"equipoise"
In the Victorian scheme of things, the notion of balance was worthy of fine shades of meanings. The word equipoise, for example, which is about balance in general, is more particularly about a kind of perfect balance, especially in abstract things. In the examples of usage, especially of "immaterial" equipoise, the balance achieved is different from the kind of balance achieved by equal distribution of weight around a center. It seems rather to be the balance achieved from the opposition of equal forces.
The first edition of the OED treats it as follows:
1. Equality of or equal distribution of weight; a condition of perfect balance or equilibrium.
Among the list of examples of the use of the word "in material things" is a very interesting one -- in a 1787 book by the pseudonymous "Gay Gambado," Acad. Horsem: "In your eagerness to mount, you may, by over-exerting yourself, lose your equipoise" (39).
Among the list of example of the use of the word "in immaterial things," especially "intellectual, moral, political, or social forces or interests" are the following:
Samuel Johnson's 1759 Idler No. 83: "Sam Scruple ... lives in a continual equipoise of doubt" (P4).
Thomas De Quincey's 1822 Confessions of an Opium-Eater: "Opium on the contrary communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties" (1862, 197).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1858 Birds of Passage, Haunted Houses:
Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires.
An article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the April 1885 Contemporary Review: "Between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound" (550 [?]).
This discussion is based on the definition of the word equipoise in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a little explanation.
To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.
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(c) Copyright 1998 Sharon Cogdill, dramaturg for this production and author of this website.
College of Fine Arts and Humanities
St. Cloud State University
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Last update: 10 May 1998.