MED gives stille seven senses under one headword — motionless, silent, secret, continual, always, yet. The word holds all of them simultaneously; Keats depends on it. But the compound stillborn takes one sense (motionless) and freezes it into death. The polysemy dies in the compounding. OED dates stillborn to 1596; before that, the word for a child born dead was something else — deadborn, or the Latin mortinatus. When English made stillborn, it chose the spatial sense (not moving) over the temporal (still = yet, as in “still alive”). The compound could have meant “born continuing” — perpetually born — but it didn’t. It chose the corpse.
What does a poem do when it uses still near birth or near death — does the compound’s gravity pull the other senses toward it?
great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
— Sidney, Astrophel and Stella I
The two uses of still in this sonnet are doing opposite work. The first — others’ feet still seemed — means yet, continuing, persisting: the temporal sense, the one OED dates older. The second is structural: Sidney is still (silent, stopped, unable) before he can speak, and simultaneously laboring toward birth. The poem holds the child-birth metaphor and the stillness metaphor in the same room, and the compound’s gravity is palpable — great with child to speak risks tipping into stillborn. But it doesn’t. The Muse interrupts before the birth fails.
What Sidney does is use the proximity of birth-language to still without letting them compound. The poem resists by making the stillness temporary — a before, not an outcome. The word retains its temporal charge (yet, persisting) precisely because the birth succeeds at line 14. If the Muse had not spoken, you’d have a stillborn sonnet and a different still.
MED throu n.(2): sense 1(a), birth contractions; sense 1(b), throwes of deth. One headword, one etymology, one physical convulsion meaning both. Sidney’s throes already holds birth and death without compounding — and couldn’t draw on stillborn, which is 1590s against a poem of c. 1582. The gravity you hear isn’t the compound’s. It’s the word the poem actually uses.
Tennyson feels the same doubleness from the other side — not a word holding both but a body doing both at once:
The deep pulsations of the world, Æonian music measuring out The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.
The trance is labour and delivery both: something forces its way through him, and what emerges is doubt. Cancell’d carries the latticework sense — crossed out, barred — so the visionary state doesn’t end, it’s voided. The pulsations that opened the passage are unmistakably uterine; the blows that close it are unmistakably fatal. Tennyson arrives at Sidney’s problem a different way: not a word that holds terminus and origin in its etymology, but a syntax that runs them into each other so neither survives intact.
Cancellare: to make like a lattice, from cancer — crossed bars, a variant of carcer, prison. The word that voids and the word that incarcerates share a root. When Tennyson writes “cancell’d, stricken thro’,” he is almost glossing the Latin: cancellare is to strike through with a lattice. The syntax works because the word was already doing it.
I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars, – Only to fail again!
— Emily Dickinson, “Escape” (1886)
The bars are not escaped; they’re tugged at and reproduced. The poem cancels the escape it names — the word “escape” quickens the blood in the first stanza, the bars return in the last, and the failure is formal as much as narrative. Dickinson doesn’t write through the lattice; she writes as the lattice, the cross-structure of hope and enclosure redrawn with each reading. Tennyson’s “cancell’d, stricken thro’” has the violence visible; here the same operation is hidden in the syntax — I never hear twice, only to fail again completing a loop that was already closed before it started.
Anglo-Norman eschaper, sense 3: to hatch, leave the nest. The root is excappare — out of the cape, out of the shell. The word doesn’t say break the bars. It says leave something of yourself inside them.