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SEPTEMBER 2014
LET v. (dialect?) by Antoinette Fawcett |
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Among the many uses of the little word ‘let’ which pervade Norman Nicholson’s poetry there are a few which have puzzled me a little.
Nicholson has a fondness for the word ‘let’ in completely standard usages. Sometimes the word is used in such a way as to permit, virtually to bid, things to happen: ‘let Solveig sing in the western dales’; or, ‘let Askam remain … secure and secret as the lucky dip of dreams’; or yet again, ‘Let the earth rejoice with the earth-apple’ (part of a long litany of ‘lets’ in the poem-sequence ‘The Bow in the Clouds’). In these contexts ‘let’ becomes resonant and commanding. One can imagine the word rolling on the tongue before being firmly clipped off in the final ‘t’ sound.
But sometimes the word ‘let’ signals a loosening, a concessiveness, a kind of liberation, as in, for example, ‘let the wind blow, / The old back-alley gaffer of the north, let the wind blow / Through frozen memories’. The ‘l’ sound here is caressing, the sharpness of the ‘t’ softening into the following ‘th’ of ‘the’.
And then again, softer still, the word ‘let’ may signal a pleading, almost in the form of a prayer: ‘Oh let the tides of the sky, the tides of the heart / Flow up the shores’.
But the more puzzling uses of the word ‘let’ edge into dialect, in my opinion, and occur in a handful of poems only, mainly in mid-period Nicholson, in poems from The Pot Geranium (1954). Each of these poems contains images of bird and feather, and in three cases the bird/feather image is related to a weather phenomenon: wind, rain or snow.
In ‘From a Boat at Coniston’ the ‘wind / Lets on the water, paddling like a duck’ (Collected Poems p. 195) – a characteristically original and almost comical visual image. In ‘Rain’, once again, something in the air touches a body of water, this time with more emphasis on how this ‘something’ feels: ‘But rain / When it falls on sea / Is scarcely seen or heard or smelt / But only felt ---/ As if a skelter of birds with pittering feet / Were letting on the glass roof of the waves’ (CP p. 205). Notice the clever lightness of sound in ‘skelter’ (picking up ‘smelt’ and ‘felt’) and ‘pittering’ (much less heavy than the re-duplicated and more usual ‘pitter-patter’).
In the poem ‘A Turn for the Better’, in which Nicholson imagines Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, taking a winter walk in the Millom allotments, and time standing still at the moment at which Mary gives birth, one small light thing moves and comes to rest on a robin’s head: ‘a smoky feather’ which ‘lets’ ‘between the black / Glass-ally eyes and the gimlet beak / And never a flick it gave to shake it off’ (CP p. 235).
And again there are birds in the next use of this type of ‘let’. In ‘Skiddaw Slate’, the first part of the long sequence ‘The Seven Rocks’, Nicholson extends his vision across space and time in a compact image which compresses human history and pre-history into the vast expanse of geological time, setting these against the quick flick-marks of yearly bird-migration: ‘Norse birds breaking their migratory flight / Let on neolithic tombs, levered from the ribs of the rock’ (CP p. 243).
In the last use of this type which I have spotted, the only one outside the collection The Pot Geranium, the focus is on an individual bird, the black guillemot, defending its own space against the ‘floating pack-ice of gulls’ that surrounds it: ‘Taking the huff if so much as a feather / Lets on his pool and blow-hole’ (CP p. 272).
The OED gives no sense of ‘let’ (v.1) which would seem to fit with the sense which Nicholson gives the word in these examples. The closest might be sense 10a. ‘To allow to pass or go; to admit to, into a place. Also occas. (with notion of let down, 32) to lower gradually over, through something’. This entry gives a quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh which might possibly fit the bill: ‘ The creaking of the door, years past, Which let upon you such disabling news’. But although each image in the five uses of Nicholson’s kind of ‘let’ does contain the sense of ‘lowering’, or rather a shift from an airy to an earth- or water-bound state, there is no sense at all that the change of state is gradual, although it is certainly light and almost weightless.
Glossaries of Cumbrian dialect have also not helped to give an exact meaning to this usage of ‘let’. But there is a clue in A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale, North and South of the Sands, in the County of Lancaster (1869). The intransitive verb ‘leeght’ is described in brackets as a corruption of ‘alight’, and defined like this: ‘to fall, settle, come to the ground’ (p. 50). This would seem to fit in with all the special uses of ‘let’ discussed above, and would explain why the word is connected with bird, snow and rain imagery in Nicholson’s imagination.
Nicholson’s roots lay in the old Hundred of Lonsdale – with ancestors coming from the Ulverston area and from Dallam Tower, amongst others – so perhaps this special use of the word ‘let’ (actually ‘leeght’) was passed on to him through family idiolect – a smidging of North Lancashire left in the mind and on the tongue of a Cumberland poet.
Antoinette Fawcett
Afterword
After checking with other members of the Society, people who have lived in Millom and its surrounding area all their lives, it seems that Millomites do use ‘let’ quite naturally in this special sense. Dr. Ian Davidson of Broughton Mills – our Chairperson – confirms that ‘let’ is also used in this way in Broughton-in-Furness, a place which is certainly located within the old Hundred of Lonsdale, but is also geographically close to Millom. Dr. Davidson gives as an example of usage: ‘The bird let on the fence’ – more prosaic than Nicholson’s ‘let’ phrases, but exactly fitting with the kind of imagery NN uses.
