The Meaning of Headlines: 'harking back'

The Meaning of Headlines: 'harking back' - monuments

On July 18, 2015, the Dawn daily newspaper in Pakistan, in its local section, contained the headline ‘Harking back: Exquisite Naulakha Pavilion and its amazing origins.’ What does ‘harking back’ mean?

The word ‘hark’ on its own means to listen. Readers might recall the song, Hark the Herald Angels Sing – it means listen, the angels are singing (bringing news). Or readers may know the line in the poem, Hist! by Australian poet Clarence James Dennis (1876-193): Hist! … Hark! The night is very dark, And we’ve to go a mile or so, Across the Possum Park.’

American poet, Richard Eberhart (1904-2005) wrote a poem called Hark Back about Paris: To have stepped lightly among European marbles, Dwelling in a pantheon of air; To have altered the gods in a fact of being; To have envisaged the marriage, Of everything new with the old, And sprung a free spirit in the world, Is to have caught my own spirit, On a bicycle in the morning, Riding out of Paris, Heading South. My flesh felt so good, I was my own god (poetryfoundation.org). But I digress …

Hark back is not technically to listen back. To ‘hark back’ is, according to Encarta Dictionaries, ‘to think or speak again about something from the past.’ It is synonymous with ‘go back to’ or ‘revisit’ or ‘recall’ – to be reliving or returning to a past event or time.

If harking back means thinking about the past, does the article inform the reader of something in the past? It does. The article is about the Naulakha Pavilion in Lahore Fort, in the Pakistan city of Lahore, built in 1663 and included on the UNESCO World Heritage Monuments list in 1981. The author writes of the architecture and its history – its ‘fusion of the Bengal tradition of constructing sloping roofs … and the Baldachin structure style’ – the canopy style of a tent. It adds information about its Iraq, Kurdish, and Moghal heritage mixed together in the ‘beautiful merging of styles.’ Emperor Shah Jehan commissioned the Lahore Fort and its Naulakha Pavilion, some say to honour his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) named a novel after it, and even his house in Vermont in America. The article takes quite a nostalgic return to the once grand structure, now falling into disrepair.

Scorecard for the Dawn headline is 100% for its wistful return to the past. It harkened back to the time of the Emperor when love was depicted in architectural wonders, in the hope that they would stand the test of time. The phrase ‘to hark back’ is not commonly used anymore, but when it is, it can evoke a multitude of reminiscences of times gone, but not forgotten.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1195182/harking-back-exquisite-naulakha-pavilion-and-its-amazing-origins

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