W. H. Auden: Linguística Natural/Natural Linguistics

Every created thing has ways of pronounciong its ownhood:

basic and used by all, even the mineral tribes,

is the hieroglyphical koine of visual appearance

which, though it lacks the verb, is, when compared with 

                                                                               our own

heaviest lexicons, so much richer and subtler in shape-nouns,

color-adjetives and apt prepositions of place.

Verbs first appear with the flowers who utter imperative odors

which with their taste for sweets, insects are bound to

                                                                                obey:

motive, too, in the eyes of beasts is language of gesture

(urban life has, alas, sadly impoverisehd ours),

signals of interrogation, friendship, threat and appeasement,

instantly taken in, seldom, if eve, misread.

All who have managed to break through the primal barrier of

                                                                                                 Silence

into na audible world find na indicative AM

though some carnivores, leaving messages written in urine,

nor have they ever made subjunctive or negative statements,

even cryptics whose lives hang upon telling a fib.

rage and grief they can sing, not self-reproach or repentance,

nor have they legends to tell, though their respect for a rite

is more pious than our, for a complex code of releasers

trains them to walk in the ways which their ur-ancestors

                                                                           trod.

(Some of these codes remain mysteries to us: for instance,

fish who travel in huge loveless anonymous turbs,

what is it keeps them in line? Our single certainty is that

minnouws deprived of their fore-brains go it gladly alone.)

Since in their circles it’s not good form to say anything a novel,

none ever stutter on er, guddling in vain for a word,

no are at loss for na answer: none, it seems, are bilingual,

for just doing their thing, nt greedily trying to publish

all the world as we do into our picture at once.

If they have never laughed, at least they have never talked drivel,

never, marching to war, inflamed by fortissimo music,

hundreds of miles from home died for a verbal whereas.

‘Dumb’ we may call them but, surely, our poets are right in

                                                                                     assuming

all would prefer taht they were rhetorized at than about.

                                                                           June 1969