baleful

For the past few weeks, I've been fortunate enough to be staying in my friends' studio while my own place undergoes extensive renovation. My friends have an English bulldog, who I've known for many years, and one of the fun things about my stay here is that she likes to come and visit when I'm home. The studio used to be inhabited by my friends' son, so I'm sure it's kind of a reflected glory, but still, it's nice to have a parttime animal friend. The other day, though, when I wasn't quick enough to answer the door, she had already returned to my friends' house and was waiting to be let in there. When I called out to her, she turned and gave me what could only be described as a baleful look. It was exactly the word that came to mind, and no other would do as well. But what does it mean, exactly? I mean by it some kind of cross between recriminatory and disappointed, with a touch of bad mood thrown in. By chance, I found a picture of a baleful bulldog, which is not quite the same as an English Bulldog, but captures the mood:

   


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Well, I'm glad I had that picture as a kind of verification that this is more or less what people think 'baleful' means, as the definition is a bit more severe. As The Free Dictionary has it, baleful means

1. Portending evil; ominous.

2. Harmful or malignant in intent or effect.

 

And over at alphadictionary.com?

 

1. Miserable, wretched, distressed, suffering.

2. Malicious, injurious, noxious.

 

That's because baleful comes out of  the Old English  bealu-full, "dire, wicked or cruel" and bealu itself is even more extreme: "harm, injury, ruin, evil, mischief, wickedness, a noxious thing". The speculated ProtoIndoEuropean root is bheleu--to beat. This all seems a pretty long way from the reproachful glance of a bulldog.

 

But there has long been a bit of poetic license around the word. Even by the time the Anglo-Saxons got ahold of it, bealu was used in a poetic sense only, or so the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us. Couple of nice words there, though--bealubenn, a mortal wound, and bealuðonc, a mortal thought*. Although the range of use seems a bit limited if we can go by our examples... 

 

Baleful became extinct for a time, as you might understand why, but was revived. By who? Modern romantic poets, of course. I went looking for an example but only encountered a "pre-romantic" poet, one William Collins, who I hadn't heard of before.

 

But who is He whom later Garlands grace,
Who left a-while o'er Hybla's Dews to rove,
With trembling Eyes thy dreary Steps to trace,
Where Thou and Furies shar'd the baleful Grove?

                                   from "Ode to Fear"


Here's the poem in its entirety. 

 

And here's  a little bit about William Collins. Though he died relatively young, he did make it to almost forty, but Wikipedia tells us that this is the sole portrait.

 



*Edited because I misspoke the first time.