In a word . . . Forlorn

Forlorn . If ever word had in its sound an echo of its sense this is it. Onomatopoeia by the term used to describe such a word. It comes from the Greek onomatopoii, meaning "the making of a name or word" in imitation of a sound associated with the thing being named.

But forlorn is today's word. Its origins are more recent, coming from the Old English forleosan meaning "to lose, abandon, let go, destroy, ruin". Definitions conjure images of an unsteady collection of distraught mourners at a particularly tragic funeral: "pitifully sad and abandoned or lonely" or "appearing sad or lonely because deserted or abandoned, forsaken, deprived, wretched or pitiful in appearance or condition, nearly hopeless' desperate".

For me the word is always associated with English Romantic poet John Keats. He uses its in his Ode to a Nightingale.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

The word might sum up his short young life. He was just 23 when he wrote the Ode in one May day in 1819. He was dying and aware of it. So its begins:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

He wants to :

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

Many a time he has been

. . . half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme

All so unlike the nightingale immortal Bird! which Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

To sing with such ease was no longer possible for him. It seemed he was born for death. He died from TB less than two years later in Rome long before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. Some speak of Thomas Chatterton, who died by suicide in 1770 at the age of 17, as the great tragic loss to English poetry.

But it has to be Keats.
inaword@irishtimes.com