Vacancy Chain
Unlike the hermit crab, no mind
can leave its outlived shape behind;
though every skull’s constrained with bone
a thought not certainly its own.
– Jacob Polley (1975- )
This week, in the poetry workshop, we’re thinking about memory. St Mary’s is full of memorials: it’s a place to remember, both specifically and broadly. From martyrs to soldiers to now-obscure townspeople, it’s brimming with past lives: it’s what Philip Larkin might call “luminously-peopled”, a phrase he uses in his poem “Here”.
One such interesting memorial is that of William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794), philologist. Jones had command of an astonishing thirteen languages (with reasonable knowledge of a further twenty-eight). His research was instrumental in the understanding of the relationship between Indo-European languages.
I love this cheeky, aphoristic quatrain from Jake Polley; he manages to sound both portentous and flippant, in a rather eighteenth-century way. Even the thought expressed in his poem is, of course, not new. The fact that humans share a community in ideas must have been particularly evident to William Jones, who would have been familiar with the similarity between (for example) the word for “mother” in various Indo-European languages: māter in Latin, mḗtēr in Ancient Greek, mātár- in Sanskrit, māthir in Celtic… Sometimes a good idea is worth having more than once.
