Abstract

This article offers a linguistic insight into the poem “Once,” written in 2008 by the Northern Irish poet Colette Bryce. It addresses the explicit intertextual link between this poem and Denise Riley’s “Two ambitions to remember” (1985), as well as its more implicit dialogue with Bryce’s former poem “Words and Music” (2004). A close reading of the linguistic choices in “Once” seems even more necessary in this poem which precisely ponders the role of words to convey meaning, namely the poetic voice’s love toward a new lover. Framed in the area of stylistics, the analysis will draw on an array of linguistic frameworks: grammetrics, modality and evaluative language, novel metaphor, deixis, and unexpected collocations, so as to understand how the concepts of “love” and “language” are portrayed in these poems. The analysis thus uncovers the careful interplay of paradigmatic and syntagmatic linguistic choices that tailor the texts. It likewise offers a new representation of the concept of “words” which arises only as a result of the poet’s conversation with Riley, her own former writing, and the reader, in addition to pointing at the cognitive power of poetic language the poems celebrate.