WORDS AND COLOUR

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 139, 2 September 1927, Page 12

WORDS AND COLOUR

(Written for THE SUN.) Words . like fine flowers, have their colour too, What do you say to crimson words or bluet This lialf-forgotten poem rose to my mind when reading the previous article on this fascinating subject. It concludes with these words, quoting from memory, a rather faulty instrument: Talce the sword And see the blue steel redden at a word. Words have built up that wonderful instrument, the English language, from which clever writers bring forth new music and brighter colours for our delight. “Every master of prose loves words, and is scrupulous to employ them in their exact meaning. Words, like coins, grow' lighter in the using,” says Frank Harris, in “Contemporary Portraits.” In the same book he speaks of George Moore’s predilection for this or that new word; not that he cared for the meaning of the word, but for its sound and colour. He also tells us of Walter Pater’s “carven prose,” ‘ little jewels of ex-

pression” and “carved ivories of speech,” to use Pater’s own fine phrase. One of Pater’s chief pleasures in life was—“To come across an exquisite phrase in one's reading, a phrase like a flower on the page, perfect in colour and form. To be able to lift it up and show it to others—a divine pleasure.” “Words are the most powerful drug used by' mankind,” says Rudyard Kipling; and the most powerful incentive and stimulant, too. Such words as “adventure,” “wanderlust,” or “voyaging ships and sea,” affect me strangely and powerfully; as if some wicked, roving, buccaneering spirit of an ancestor rose within me at the words and filled me with aching desire. The lure of the sea! The very word “lure” is a call—not a loud one, but a quietly insistent and compelling one, and sends many a youth To lrack Adventure hard To her deepest lair. For sheer colour as well as throb- | bing music G. K. Chesterton’s “Lepanto” takes some beating: Stiff .(lays straining in the night blasts cold, In the gloom black-purple , in the glint old-gold. Torch-light crimson on the copper kettle drums. Then the tuckets, then the trumpets , then the cannon, and he co)>ics. Don John laughing in the brave beard, curled. . . . Don John of Austria is going to the war. See, too, the colour of a perfect northern night in this exquisite metaphor: The moon is in heaven And God is commencing To write his great letter Of gold on blue velvet. “Pain,” “pathos,” and “sorrow” are to me, grey words, while “joy,” “hope,” and “love” are golden. “Kindness,” "sympathy,” “humanity” and “charity” are pale words, and need the golden touch of “love,” “joy” and “hope” to infuse real life into them. But “ecstacy”—the very word gives one a thrill. Of place names and jewel names we each have our favourites. Why should “Africa” draw me like a magnet and leave the next traveller cold? Why should “lapis-lazuli—“blue as the vein in a Madonna’s breast,” to to quote Browning—be my favourite stone?

Words, I suppose, have their individual colour and music for each person, according to temperament, and likes and dislikes are coloured by the association of words and their meaning. And there I must leave it. L. E. ROWLATT. Ponsonby.