"The Cool Web"

If the World is either reticent or mute, we humans, for our part, do not know when to shut up.  Lao Tzu's well-known dictum is a good starting point:  "Those who know do not talk.  Those who talk do not know." Perhaps.  Po Chu-i puts Lao Tzu in humorous perspective for us (the translation is by Arthur Waley):

                  Lao Tzu

"Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent."
Those words, I am told,
Were spoken by Lao Tzu.
If we are to believe that Lao Tzu
     Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
     Of five thousand words?

Robert Graves suggests that yakking may serve a purpose.  But at a cost.

                        The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves, Poems, 1914-1926 (1927).

                                     Norman Rowe, "Span" (1985)