Northcoast Antiquarian

Donald S. Yarab

The musings began as I started my morning routine. Roused out of bed and heading to the shower, I found myself uttering, almost involuntarily: yet ever more. The words rose without prompting—perhaps because the task before me was ordinary, repetitive, and required no conscious thought. In such moments, the mind drifts, half-idle and half-aware, allowing stray phrases to surface without clear origin. But these three words arrested me. I repeated them aloud and wondered: three simple words, and yet they carried weight, rhythm, and an unexpected poetic resonance. Why?

After completing my morning ablutions, I returned to contemplate the phrase further and determined that some research was in order. Accordingly, I sought poetry and prose in which these words appear in succession—or in meaningful proximity—with appreciable effect. Once identified, I sought to understand the source of their force: the reason they ring with a power far exceeding their lexical modesty.

What emerged almost immediately was that the phrase yet ever more is no fixed formula of the poetic canon—no Miltonic thunder, no Dantesque refrain, no Eliotian motif. Rather, it appears sporadically—in seventeenth-century lyrics, Victorian nature poetry, and occasional elegiac verse—where poets employ it whenever they require a compact expression of endurance, paradox, or lingering emotional intensification. Its power lies precisely in this: three ordinary words capturing experiences that refuse ordinariness.

Early Instances: Paradox and Persistence

Consider William Strode’s seventeenth-century poem On Jealousie:

There is a thing that nothing is,
A foolish wanton, sober wise;
It hath noe wings, noe eyes, noe eares,
And yet it flies, it sees, it heares;
It lives by losse, it feeds on smart,
It joyes in woe, it liveth not;
Yet evermore this hungry elfe
Doth feed on nothing but itselfe.¹

The concessive yet introduces contradiction: jealousy ought to consume itself and die out. Yet—contrary to all reason—it persists. Evermore extends that persistence beyond temporal boundaries, transforming a human passion into an almost metaphysical condition.

A similar pattern appears in Archibald Lampman’s Hope and Fear (1883):

As when the sunless face of winter fills
The earth—a moment misty bright—
The sun streams forth in powdery light,
A silver glory over silent hills;

And all the rolling glooms that lie below
That sudden splendour of the sun,
With shivered feet and mantles dun,
In stricken columns skim the gleaming snow;

Yet far away, beyond utmost range
Of sun-drowned heights, pine-skirted, dim,
That fringe the white waste’s frozen rim,
Hang ever ghost-like waiting for the change:

So often to the blank world-sobered heart
Comes hope, with swift unbidden eye,
And bids the weary life-glooms fly
With shaken feet, and for a space depart;

Yet evermore, still known of eye and ear,
With sullen, unforgotten surge,
Hang ever on the waste heart’s verge,
Time’s hovering ghosts of restless change and fear.²

Here the phrase marks memories that, though logically expected to fade, remain vivid—“still known of eye and ear.” Memory becomes not a fading echo but an enduring presence, resisting dissolution. The poem’s natural imagery—sunlight briefly breaking through winter gloom only for shadows to persist at the horizon—mirrors consciousness itself: fleeting solace does not erase deeper, lurking fears.

Structural analogues—but not direct antecedents—appear elsewhere in the tradition: George Herbert’s The Search (1633) repeatedly opens with “Yet can I mark…,” enacting concessive-persistence, while Christina Rossetti’s A Better Resurrection deploys yet as a pivot from desolation to expectation in the line “Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring,” generating a concessive-and-intensifying movement even without a full triadic form.

Tennyson and the Deepening of Grief

The pattern appears with particular frequency and force in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), where it becomes almost a structural signature for the poem’s central paradox: grief that does not diminish with time but deepens and transforms. Tennyson varies the pattern—substituting but for yet, altering the position of ever and more—while retaining its concessive–durational–intensifying logic.

In Canto XLI, contemplating his deceased friend’s spiritual ascent, he writes:

For tho’ my nature rarely yields
To that vague fear implied in death;
Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,
The howlings from forgotten fields;

Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor
An inner trouble I behold,
A spectral doubt which makes me cold.
That I shall be thy mate no more,

Tho’ following with an upward mind
The wonders that have come to thee,
Thro’ all the secular to-be,
But evermore a life behind.³

The phrase captures the poet’s fear that he will perpetually lag behind Hallam’s transfigured state—not merely left behind but evermore behind, the temporal gulf widening rather than closing. The concession is double: though he claims not to fear death itself, and though he strives to follow Hallam’s ascent, the doubt persists and intensifies.

Yet the most remarkable deployment appears in Canto CXXXI, where the pattern shifts from lamentation to affirmation:

And yet is love not less, but more;

No longer caring to embalm
In dying songs a dead regret,
But like a statue solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm.

