Wax poetic means to talk or write about something in an increasingly flowery and enthusiastic way. The ‘wax’ is an old verb meaning ‘grow’, nothing to do with candles, and the phrase is first found in print in 1872, in Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone. ‘Waxing poetic’ and ‘waxed poetic’ are the same idiom in other tenses, and ‘wax lyrical’ and ‘wax eloquent’ are its close relatives. It is rarely quite a compliment: what it usually describes is a purple patch, or a speaker being long-winded about something small.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Wax poetic’?
‘Waxing poetic’ has nothing to do with bees, candles, or polishing cars. The verb ‘to wax’ is ‘to grow’; the opposite of ‘to wane’, which is ‘to decrease’. Grow and decrease have largely superseded the archaic terms wax and wane in almost all modern usages, apart from the waxing and waning of the moon. The other remaining contemporary uses of ‘wax’ with the meaning of ‘grow’, survive in various expressions like ‘wax poetic’ and ‘wax lyrical’. These are often explained as deriving from the imagery of the waxing of the moon. In fact, the word is extremely ancient and was used to mean grow in many contexts prior to it being used to describe the monthly increase in size of the visible moon. King Alfred, in the translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, which he commissioned in AD 897, used the Old English version of the word - ‘weaxan’.
Etymonline’s entry for wax (v.1) sets out the same order of events. The word is Old English weaxan, ‘to increase, grow’, used first ‘in reference to trees, plants’; it reaches the moon only ‘from early Middle English’, where it gets ‘paired alliteratively with wane’. The same entry records a second old use, ‘pass from one state to another’, as in ‘wax old’, and that is the one ‘wax poetic’ is built on: less growing than turning into. The old strong forms of the verb, wax and weox and waxen, were already archaic after the 14th century. Weaxan itself is easy to find in the Pastoral Care text, in flatly practical senses, among them a priest who ‘his feax lete weaxan’, lets his hair grow.
There are numerous examples of the use of ‘wax’, meaning ‘grow’, in medieval texts; for example, The Geneva Bible, 1560, in Deuteronomy 32:15:
“But he that shulde haue bene vpright, when he waxed fat, spurned with his hele.”
[the 1611 version has it in more modern English as “Jesurun waxed fat, and kicked.”]
Both use the verb in its plain sense of growing, with no suggestion of speech in it at all.
It isn’t until much later that ‘wax’ began to be used to refer to flowery and poetic speech or writing. This occurs in various phrases, like ‘wax lyrical’, ‘wax poetic’ and ‘wax eloquent’. Of these, it is ‘wax poetic’ that is still most commonly used. The dictionaries were slow to catch up with it. Michael Quinion, writing on World Wide Words, points out that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose entry for wax was published in 1926, left the idiomatic sense out altogether, and that it ‘had to wait until 2006 before it was added to the online entry’, with a first example there dated 1842. ‘Wax eloquent’ was the first of this group of phrases to be used to describe someone becoming increasingly expansive and expressive in speech. That dates from the early 19th century, for example, this piece from Bracebridge Hall, a collection of essays and literary sketches that Washington Irving published under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon. The first London edition, printed for John Murray of Albemarle Street, is dated 1822, and the passage comes from the essay ‘English Gravity’ in its second volume:
“The whole country is covered with manufacturing towns… a region of fire; reeking with coal-pits, and furnaces, and smelting-houses, vomiting forth flames and smoke.” The squire is apt to wax eloquent on such themes.
Ironically, far from ‘waxing eloquent’, Irving was suffering from writer’s block while he was assembling the book, following a family bereavement, and struggled to finish enough essays as to be worth publishing. His own farewell at the end of the second volume admits as much, recalling ‘how often I have taken up my pen, with a mind ill at ease’.
‘Waxing poetic’ came next. The first example that I can find in print is in Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, 1872:
“One could almost wax poetic, but we will keep such ambitious ideas for a future day.”
Quinion reaches that same 1872 sentence on World Wide Words, and adds that the Oxford English Dictionary entry carries no instance of ‘wax poetic’ at all, so 1872 stands as the earliest example either of us has found.
Stanley seems to have been an enthusiastic waxer. His book also contains “I waxed indignant”, “Farquhar and Shaw waxed too wroth”, “I accordingly waxed courageous” - all at a time when he reports that the sun “waxed hotter and hotter”. It would be remiss to leave out a Marx Brothers gag at this point. Groucho Marx’s role as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff in the 1932 film Horse Feathers yielded this gem:
Wagstaff’s Receptionist: The Dean is furious! He’s waxing wroth!
Prof. Wagstaff: Is Roth out there, too? Tell Roth to wax the Dean for awhile.
‘Wax lyrical’ followed in the early 20th century; for example, Gilbert Cannan’s translation of Jean-Christophe in Paris, 1911:
“He had the genius of taste except at certain moments when the Massenet slumbering in the heart of every Frenchman awoke and waxed lyrical.”
Cannan was translating Romain Rolland’s novel sequence Jean-Christophe.
Time for me to wane lyrical and stop.