Fluidity and Solidness in Poetry

The abundance of juxtapositions of fluidity with solidness in poetry requires an explanation involving a universal feature of human psychology.

I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion; whose simple touch,
Is powerful to araise King Pepin, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand,
And write to her a love-line.

— Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (2022)

Through history and prehistory, people have had an immediate understanding of the difference between a liquid and a solid, without needing scientists to explain the difference to them.

— Dennis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution (2010)

Shakespeare mixes fluidity with solidness in the quote above, the former represented by breath and the latter by an animated rock. Lafeu, the character who speaks the lines, is using a metaphorical scenario to make the point that the medicine is special and strong. Arguably, however, Shakespeare also chose this metaphor because it adds aesthetic value to the story by way of contradiction. A cold, solid, static, lifeless rock is opposite in our minds, and in reality, to breath, life, quickness, dancing, fire and motion, and therefore it’s surprising and amusing to imagine a rock being endowed with or put in juxtaposition to these qualities. The lines make the point about the power of the medicine and entertain us at the same time.

One could interpret the contradiction in terms of differential excitement. A normal, unexciting rock is given the more exciting quality involved in various pairs of universally recognized opposites, those described by the dualities hot~cold (fire), fluid~solid (breath), dynamic~static (life, motion, dance) and fast~slow (quickness, spritliness), with the more exciting dualistic component to the left of a tilde and less exciting component to the right. In the contexts of sensory biology and psychology these dualities represent perceptual dimensions. In aesthetics they can be thought of as mixtures. They have the same structure from either perspective, suggesting a relationship between sensory systems and beauty. By taking the given more exciting qualities and pairing them with solidness one can summarize Shakespeare’s metaphor for the rock as hot~solid, fluid~solid, dynamic~solid, fast~solid, or more concisely as hot/fluid/dynamic/fast~solid.

In the quote Lafeu is assuring the King of France there’s a treatment that will cure him of disease, to be administered by a woman named Helena, whose medicine, he says, could even breathe life into King Pepin the Short, who at the time had been dead for 800 years, or resurrect Pepin’s son Charlemagne and inspire him to write a love letter, presumably to Helena. The resurrections are another contradiction, in this case with the structure living~nonliving, one of the most common aesthetic themes in poetry, mythology and stories, as well as an essential element of many religions, which tend to apply the same exciting qualities to the dead that Shakespeare applied to the rock (see Disruptions of Death).

These are also the types of contradictory mixtures of opposites we see repeatedly in creation stories, as when humans come into existence as a result of solids being injected with the fluidity of breath. In the stories, the mixture is used as a practical solution to the problem of how to get from inanimate (solid or fluid) matter to life (a mixture). A transformation is necessary because living things are observably softer than a solid and harder than a fluid, or because, from a physical perspective, the nonliving is simple and dualistic while life is complex and intermediate. If in Shakespeare and other fiction and poetry the mixture fluid~solid is used for amusement, to satisfy an unconscious bias, it’s reasonable to assume this bias has also played a role in the evolution of creation stories and myths, exerting pressure in favor of mixtures by way of aesthetic selection that operates in addition to the apparent logical need for physical transformation. The stories make sense while also being appealing, and should converge for both reasons on descriptions of what would later be called liquid crystals.

Dunmur (2021) gives examples of the specific expression “liquid crystal” being used in poetry going back to the Renaissance. Petrarch (1304–1374) used the term, according to the translation of Elliot (1993), in “Il Canzoniere”:

The morning songs of birds on their sad themes [song~sad]
at daybreak fill the dene with echoing calls, [bright/disorder/many/high pitch~down/in]
and there’s the sigh as liquid crystals fall, [fluid~solid]
pouring in brisk and chilly shining streams. [fluid/bright~down/cold]

Later, Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) used it in “Las Soledades”:

Next day the eye of morning sees [bright~round]
pretended groves made of untruthful trees,
avenues that the farming of their town
has walled with liquid crystals and not stone. [fluid~solid]

At around the same time Shakespeare was writing lines about crystal tears, glassy streams, watery glass, liquid pearls, liquid mountains, liquids trapped in solids, melting solid flesh, melting mountains and freezing skies. One can see a pattern throughout poetry involving these mixtures and others like them so extensive and obvious that there can be no doubt of a universal tendency for them to be produced repeatedly in the creative mind. The idea of fluidity induces that of solidness, and vice versa, in a kind of aesthetic reflex.

