{"id":38,"date":"2015-05-06T02:51:31","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T02:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/?p=38"},"modified":"2018-05-22T22:04:01","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T22:04:01","slug":"we-blossom-and-flourish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"We blossom and flourish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We blossom and flourish<\/em><br \/>\n<em> As leaves on a tree<\/em><br \/>\n<em> And wither and perish<\/em><br \/>\n<em> But naught changeth Thee.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What is it about this (half-)verse that so resonates? It won\u2019t be the religion, I don\u2019t do religion and it only comes in at the end. It will be in part that it\u2019s been there in my awareness since schooldays, and all those gruesome assemblies where we stood up while masters came in, sat down, stood up, prayed, sat down, were talked at, stood up, sang, (or muttered, in my case), sat down, were lectured at, stood up, prayed, sat down, stood up, masters went out. Fifteen minutes a day, every schoolday for five years. But you wouldn\u2019t think that would engender much affection, though there is something about this hymn being musically so simple, even I could sing it. (I was never a singer: quietly removed from school choir at age seven.) I sing it occasionally now, early in the morning on the beach, when I\u2019m sure nobody is in earshot.<\/p>\n<p>No, it must be the language. The words are all basic, old words of English. No prefixes, suffixes, long words, imports. The four verbs: <em>blossom, flourish, wither, perish: <\/em>four ancient words of English for four fundamental processes of life. The sentence structure: subject and intransitive verb, four times over: as basic as it gets, connected by <em>and<\/em>, the simplest conjunction. One simile, again, of unanswerable directness.\u00a0\u00a0 The plain, pure rhythm; the plain, pure rhyme.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you, <a href=\"mailto:http:\/\/www.cyberhymnal.org\/htm\/i\/i\/iigowise.htm\">Walter Smith<\/a>. For when I use language, this is a model for how I want to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We blossom and flourish As leaves on a tree And wither and perish But naught changeth Thee. What is it about this (half-)verse that so resonates? It won\u2019t be the religion, I don\u2019t do religion and it only comes in at the end. It will be in part that it\u2019s been there in my awareness &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/?p=38\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">We blossom and flourish<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}