An Intricate Study of “Marsh Languages”
Margaret Atwood is an infamous Canadian poet also known for penning novels. As someone whose work lives and dies by words, perhaps it isn’t too shocking that she has some well-developed thoughts on the use and evolution of language. Her poem, “Marsh Languages,” mourns the loss of original, expressive, and sensual language to new, mechanical, and lifeless language.
At the outset of “Marsh Languages,” Atwood describes “The dark soft languages,” or original languages, as “being silenced,” or forgotten. The “Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue / falling one by one back into the moon” paints a picture of the original languages disappearing back into nature from whence they came. As Atwood will go on to explain within the context of the poem, the old languages are considered to exist within and alongside nature. This stanza is the equivalent to the opening paragraph or a thesis statement in a persuasive essay; its only function is to explain Atwood’s general feelings about language.
Atwood uses excessive imagery in stanza two in order to depict how intimate past languages are, especially when compared to current, modern languages. The old “Language of marshes,/language of the roots of rushes tangled/together in the ooze” is directly connected, intimate, and inseparable from nature. The “tangled” bottoms of “rushes” provide an example of the intimacy of nature, intimacy that Atwood believes cannot be adequately expressed in current languages. Atwood goes on to cement the connection between language, nature, and man with her description of “marrow cells twinning themselves/inside the warm core of the bone:,” where she reveals her belief that the “Mothertongue” allowed humans to express their most primal thoughts, features, experiences, and urges, for that language was synonymous with the core workings of humans and nature, and as such, was as essential and as beautiful as the plants and the wildlife. The original languages were merely extensions of nature within humans, but now these “pathways of hidden light in the body fade and wink out” because new languages are not beautiful and connected to nature, and therefore, new languages cannot express the feelings and urges of human beings as adequately and magically.
Part of the magic that the “Mothertongue” wove stemmed from the way it was formed and the way it was spoken. Atwood mentions “The sibilants and gutturals” as examples of how past languages had diverse and intimate sounds that allowed them to be very sensual and commanding of human emotion. She then gives the “Mothertongue” the moniker of “cave language” as a way of showing that the ancients were, in many ways, more at one with themselves and with nature because they were nature. Atwood proceeds to describe “the half-light/forming at the back of the throat,” which shows how the act of speech of the old languages was very beautiful and warm and how the inflection of the tongue contributed as much to the words’ meaning as the words themselves. She portrays this sequence as an art, where “the mouth’s damp velvet mold[ed]/ the lost syllable for ‘I’ that did not mean separate,” a combination of emotion, soul, nature, and mastery of the mind and mouth, where words are as valuable as Greek pottery, and where singularity doesn’t involve being alone, but rather, being a part of the entity that is nature and mankind. This intricacy is not possible with the new languages, and as a result, these telling inflections and modifiers “all are becoming sounds no longer/heard because no longer spoken/and everything that could once be said in them has ceased to exist.” The new languages have compromised man’s ability to connect with his self, with others, and with nature.
The latter half of the previous stanza sets the mood for the rest of the poem, where Atwood returns to her original point of the destruction of expression in language. In the fourth stanza, she laments that “The languages of the dying suns/are themselves dying,/but even the word for this has been forgotten.” In other words, the original languages are becoming non-existent, and even this concept cannot even be properly expressed within the new language system. Language has been over-simplified to the point where “The mouth against skin [is] vivid and fading.” We’re shown that language still has tons of potential to reach new and exciting new heights of expression and ways to connect with nature and people, but even with these possibilities, its creative and sensual use is fading out of existence, instead only existing as a tool to man’s asinine daily routines. And since it is no longer possible to “speak both cherishing and farewell,” we see that language has become diluted into nothing more than a commodity, something distinctly disconnected from people and nature. The languages of today value “only a mouth, only skin,” which explains how speech and expression have devolved from an art form into a lazy means of getting things done. We learn that “There is no more longing,” for modern languages aren’t developed in ways that can be used to explore and understand the bond between man and nature. Instead, language is inadequate, rigid, established, permanent, and most importantly, mechanical.
In the final stanza, Atwood establishes the damning truth, which is that “Translation was never possible” from the old languages to the new languages, because new languages, by design, don't have the capacity to absorb the meaning of the original languages. Rather, new languages ignored this point and initiated a massive “conquest” of the “Mothertongue,” and by doing so, they eliminated the value of man’s connection with nature and created the new value of structure, or “hard nouns.” Atwood contends to this point, that language has turned into a matter of structure over free form, flow, and expression, that it has become “the language of metal/the language of either/or” that boxs man’s means of expression into a small number of fixed words and phrases. Ultimately, our current language system has become “the one language that has eaten all the others,” for this modern language is all that is left in the wake of the “conquest.” Atwood concludes with this to establish that both she and all of mankind’s opportunities to better understand life and nature have been demolished by the establishment of static modern languages and the destruction of the “Marsh Languages.”
