26. The poet ends the move as he begins it. If the philosopher only orders everything, places everything, the poet would loosen all bonds. His words are not common signs -- they are sounds -- magic words which move beautiful groups around themselves. As the garments of the saints still retain wondrous powers, so is many a word sanctified through some splendid memory, and has become a poem almost on its own. For the poet language is never too poor but always too general. He needs words that often recur and are played out through use. His world is simple, like his instrument -- but it is just as inexhaustible a source of melodies.
[Novalis, Logological Fragments I, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Mahony Stoljar, ed. and tr., SUNY Press (Albany, NY: 1997), p. 54.]
A good example of what Novalis has in mind, I think, is the word 'mother', which is in bare sense something like 'the designation of a woman relative to her children'; but how far this falls short of the word's meaning! The word 'mother' is indeed "a poem almost on its own", and Novalis surely has something of the right idea about what makes it so -- it has not only a bare common meaning but is a word that is associated for many with "some splendid memory", and therefore its actual meaning is many-layered from being used in such a richly varied portion of overall human experience. It is this many-layered character that makes it suitable for many of the figurative expressions in which it shows up; to speak of Mother Church or Mother Russia or Mother Earth is not merely to carry over some kind of analogy with a 'woman relative to her children' but to carry over analogies with these layers -- the phases of motherhood, the actual relations of children to their mothers, the all-encompassing providence of which motherhood makes such an excellent symbol precisely because it is an eminent example of something that involves a sort of all-encompassing providence. The layers are what make the word an instrument capable of being "inexhaustible" as "a source of melodies." And so on with many other words that are in common use across a richly varied part of human experience, the second-class relics of the human person.
