Tome & Plume: Diction Adds Tinge To Your Writings

An author acts on the same principle as a painter does in using diction. A painter makes a dark tinge doubly dark by putting it against a luminous background to deepen its effects. So is the impact of diction on writing. Diction is the choice of words used in a literary work. If we talk of diction, especially in English literature, the name that comes to our mind is William Shakespeare. A sonnet of the bard opens with “Shall I compare thee to a summer day?” So, he began the poem with a question.

As the poem goes on, the bard’s diction becomes more vivid. The poet gives a hint that his beloved is beyond time. She will be forever in his poetry. He then compares the person to “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and the summer’s lease has all too short a date.”

“Rough winds do shake” is an apt personification, as summer cannot “lease” anything to anyone. As change is eternal, the poet’s beloved is compared to that eternity. There is a soliloquy in the play, Macbeth. The playwright uses diction to establish that Macbeth is personally justifying his actions.

The bard writes: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.” This is the choice of words that makes a reader go through the play.

Milton’s expressions

How can one forget the diction of John Milton in Paradise Lost? He wrote: A dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible… (Paradise Lost Book I) The contrast is between lightness and darkness. He used “flame” to connect both the opposite words – light and dark. The word rather again creates a right oxymoron. This is how he uses the complex connections between good and evil. Oh goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce …

Milton’s use of antithesis has had a fine timbre of poetic effect.

Rabindranath Tagore’s style

Tagore’s Chhinnapatra (The Torn Letters) is a piece of philosophical writing. To understand or appreciate the real poet and his intellect, one must sift through the pages of The Torn Letters, a collection of letters written to a niece, Indira Devi. He wrote those letters when he was in East Bengal (present Bangladesh), Orissa and north Bengal on family business. He wrote: “There is some humongous eternal sadness about the universe – it reveals itself when a shaft of absent light falls on the forsaken earth of the evening – what an eloquent silence fills the earth and the sky.” These are not the lines from one of his poems. “Silence” and “light” have been personified. “… its eternal language exploded into audible sound, what deep, sombre, calm, beautiful, gentle music would from the earth to the stars…,” he writes. A literary and philosopher Soumindra Mitra wrote: “There is no dearth of famous and great books in the treasure-trove of Bengali literature, but there is only one, about which the term intimate can be used.”

Vivekanand’s brevity

As far as style is concerned, the name that also comes to one’s mind is that of Swami Vivekanand. His speeches are full of brevity and figures. Swamiji was a poet, too. He wrote: “All love is expansion; all selfishness is concentration. Love is therefore the only law of life…” An abstract noun “love” was so well embodied that this simple sentence has many significations. In a letter to a friend from Almora on June 10, 1898, Vivekanand wrote, “I see in my mind’s eye the future perfect India rising out of this chaos and strife, glorious and invincible, with Vedanta brain and Islam body.” In the sentence, he has aptly personified the country “with Vedanta brain and Islam body.”

Tulsidas’s choice of words

There are many masters of diction across the world. Yet, few are like Goswami Tulsidas. His metaphors and antithesis indicate the craftsmanship of this poet who totally surrendered himself to God. Only two lines from the Shri Ramcharitmanas throw a glimpse of this genius wordsmith.   Mangal bhavan amangal haari Drubahu su Dasarath ajar Bihari…. Mangal Bhawan means, “abode of auspiciousness” and Amangal Hari (the remover of inauspiciousness). He uses two opposite words: positivity and negativity. So, just the name Lord Ram destroys all evils and infuses positivity in every fibre of human being.