On Stretching Meanings

Poetry has some flexibility with the language, naturally, in the service of art. Just how much can be a question though, obviously. For example, if you look one post before this, the sonnet there rhymes "ruth" with "truth." This in itself is not objectionable: they rhyme. But is "ruth" really the emotion demanded by, or even an emotion permitted by, the rest of the poem? Ruth means pity, compassion, sorrow, grief, the emotions felt by Ruth the Moabite towards her mother-in-law Naomi in the Biblical Book of Ruth after their mutual widowhood. The poem is about romantic love. How far can one stretch "ruth," with all its sorrowful, pitying connotations (and even direct definitions!) to fit that mold?

The first cast in that direction is grammatical: "ruth" is joined with "And tenderness" in the following line, which means that we must take a form of ruth that can join with tenderness. But all of the definitions I've placed above can do so: grief and tenderness may be the furthest apart, but they are by no means absurd when joined. Rather, the absurdity in all these cases arises from the sense that the poem wants "ruth" to mean something like a synonym for tenderness, not just a complement. So this move does not help, although in other contexts it might.

Building on that, though, we can ask if there is a fringe definition - archaic, obsolete, historical-linguistic - that is allowable but unintuitive and might make sense of "ruth." This is for instance how one most often deals with John Milton's excessive Latinism: go back to his Latin roots and define the parts until you see how it works beyond ordinary English usage. Here we are on firmer ground: if we take "ruth" in its formative sense as related to the sympathetic and self-effacing love Ruth felt for Naomi, we could make that work.

This, however, brings us close to the borderline of complete redefinition: taking the word Humpty-Dumpty-style and making it mean what you say it means. This should generally be avoided except when coining the word for the first time, and even then it ought to be a meaning suggested by the sound or component parts of the word. It is a real stretch, which can easily break a poem, to go too far out on the redefinition limb.

As for "ruth," you tell me: did it go too far? I am personally just barely satisfied with it: the difficulty of that rhyme compensates somewhat for the effort needed to define it (if the rhyme were something ending in an -ee sound, there would be no excuse since there are so many rhymes), and the root meaning is there, if somewhat faintly. Ruth's love for Naomi is the central motivator of the word, and it is that sort of overwhelming, non-self-oriented love - which sometimes seems like pity and can in fact be called compassion in one sense of that word - that the poem wanted and needed from the word. But I am not the arbiter of my own poetry: the reader is. So what do you think?