The New Hieroglyphics - Analysis

A global picture-code that cannot quite be a language

Les Murray’s poem argues that the so-called World language—the signage-and-icons system he calls Airport Road—promises universal understanding while quietly proving the opposite: it can transmit instructions and categories, but it can’t carry the full human life of speech, culture, and inwardness. The poem starts with a clean example: a balloon with a gondola means speculation. Already the joke bites: a whole economic concept gets reduced to a little floating picture, as if thinking itself were just a standardized pictogram.

From the outset Murray sets a tension between what can be written and read and what can be spoken. The speaker gives a blunt verdict—World not spoken—and then immediately admits why: People use their own words. The poem isn’t nostalgic about national languages so much as insistent that actual talk belongs to particular mouths, histories, and habits. A universal code can be legible without ever being alive.

Pronouns without pupils: the cost of making everyone readable

The poem’s most unsettling invention is its way of drawing persons. I becomes two eyes without pupils—a self that cannot be looked at directly, because those aren't seen when you look through them. It’s an eerie metaphor for consciousness: the self is the perceiving point, not an object in the world’s inventory. By contrast, You has both pupils, and we has one. World can diagram relationships from the outside, but it falters at the interior fact of being someone.

This is where Murray’s satire deepens into philosophy. A system meant to include everyone ends up stripping away exactly what makes a person irreducible. Turning pronouns into standardized eyes suggests that the price of global legibility is a kind of de-personing: you become a sign that others can decode. The poem keeps returning to this contradiction—maximum clarity, minimum soul.

Obviousness as a moral program (and a joke)

World assigns feelings and ethics as if they were road rules. Good is thumbs up; confidential is a hand zipping lips; Evil is three-cornered snake eyes. These are comically blunt, but the poem doesn’t only mock them. It shows how a global code tries to replace argument with instant recognition: if the picture is obvious, you don’t have to negotiate meaning with another person.

That hunger for instant recognition becomes explicit when Murray says, The effort is always to make symbols obvious. The examples are deliciously overconfident: the bolt of electricity, the winged stethoscope for flying doctor. But then the poem snaps into political absurdity: Prams under fire? means Soviet film industry. The point is not merely that such a symbol would be unfair; it’s that even the attempt at neutrality can smuggle in propaganda, stereotypes, or historical grudges under the guise of mere depiction.

Trying to escape culture—only to reveal it

World’s designers, the poem says, want pictographs that shouldn't be too culture-bound. Yet the moment Murray gives examples, the cultural fights leak in. For red, betel spit loses to ace of diamonds; black becomes ace of spades; and even those spades split into meanings like Union boss and feeble effort. The poem’s quick, wry shifts enact how symbols mutate as they cross communities: one person’s neutral icon is another person’s insult, in-joke, or political shorthand.

The implication is sharp: there is no pictorial Esperanto that stands outside history. Even when World borrows Latin letters only for names and abbreviations like OK, the borrowing admits that the code is not truly self-sufficient. It must lean on the very local languages it claims to supersede.

The hinge: sunflower talk and the return of metaphor

The poem’s decisive turn comes with a phrase that suddenly warms the satire into something like awe: everywhere there's sunflower talk, meaning metaphor. After insisting on literalness—Spare literal pictures that computers can draw faster than Pharaoh's scribes—the speaker admits that human meaning can’t be kept literal. Even World, built to be straightforward, keeps generating figurative speech.

That’s why the pictograph for grace is not a simple label but a strange, almost dreamlike scene: a figure riding a sky hook, bearing food. Likewise, Nature becomes two animals in a book, and instinct becomes two books Inside an animal. These aren’t just pictures; they are arguments about what the thing is. World pretends to be merely denotative, but it can’t stop itself from making little metaphysical claims.

Poetry inside the speech balloon—and the riddle that won’t resolve

Murray’s most pointed irony is that World ends up needing a symbol for poetry, and it defines it as a particular kind of speech: Sun and moon together inside one (inside a speech balloon). Poetry becomes a conjunction of opposites—day and night—held inside the very container World uses for utterance. Yet earlier, World not spoken. The poem sets up a contradiction: the global code must invent a sign for the untranslatable, and it does so by quietly reintroducing the idea of a voice.

Then the poem offers a puzzle it refuses to answer: sun and moon over palette or shoes are art forms, but what about sun and moon above a cracked heart and champagne glass? The speaker says, Riddle that, and this matters. World can command and label, but when it approaches mixed emotion—celebration tainted by grief, romance collapsing into hangover—it becomes interpretive, unstable, human. The reader has to do what World tried to eliminate: think, infer, and argue inwardly.

A hard question hidden in the fashion joke

If World needs a dictionary—the square-equals-diamond book—is it still a universal language, or just another specialized literacy that some people will wield over others? Murray’s example is wickedly specific: figures led by strings to their genitals mean fashion. The joke lands because it’s plausible and insulting at once: even a supposedly neutral code can express contempt, and the contempt becomes part of what gets standardized.

Ending with parallel cutlery: a polite truce, not a victory

The poem closes by admitting both failure and usefulness. All peoples are at times cat in water with this language: awkward, panicked, out of element. Yet it can promote international bird on shoulder—a striking emblem of cross-border friendliness, maybe even peace. The final gesture—lays its knife and fork parallel—feels like a global etiquette sign: the meal is over, communication has been managed, and everyone has followed the same code.

But parallel cutlery is not conversation. Murray leaves us with the sense that World can coordinate bodies in shared spaces—airports, toilets, menus, warnings—while the deepest human work (grace, poetry, riddled feelings, the pupil-less self) keeps slipping back into the messy realm where people use their own words.