Archaism
Quick answer: Archaism is the deliberate use of old-fashioned words like 'thee', 'ere' and 'o'er' in writing. Learn when archaic language helps a poem and when it embalms it.
An archaism is a word, spelling or grammatical form that has fallen out of everyday use but is deliberately revived in writing: 'thee' and 'thou', 'ere' for before, 'o'er' for over, 'methinks', 'hither'. The choice is always a signal, since no one reaches for 'ere' by accident. Archaic language announces that a text wants to stand outside the present.
Poetry is where archaisms survive longest, partly because old poems keep them in circulation and partly because new poets borrow them for gravity, ritual or pastness. That borrowing is the most double-edged decision in the glossary: the same word that gives one poem the weight of ceremony gives another the smell of the museum. Knowing which effect you are buying is the entire skill.
How It Works
Archaism works by association. Readers meet 'thou' mainly in scripture, Shakespeare and old hymns, so the word imports those registers wholesale: solemnity, intimacy, the sacred, the past. Grammatical archaisms ('he knoweth', 'if it be') and syntactic inversions ('quoth she') do the same. The effect is real but expensive, because the reader is simultaneously reminded that the poem is in costume.
An invented pair shows the trade: 'ere the frost doth take the garden' against 'before frost takes the garden'. The first buys ritual and pays in distance; the second buys immediacy and pays in plainness. Neither is wrong, but they are different purchases.
Where You Will See It
Edmund Spenser wrote 'The Faerie Queene' in deliberately antique English even for the 1590s, faking the past to honour Chaucer. Coleridge dressed 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in archaisms to make his ballad feel found rather than written. The King James Bible froze early seventeenth-century forms into permanent liturgical English. And the great modernist quarrel was partly about this device: Ezra Pound began in 'hath' and 'thee' and then spent a career scrubbing archaism out of himself and everyone near him.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
The default advice for contemporary poets is blunt: do not, unless the poem has a structural reason. Legitimate reasons exist, a persona from another century, deliberate pastiche, a hymn or spell whose form demands its inherited language, comic incongruity, quotation. Illegitimate reasons are commoner: reaching for 'ere' because it sounds poetic, or letting a rhyme force ''tis'. Judges reading thousands of contest entries can tell borrowed solemnity from earned feeling in about a line. If you do use archaism, commit fully and consistently, since a single 'thou' in a modern poem reads as a wardrobe malfunction.
What poets can take from this
- Use archaism only with a structural reason: persona, pastiche, ritual or joke.
- Be consistent, since one antique word in a modern poem reads as an accident.
- Never let rhyme or metre force an archaism; recast the line instead.
- Study Spenser and Coleridge to see archaism as a designed costume, not a habit.
- When in doubt, translate the line into plain present English and see what dies.
Try it yourself
Write a two-part poem. Part one: a spell, blessing or curse in fully committed archaic English, consistent in its 'thee', 'doth' and inversions. Part two: the same content translated into flat modern speech. End by keeping whichever version tells the truth better, and note what the costume added or hid.
Questions
Is using archaic words in poetry wrong?
Not wrong, but expensive. Archaisms import ceremony and pastness at the cost of immediacy, and unearned ones make a poem feel imitative. Most editors and judges advise contemporary language unless the poem has a structural reason for the costume, such as persona or pastiche.
What is the difference between an archaism and an obsolete word?
An obsolete word has left the language entirely and needs a glossary. An archaic word is old-fashioned but still recognised, kept alive by scripture, Shakespeare and tradition, like 'thee' or 'hither'. Archaisms can still be deployed; obsolete words must be explained.
Why do old poems use 'thee' and 'thou'?
Because those were ordinary words at the time, the informal singular 'you'. They were not poetic then; they have become poetic to us because we now meet them mainly in old poetry and scripture. Later poets borrowed them to sound elevated, which is archaism proper.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.