First off, a clarification: from my perspective, poets shouldn’t rule
out or discard any linguistic resource, nor should they label one as being
superior to another. In such a context,
this post simply aims to provoke thought about how we use these three terms: till,
until and ‘til, all of which can serve different purposes in a poem.
If using everyday, accessible registers, I’d suggest till is the
ideal choice. It’s certainly my default selection. And if playing with
registers or going for a more formal tone, I sometimes plump for until.
However, I often see poems, written in an approachable tone with contractions
in their verbs, etc, that suddenly throw in an until instead of a till
to no specific semantic or syntactic effect. Why has the poet chosen to make
this decision? Is it for musical and/or metrical reasons? In these cases, is until
being used as syllabic padding?
And then there’s ‘til. I encountered many hurdles during the
editorial process of my first full collection with Eyewear back in 2017, but one
of the toughest was an editorial intern’s unilateral and systematic imposition of turning
every single till into ‘til throughout my ms. I had to put my
foot down at that point and refuse to continue unless they accepted my tills.
From my perspective, ‘til is only acceptable if the poet wants to strike
an explicitly colloquial tone.
But what about you? What’s your position on till, until and ‘til?
