Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Enjoyment; rejoicing; festivity; gladness.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Enjoyment; gayety; festivity; joyfulness.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun archaic, poetic
Enjoyment ,joy ,delight .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For times now past and gone I spent in joyance of their love
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They spent the night in joyance and harmony and telling tale after tale until morning dawned, when the Caliph laid an hundred gold pieces under the prayer-carpet and all taking leave of Ala al-Din, went their way.
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Meanwhile, they brought Ma’aruf girls of the Brides of the Treasure,68 who smote on instruments of music and danced before him, and he passed that night in joyance and delight,
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In this particular context, the word joyance itself becomes increasingly suspect: as a term that signifies not just being but showing: display, semblance, and, by implication, perception.
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The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the Spenserian word joyance was, according to Samuel Johnson's own lexicographical judgment, obsolete by the eighteenth century.
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Next to one gold Buddha sign read, "all of them show you a kind of joyance from the feeling of the men who have conquered the perplexity."
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While one should think it true that in nature there indeed is "nothing melancholy," given such anti-anthropomorphic, anti-anthropocentric logic as the speaker has proposed, can sentient nature be said to be full of active "joyance" either?
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Given Coleridge's staunch rejection of just such artificial "conceit [s]" (23), his treatment of the bird's "joyance" generates troublesome contradictions indeed, contradictions that in turn point to significant problems of perceiving and representing animals (miring the "One Life" doctrine in something of an epistemological quandary).
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The term "joyance" interestingly denotes as much an activity as a state of feeling or being, referring, unlike the common word "joy," both to feeling joy and to the action of showing it (OED).
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Coleridge had recoined the word "joyance" in "Lines on an Autumnal Evening" (1796), and then chose to redeploy the term in "The Nightingale," with the reasonable expectation of the word's antique strangeness to his readers.
qms commented on the word joyance
My solitude is an annoyance
But calls from my love give me buoyance,
And word that she’s wending
Toward her absence ending
I hear with a heartwarming joyance.
February 17, 2019