The following quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2022) is an example.

This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, [fluid~solid]
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot;
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp.

So is this, from Venus and Adonis:

But hers, which through the crystal tears gave light,
Shone like the moon in water seen by night.

This from Hamlet:

There’s a willow grows aslant a brook, [fluid~solid]
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. [fluid~solid]

And this from Richard II:

Too good to be so and too bad to live, [bad~good]
Since the more fair and crystal is the sky, [fluid~solid]
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.

Of the nine uses of the word “liquid” found throughout all of Shakespeare’s writing on Open Source Shakespeare, four (~44%) exemplify the same pattern of fluidity mixed with solidness, a high proportion if one assumes such references should tend to occur randomly in relation to each other.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass.

Richard III:

The liquid drops of tears that you have shed
Shall come again, transform’d to orient pearl. [fluid~solid]

Sonnet 5:

Then, were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, [fluid~solid]
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft.

Troilus and Cressida:

The strong-ribb’d bark through liquid mountains cut, [fluid~solid]
Bounding between the two moist elements,
Like Perseus’ horse: where’s then the saucy boat.

Out of the four times Shakespeare uses the word “solid” throughout his writing, three (75%) are coupled with some form of fluidity, either water or melting.

Hamlet:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, [fluid~solid]
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Henry IV:

Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea; and other times to see [fluid~solid]
The beachy girdle of the ocean.

Troilus and Cressida:

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe: [fluid~solid]
Strength should be lord of imbecility.

The opening picture, Bruegel’s 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel, is like the lines of Shakespeare in that the Tower is a solid surrounded by fluid water and clouds, with the clouds nearly penetrating some of its many entrances in the upper floors, like breath entering a stone. In Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” the solid wooden walkway in the lower portion of the painting contrasts with the dark fluidity into which the person on the bridge looks to be melting away. The background of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is one of blue fluidity intermingling with red solidness, and a very improbable scene for a subject to be sitting in front of.

In sampling the most famous poetry, according to a Google search, clear examples of fluid~solid occur at an extremely high rate. In “Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns, “luve” is like a melody that will last until the “seas gang dry” and “the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” In Robert Frost’s “Birches” the trees are loaded with ice in the sun after the rain as a colorful rising breeze cracks and crazes their enamel (fluid/disorder~solid) and the warmth of the sun makes them shed crystal shells (hot~solid). In “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, the deferred dream “dries up like a raisin in the sun,” crusts and sugars over “like a syrupy sweet” or explodes. Gilgamesh is called “a raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone” (Kovacs 1989). The never-brewed liquor comes from “tankards scooped in pearl” in Emily Dickinson’s “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” and the inns are molten blue (fluid~blue). In William Carlos Williams 1923 poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” the only components, aside from white chickens, are a solid red wheelbarrow and liquid water:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

Perhaps the ultimate example of the use of this mixture in poetry comes from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where it’s used 14 times in 29 consecutive lines from a section of the poem in its fifth part, “What the Thunder Said”:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Perplexity

Perplexity’s response to “How often do poems contain juxtapositions of fluids and solids?”

The juxtaposition of fluids and solids represents a remarkably common and enduring poetic device, though precise quantitative data on its frequency remains elusive in current scholarship. Based on available research, this contrast between states of matter appears to be more frequent than casual observation might suggest, embedded deeply in both the technical craft and thematic concerns of poetry across cultures and historical periods.

Contemporary and classical poetry frequently employs this juxtaposition across multiple dimensions. In Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” the poet creates “waxy stalactites” that function simultaneously as solid cave formations and metaphorical tears, demonstrating how fluid and solid states can merge conceptually while maintaining their distinct physical properties.

Based on available evidence, fluid-solid juxtapositions appear to be substantially more frequent in poetry than random occurrence would predict. The pattern manifests across cultures, historical periods, and poetic traditions, suggesting it addresses fundamental human experiences and provides poets with a versatile tool for exploring themes of change, permanence, transformation, and the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Perplexity’s response to “Find examples of the word crystal used together with references to fluids in the works of Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare frequently employed the word “crystal” in conjunction with various fluid imagery throughout his plays and poetry, creating a rich tapestry of metaphorical associations between the transparent mineral and different types of liquids. These combinations served multiple symbolic purposes, from conveying emotional states to describing physical beauty and natural phenomena.