A mouthful of air
Friday Fragment #15
The poet W. B. Yeats once contrasted the weight of his words to a slander directed against his friend: ‘But weigh this song with the great and their pride / I made it out of a mouthful of air’. Yeats wanted to show both the power and delicacy of language. He opines that a few elegant words are every bit as powerful as the many aggressive and dishonest ones with which people attack. And yet he also shows us that language is incredibly light and fragile: mere mouthfuls of air. A century later, Anthony Burgess would take Yeats’ words as the title for his book about the English language, wanting to remind us of that literal lightness of definition: we communicate in a multitude of these mouthfuls, ‘modified by contortions of the vocal organs’. It’s possible then to conceive of this writer’s page as exhaled air: an outwards breath. Language is borrowed by the writer to become text, to become literature: a mouthful of air given shape and symbolic form. There is no doubting that literature enriches language – preserves and celebrates it – but language, at its most simple, is what is spoken and heard. It’s a reminder for any writer that the fundamental tools with which we create belong first and foremost to language, not literature. In checking one’s work, in establishing its value, a writer must not just read their words back, but must speak and listen to those words, too. The spoken word allows us to locate and understand rhythm, to find flaws within an arrangement. The ear knows how to listen for confusion, how to tighten meaning. The ear is fine-tuned to noticing the voice stutter and stumble on pretension. Speech is made from a mouthful of air. What we hear travels to us as a disturbance in the air. How we shape, create and receive this sound is ultimately what determines for any writer the truth and beauty of what they write. Another reminder that language is embodied within literature is that we question what it is that a writer has to say – it is the vocalised word which steers the hand of every good writer and the mind of every good reader. For the artist who lacks inspiration, it is air once again that they lack. The word ‘inspire’ comes from the Latin inspirare: ‘to breathe or blow into’. To inspire is both to inhale and to fill someone with the urge to do something: to take in air, for the mind to function as lung. Thomas Mann once described the writer as, ‘someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ This is true in so far as the writer is trying to do more. The writer of literature wishes to use language in ways far more inventive, to filter out the ordinariness of any intaken breath and ‘exploit the aesthetic’, to borrow from Burgess once more. At its best, writing should be a rhythm of inhalation and exhalation; a musicality of the complementary and contrasting noise of language; intoxicating lung-inflating mouthfuls of air.1
‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.
‘A Mouthful Of Air’ was originally published in For The Culturally Curious Zine, curated by Emma Gibbs de Oliveira, whose writings and newsletter you can read over at
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Thank you Matt 🙏🏼
the writer as ‘someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’ is so very good. A great read, thank you