab’s worship of the pagan god Baal. Elijah flees into hiding where ravens bring him food and he drinks from a nearby brook.

It is interesting to look at ‘The Raven’ alongside Nicholson’s verse play The Old Man of the Mountains, a more expansive treatment of the Elijah story. First performed in 1945, it gives the Raven a major chorus-like role supplying narrative and comment. Considering their dates, we may wonder if Nicholson worked on both at the same time. Both works relocate the story to ‘a northwest corner of a northwest island’ (The Old Man of the Mountains, page 12). In each the raven provides bread which Elijah dips into the beck and (in words identical but for the tense of the verb) ‘[eats] it like a sop’ - an idiosyncratic detail not found in the biblical story.

As usual Nicholson reorders and reinterprets his source material. In the Bible Elijah is fed by ravens (plural) before the drought ends, with various plot developments in between. But as ‘The Raven’ begins, there is already rain; newly-sown oats are showing green; there is grass in the pastures. Cascading beck-water and luxuriant mountain vegetation are evoked in images redolent of both:
Water wound like bindweed round the rocks,
And burst into buds and elderflowers of foam;
Rowans and hawthorns creamed and bubbled with blossom
And splashed their petals on the old man’s head …
He however seems oblivious, almost catatonic:
[He] felt them not at all nor the thin white rain.
Nicholson in the 1940s could probably expect most readers to recognise the biblical story with ravens cast as agents of God’s providence. The Old Man of the Mountains explicitly – insistently – asserts the link between human behaviour and the well-being of the natural world. ‘The Raven’, necessarily more terse and allusive, seems to suggest that the act of taking up the simple refreshment provided recalls the old man to himself and reconnects him with his environment.

So what are ‘the lyle herdwicks’ doing here? Do they contribute more than local colour? Herdwicks are famously well-adapted to the Lakeland fells. Their sturdy legs can manage rough terrain. With their compact ‘lyle’ bodies they can thrive on sparse upland grass that would not satisfy larger breeds. Drought in Cumbria is rare but, as the past summer has reminded us, not unknown, with farmers breaking into winter feed supplies. After drought Nicholson’s ‘lyle herdwicks’ may be grateful for the extra nourishment of the ‘wet pastures’ (normally undesirable conditions for sheep), but they will return to their frugal ways. Along with the raven and the man, they have their part in restoring harmony to a stricken world.

Kathleen Morris

If you – or someone you know – might wish to contribute a short article for this column, please do contact us. We are not only interested in dialect – or near-dialect – usage, but also in a focus on any word which might, in the context of Nicholson’s poetry, drama or prose, contribute to its particularity, to a sense of Northerness… Click HERE for our
contact details

Notes on Words starts with: 'As Trees Walking'

'Cumbrian phonetics cracked like a plaited whip'

August 2018........................​

August 2018........................