Home › Glossary › Letter C

crescit eundo

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

It grows as it goes; gathering strength and momentum with forward movement.

Detailed Definition
Crescit eundo is taken from Lucretius's description of a thunderbolt gaining force as it travels. It became the motto of New Mexico and is associated with the idea of compounding growth and gathering momentum. In poetry, it speaks to the self-reinforcing quality of creative energy, love, narrative, and fame. Poets use it to describe how a poem, a passion, or an idea gains power as it develops, each movement forward adding to the force of what follows.
Example
Example in poetry:
Lucretius's image of the thunderbolt growing as it travels provides the scientific basis for crescit eundo, and the Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura is itself a crescit eundo work — gathering force and momentum across six books; The narrative structure of the Aeneid embodies crescit eundo — Aeneas's story gathering momentum and significance as it moves from the ruins of Troy toward the founding of Rome; A poet writing a sequence or long poem might consciously employ crescit eundo as a structural principle — allowing the poem to gather force with each section, the end more powerful than the beginning; Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" crescit eundo through its fifty-two sections — the self expanding and deepening as the poem progresses until it reaches the cosmic dissolution of the final section; A student might analyze how a sonnet sequence achieves crescit eundo — identifying how the individual sonnets build on each other to create a momentum greater than any single poem
Additional Notes
Crescit eundo is taken from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (VI, 340), where it describes the thunderbolt (fulgur) growing more powerful as it travels through the sky. The phrase became the motto of New Mexico when it joined the United States in 1912, applied to the state's growth. Students should note the physical phenomenon that Lucretius describes: the thunderbolt generates a vacuum as it moves, into which more air rushes, feeding the electrical charge and making it more powerful. This physical model of self-reinforcing momentum is the literal basis for the metaphorical uses. In poetic terms, crescit eundo describes the phenomenon of the poem that gathers imaginative force as it develops — where each line or stanza draws energy from what preceded it and amplifies it. Related terms include the sublime (which is related to the overwhelming experience of accumulated power), anaphora (the rhetorical repetition that generates cumulative force), and the concept of narrative momentum.
Also Known As
it grows as it goes growing as it goes New Mexico state motto
Skip to main content