Learning a Dead Language

There is nothing for you to say. You must

 Learn first to listen. Because it is dead

 It will not come to you of itself, nor would you

 Of yourself master it. You must therefore 

Learn to be still when it is imparted,

 And, though you many not yet understand, to remember.

 

 What you remember is saved. To understand

 The least thing fully you would have to perceive

 The whole grammar in all its accidence

 And all its system, in the perfect singleness

 Of intention it has because it is dead.

 You can learn only a part at a time. 

 What you are given to remember

 Has been saved before you from death's dullness by

 Remembering. The unique intention

 Of a language whose speech has died is order,

 Incomplete only where someone has forgotten.

 You will find that that order helps you to remember.

 What you come to remember becomes yourself.

 Learning will be to cultivate the awareness

 Of that governing order, now pure of the passions

It composed; till, seeking it in itself, 

You may find at last the passion that composed it, 

Hear it both in its speech and in yourself.

 

 What you remember saves you. To remember

 Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never

 Has fallen silent. So your learning is,

 From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself

 Is memorable, what passion may be heard 

When there is nothing for you to say.

--W.S. Merwin

From his first post-college days, W.S. Merwin made his living mostly by translating.  He published many translations of poetry written in many languages, from ancient Chinese poets to Dante to Pablo Neruda.   So this poem can be read in one way as applying literally to learning dead languages, such as Latin. Perhaps it can be applied to reading any poem. But it seems to me that at least some of it applies to memories themselves.

 Anything in the past existed in a context, a kind of language, that has slipped away with that past. It was a context of things, places, people and happenings, and also of feeling.  But we mostly and in a sense necessarily translate our memories of the past into the language of the present.  Yet part of those memories may carry with them something of their context, if we don't try to decide what they mean too quickly.  I think certain powerful lines in this poem apply to all memories, and to memory itself.  But the poem hints at even more powerful ways of apprehending memories, within their contexts and perhaps the wider contexts of our entire lives.  

The photo: The arrow points to the apartment where my parents lived when I was born in 1946, and where the three of us lived for a few more years, at the top of what was then an apartment building in Greensburg, PA on College Avenue, so called because high on a hill opposite this building--and visible from that window--was Seton Hill College.  The building I suspect had been a residence, for this area was once populated by the rich. Up on that hill was a ridiculously large mansion, which came to house the college, and remains part of it.  While still a residence, it contained the first library that a young Andrew Carnegie ever saw.  The building that housed my first home no longer exists.  The writing on the photo is my mother's.