Seagulls are hard to get away from in certain
seaside towns or if you live near a garbage dump, but on
another list recently the word/bird "heron" was
brought up as one overused as a kind of shorthand
touchstone for conveying a scene of natural beauty.
(Although I'm no naturalist, it does seems to me that
herons are more numerous in the US than they once were.
Maybe there's a simple envronmental expalanation to
all those herons wading into the reedy lines of our poems.)
I've noticed that the fortunes of certain words seem
to rise and fall. I trace "tendril," in American poetry,
to influence of Roethke. Theodore Roethke's family business
was a greenhouse, so in his case the word was integral
to the life in a direct way.
Of course as some jazz great once said,
every cliche was once a good lick. So in a certain sense
the overpopulation of certain words/tropes in poems was
created by their very success. And it can be said
that some words have almost a natural "poetic cast"
about them...I think by virture of a rightness of sound vis-a-vis
sense..."shard" being perhaps an example.
Finnegan
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