Nicholson has a fondness for the word ‘let’ in completely standard usages. Sometimes the word is used in such a way as to permit, virtually to bid, things to happen: ‘let Solveig sing in the western dales’; or, ‘let Askam remain … secure and secret as the lucky dip of dreams’; or yet again, ‘Let the earth rejoice with the earth-apple’ (part of a long litany of ‘lets’ in the poem-sequence ‘The Bow in the Clouds’). In these contexts ‘let’ becomes resonant and commanding. One can imagine the word rolling on the tongue before being firmly clipped off in the final ‘t’ sound.
But sometimes the word ‘let’ signals a loosening, a concessiveness, a kind of liberation, as in, for example, ‘let the wind blow, / The old back-alley gaffer of the north, let the wind blow / Through frozen memories’. The ‘l’ sound here is caressing, the sharpness of the ‘t’ softening into the following ‘th’ of ‘the’.
And then again, softer still, the word ‘let’ may signal a pleading, almost in the form of a prayer: ‘Oh let the tides of the sky, the tides of the heart / Flow up the shores’.
But the more puzzling uses of the word ‘let’ edge into dialect, in my opinion, and occur in a handful of poems only, mainly in mid-period Nicholson, in poems from The Pot Geranium (1954). Each of these poems contains images of bird and feather, and in three cases the bird/feather image is related to a weather phenomenon: wind, rain or snow.
In ‘From a Boat at Coniston’ the ‘wind / Lets on the water, paddling like a duck’ (Collected Poems p. 195) – a characteristically original and almost comical visual image. In ‘Rain’, once again, something in the air touches a body of water, this time with more emphasis on how this ‘something’ feels: ‘But rain / When it falls on sea / Is scarcely seen or heard or smelt / But only felt ---/ As if a skelter of birds with pittering feet / Were letting on the glass roof of the waves’ (CP p. 205). Notice the clever lightness of sound in ‘skelter’ (picking up ‘smelt’ and ‘felt’) and ‘pittering’ (much less heavy than the re-duplicated and more usual ‘pitter-patter’).
In the poem ‘A Turn for the Better’, in which Nicholson imagines Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, taking a winter walk in the Millom allotments, and time standing still at the moment at which Mary gives birth, one small light thing moves and comes to rest on a robin’s head: ‘a smoky feather’ which ‘lets’ ‘between the black / Glass-ally eyes and the gimlet beak / And never a flick it gave to shake it off’ (CP p. 235).
And again there are birds in the next use of this type of ‘let’. In ‘Skiddaw Slate’, the first part of the long sequence ‘The Seven Rocks’, Nicholson extends his vision across space and time in a compact image which compresses human history and pre-history into the vast expanse of geological time, setting these against the quick flick-marks of yearly bird-migration: ‘Norse birds breaking their migratory flight / Let on neolithic tombs, levered from the ribs of the rock’ (CP p. 243).
In the last use of this type which I have spotted, the only one outside the collection The Pot Geranium, the focus is on an individual bird, the black guillemot, defending its own space against the ‘floating pack-ice of gulls’ that surrounds it: ‘Taking the huff if so much as a feather / Lets on his pool and blow-hole’ (CP p. 272).
The OED gives no sense of ‘let’ (v.1) which would seem to fit with the sense which Nicholson gives the word in these examples. The closest might be sense 10a. ‘To allow to pass or go; to admit to, into a place. Also occas. (with notion of let down, 32) to lower gradually over, through something’. This entry gives a quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh which might possibly fit the bill: ‘ The creaking of the door, years past, Which let upon you such disabling news’. But although each image in the five uses of Nicholson’s kind of ‘let’ does contain the sense of ‘lowering’, or rather a shift from an airy to an earth- or water-bound state, there is no sense at all that the change of state is gradual, although it is certainly light and almost weightless.
Glossaries of Cumbrian dialect have also not helped to give an exact meaning to this usage of ‘let’. But there is a clue in A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale, North and South of the Sands, in the County of Lancaster (1869). The intransitive verb ‘leeght’ is described in brackets as a corruption of ‘alight’, and defined like this: ‘to fall, settle, come to the ground’ (p. 50). This would seem to fit in with all the special uses of ‘let’ discussed above, and would explain why the word is connected with bird, snow and rain imagery in Nicholson’s imagination.
Nicholson’s roots lay in the old Hundred of Lonsdale – with ancestors coming from the Ulverston area and from Dallam Tower, amongst others – so perhaps this special use of the word ‘let’ (actually ‘leeght’) was passed on to him through family idiolect – a smidging of North Lancashire left in the mind and on the tongue of a Cumberland poet.
Antoinette Fawcett
Afterword
After checking with other members of the Society, people who have lived in Millom and its surrounding area all their lives, it seems that Millomites do use ‘let’ quite naturally in this special sense. Dr. Ian Davidson of Broughton Mills – our Chairperson – confirms that ‘let’ is also used in this way in Broughton-in-Furness, a place which is certainly located within the old Hundred of Lonsdale, but is also geographically close to Millom. Dr. Davidson gives as an example of usage: ‘The bird let on the fence’ – more prosaic than Nicholson’s ‘let’ phrases, but exactly fitting with the kind of imagery NN uses.