Dana Gioia's poem, "Words," delightfully describes the necessity as well as the unnecessary nature of the poet's most important tool--a fascinating paradox.
Real Poems
Dana Gioia is a poet one can count on. He always has something to communicate; his poems dramatize and portray and examine. Unlike many contemporary poets who want to shock, disturb, protest, or simply express an airy nothingness, Gioia’s poems demonstrate a poet whose skill and devotion to his craft result in an art that is useful, insightful, entertaining, and educational. Simply put, his poems are real poems.
First Stanza – “The kiss is fully itself”
And Gioia’s “Words” demonstrates that skill abundantly. The poem consists of four five-line, unrimed stanzas. The first line of the first stanza asserts, “The world does not need words.” The reason the world has no need for words is that “It articulates itself / in sunlight, leaves, and shadows.”
Of course, it is easy enough to understand that leaves are leaves without their saying so with words, but even a human activity such as a kiss is “fully itself though no words were spoken.” The kiss then speaks in the same wordless way that the sun speaks or the way stones speak—just naturally with its essence.
Second Stanza – “one word transforms it into something less or other”
Still focusing on the kiss, the second stanza dramatizes just how the activity can be changed from its nature by one word. And just by naming it “kiss” it is limited; the term erases the other activities that may accompany it: “the fluster of hands / glancing the skin,” the “gripping a shoulder,” or even “the silent touching of tongues.” Just by calling the activity its name limits its nature.
The little drama asserted in this stanza makes us start to feel a bit of antipathy towards these things we call words, even though we know that without them we would not have been able to experience the little drama.
Third Stanza – “To name is to know and remember”
But the next drama in the third stanza restores our faith in words: naming things makes them more real to us, because “To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper— / metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa / carved as arrowheads.” And because we can name things, that is, attach words to them, we can store them in our memory. We do not have the same luxury that stones and trees have.
Fourth Stanza – “sunlight needs no praise”
The fourth stanza again serves as a reminder that our human language cannot add one iota to the natural world. Even though we humans run on praise, the sunlight will go on “piercing the rainclouds, / painting the rocks and leaves with light” without being congratulated.
And though “daylight needs no praise,” it is a tribute to the human soul that is capable of praising it. Just as God does not need humankind, but humankind does need God. The soul that is capable of praise is the soul that realizes what is “greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.”