Regret is dead, but love is more
Than in the summers that are flown,
For I myself with these have grown
To something greater than before.⁴

Here yet introduces not mere continuation but transfiguration. Love persists and intensifies—”not less, but more”—becoming something greater. What began as lamentation has, through time’s pressure, become an enlargement of the heart.

Later Variations

Geoffrey Bache Smith, whose A Spring Harvest was published posthumously under J.R.R. Tolkien’s editorship, employs the phrase to capture beauty and grace in his Glastonbury:

The Queen that was, whom now a convent’s shade
Imprisons, and a dark and tristful veil
Enwraps those brows, that in old days were seen
Most puissant proud of all that ever made
The traitor honest, and the valorous frail.

Yet evermore about her form there clings
And evermore shall cling, the ancient grace,
Like evening sunlight lingering on the mere:
And till the end of all created things
There shall be some one found, shall strive to trace
The immortal loveliness of Guinevere.⁵

Guinevere’s beauty, though shadowed by sorrowful penitence, persists; the phrase conveys a grace that resists decay, lingering like light upon the waters. The doubled evermore—first descriptive, then prophetic—creates a temporal dilation: what persists now will persist “till the end of all created things.”

Perhaps this explains why the phrase surfaced unbidden during my morning routine—in that liminal state when the mind is neither fully engaged nor wholly at rest, and truths we do not seek present themselves. A simple, repetitive task; three ordinary words; and suddenly a glimpse of what all these poets knew.

The Shape and Sound of the Phrase

The power of yet ever more lies in the internal mechanics of the phrase itself. Yet, is adversative; it signals resistance, contradiction, persistence against expectation. Ever erases temporal boundaries and opens a vista without limit. More introduces escalation—a rising degree, an intensifying condition.

Thus the phrase embodies a miniature logic of concession → duration → escalation, a compressed rhetoric of persistence against expectation.

The sound reinforces the structure. The assonantal /ɛ/ shared by yet and ev-er binds the first two terms, while the deeper /ɔː/ of more provides rounded closure. Jakobson’s “poetic function” is precisely this intertwining of sound and meaning: language calling attention to itself through patterned echo.⁶ The triad exemplifies it.

Linguistically, the force of yet ever more can also be understood in light of Michael Israel’s account of scalar meaning. Ever is a degree-based intensifier, signaling movement along an ordered scale without natural upper bound; joined to more, it expresses not mere continuation but continuation that deepens.⁷ Geoffrey Leech’s observations on foregrounded repetition likewise illuminate why paired or tripled intensifiers resonate in poetic contexts.⁸

But lived experience precedes theory: some feelings—grief, longing, devotion—intensify through time rather than diminish.

The Lived Experience of Persistence

The rarity of the exact triad is telling. Poets have long used its components in various pairings, but the compact English formula appears only occasionally, and often at moments of emotional endurance or spiritual intensification. This scarcity sharpens its effect. Each verified instance crystallizes a paradox: what ought to subside instead deepens.

This explains the phrase’s particular force. In three ordinary words, it captures something we already know but rarely articulate: the heart’s deepest experiences follow a logic all their own. They do not fade; they deepen. They do not lessen; they grow. For grief, for love, for memory, for beauty glimpsed and lost, time does not heal so much as intensify. What we carry becomes heavier, more present, more itself.

Yet ever more.

Notes

1. William Strode, The Poetical Works of William Strode, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Dobell, 1907), 49. ↩︎
2. L. R. Early, ed., Twenty-Five Fugitive Poems by Archibald Lampman (Canadian Poetry, vol. 12, Spring–Summer 1983). ↩︎
3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. as written by Alfred Lord Tennyson MDCCCXLIX (London: Bankside Press, 1900), Canto XLI, 49. ↩︎
4. Tennyson, In Memoriam, CXXXI, 133. ↩︎
5. Geoffrey Bache Smith, A Spring Harvest, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1918), 17. ↩︎
6. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. Chapter 7, Linguistics and Poetics, 62–94, on the poetic function. ↩︎
7. Linguist Michael Israel notes that words such as ever function as degree-based intensifiers, signaling movement along a scale rather than a fixed quantity. In his discussion of polarity items, he explains that their force comes from the way they mark increasing degrees without a natural upper limit, a feature central to English expressions of ongoing growth or intensification. This helps clarify why phrases like “ever more” feel open-ended and expansive: they point not to a single amount but to a process that keeps rising. See Israel, “The Pragmatics of Polarity,” in The Handbook of Pragmatics (Horn & Ward, eds., 2004), discussion of scalar semantics and polarity items. ↩︎
8. Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969), chap. 6, “Patterns of Sound,” esp. §§6.1–6.4, where Leech discusses foregrounded repetition, sound patterning, and the poetic heightening of ordinary lexical items. ↩︎

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