“As usual I’ve got no very watertight reasons—but I imagine you have hit on part of the reason when you say the ‘daily bread of our northern muse.’ I love ‘brights’ as a verb. It seems to have more power then ‘brightens’ and I expect you are guessing aright when you suggest it may be that I’ve used it to strengthen the figurative meaning, if by figurative we mean the archetypal meaning or something like that. Of course as with so many of my ‘tricks’ it may be that I imagine it sounds more positive because it is slightly unusual—one has to beware of that snag, and I try to keep aware of it, when I choose a less usual or innovative form. But I do tend to like (for some reason unknown to me) the chance of emphasizing the meaning & feeling of a word by using, e.g., the adverbial form of that word in a verbal sense. (* Also I like substantives that are also used verbally, as ‘she souths.’) P’r’haps it’s partly, in the case of ‘brights,’ a colloquial thing as well, as I have heard an older generation (I can’t remember whether in London or in the country) say such things as ‘Look! it brights up the whole place.’ I think there is a natural tendency in traditional English unschooled usage to do that sort of thing. But I don’t know for certain.”
—David Jones on his use of language in The Anathemata (from a 1953 letter to Desmond Chute, published in Inner Necessities: The Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute)
