Burly

Thinking about poetry, and the words chosen by our great poets, it seems that we have lost much of the traditional vocabulary and references that give the deeper resonances to life. It is a truism to say that the average number of words we each use has declined, and become, perhaps through the standardising influence of the Internet, and mass media, much flatter and less able to suggest nuance than before. With the decline, even the extinction, of age-old communities and their close-knit network of references and meanings, words disappear. 

 

The poets surely must take us beyond our day-to-day experience of life to reveal a fresh dimension, otherwise the only purpose would be window-dressing our reality ; and this can only be done with depth of language, arresting images, a new-found musicality in the sounds. This doesn’t mean detached from our reality, but on the contrary, finding lost depths to it; more than the realists’ programme of staying faithful to what is immediately, empirically, before us, like Stendhal’s mirror, ‘que l’on promène le long d’un chemin’.

I often find that etymology is a good way to reconnect with the depths of words, and lost meanings. Working on a translation today I came across the word ‘burly’, not an obscure word at all, but only today did I look it up. Where does it come from, what depths lie in this simple two-syllable adjective which doesn’t sound latinate at all? And it turns out it isn’t!

Here is what I found, on the online etymoligical dictionary:

c. 1300, borlich, "excellent, noble; handsome, beautiful," probably from Old English borlice "noble, stately," literally "bowerly," that is, fit to frequent a lady's apartment (see bower). Sense descended through "stout, sturdy" (c. 1400) to "heavily built." Another theory connects the Old English word to Old High German burlih "lofty, exalted," related to burjan "to raise, lift." In Middle English also of things; now only of persons.

We have drifted somewhat from the early noble resonance! To describe a man noble and handsome enough to enter a lady’s bower… . So it seems to have chiralvic overtones in its early medieval usage. There’s another highly poetic word we have lost: a bower – dear to the Romantics.