“A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same.”
– Margaret Atwood
Those other appeals, they have their flaws.
But this one, in my humble judgement,
is the best: appeals to character,
trustworthiness, credibility, honor
of the speaker, all of which I suppose
is made up of history and a bit
of confidence in your own experience,
occasionally testimony, (four out of five poets…),
reliability, what they call a man’s fiber,
and then the fiber of the words themselves,
slick or rough or double-threaded.
But interestingly, ethos is not necessarily
the same thing as solid or substantial
(as in a ghost), or massive (as in a small flash
of insight), or upstanding (as in a collapsed
and mourning widow), which is something
image-crafters always get wrong.
Credence often finds its way to the wobbly
and the ramshackle, the tottering child,
the shaking suitor. Even a rickety bridge
can make a very honest and caliber case.