MAGICAL LETTERS AND INESCAPABLE RHYTHMS
Poetry, Meaning, & Sound Patterns
Andrea Henchey
Critical Paper and Program Bibliography
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in
Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2010
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The sound must be an echo to the sense — Alexander Pope
Say the word “ping.” Now say the word “pong.” Which is darker?i Most think
“pong”— but why? Why do we perceive some vowels as “light” and some as “dark”?
Why are some “big” and others “small”? What is it about certain consonants that makes
them seem “tender” or “aggressive”? How do speech sounds move us? How do rhythms
affect our moods? While I will not attempt to answer, definitively, why certain sounds
make us feel what we feel, I will argue that sound patterns do, indeed, carry “expressive
potential” of their own and thus play a crucial role in the affective reception involved in
the writing and reading of poetry. Though there are still many who deny that the
phenomenon of “sound symbolism” even exists, my research has convinced me of a
profound connection between sound and meaning. Through a review of the relevant
theory and a close examination of the work of several poets who use sound patterns
especially well, I hope to deepen and refine my understanding of this connection and,
ultimately, apply this understanding to my own writing and to my belief that reading is a
dynamic and interactive process.
When I first became truly aware of the effect sounds can have on readers nearly
two years ago, I decided that I had to “crack the code.” I confess I was not guided by a
higher academic purpose. I was selfish and my objective simple: to discover which
sounds and rhythms to use in my poetry to conjure the responses I desired. In other
words, I wanted to make magic. I still do. And it turns out I wasn’t the only one this idea
in mind. In fact, people have been thinking and writing about the relationship between
sound and meaning since days of Plato. More recently, Margaret Magnus wrote a brief
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but compelling book, Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants, in which she
outlines her studies in “phonosemantics” (‘phono’ = sound + ‘semantics’ = the study of
meaning) a branch of linguistics sometimes referred to as “sound symbolism.” Her
findings are astounding. As she made her way through the dictionary, she discovered
classes of “phonesthemes” which she defines, as linguist Firth did before her, as a “sound
sequence and its associated meaning” (4). One example of a phonestheme that she
provides is /gl/, which “refers to reflected light”:
/gl/ shining, mostly reflected or indirect light – glare, gleam, glim, glimmer, glint,
glisten, glister, glitter, gloaming, glow (4)
What is more exciting is that she found that:
not only every sequence of consonants, but every single consonant behaved this
way. That is, /b/ inhabits a deep, multifaceted, but also unique and very specific
world with which it infuses every word that contains it. Moreover, it is the
pronunciation of /b/ that lies at the heart of this world” (5)
At the outset of my research, I suspected that if individual phonemes could carry
meaning, then that meaning must connect with the manner of articulation, the way we
move our mouths to make the sound. (I should take a moment here to clarify that a
phoneme is not the same as a letter. A phoneme is: “The smallest phonetic unit in a
language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b
of bat in English” (“phoneme”). To further illustrate the distinction between letters and
phonemes, the words “catch” and “kill” both begin with the same phoneme: /k/ while,
say, “circle” and “serendipity” both begin with /s/). Magnus suggests the “explosive” or
“plosive” /b/ — a sound made by building up pressure in the mouth until it bursts out of
the lips — imparts a certain feel to each every word it is a part of. I agree. My initial
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impressions have only been confirmed by Magnus’ work and the many additional sources
I’ve consulted.
It would be foolish to try to include every important idea from Gods of the Word
here, but a quick review of some of the most enlightening and relevant points seems
appropriate. One of the more important concepts is that while a phoneme, say /b/, colors,
flavors, or lends some of its nature to the words that contain it, it does not tell us much of
anything about what the words will refer to; instead it lends them certain qualities.
Magnus explains:
Linguists and philosophers have largely equated ‘meaning’ with ‘what a thing
refers to’. But the consonant /b/ only indirectly affects the referents of the word
that contain it, and it does not seem to affect reference in any general way. The
consonant /b/ has no direct influence on whether the word containing it refers to a
sound, a body part or an animal. Rather it tends to make the sound blaring, the
body part bloated, and the animal beastly…” (7)
She then suggests that there are at least two aspects to what we think of as a word’s
“meaning.” The first is “reference” and the other is its ‘inherent meaning.” It may be
helpful to think of the difference between the black and white, dictionary definition of a
word (reference) and the more subtle nuances of its connotations (inherent meaning).
You could even say we’re talking about each word’s essence, its spirit or soul. Magnus
later claims that “because every inherent meaning is unique, there are no true synonyms”
(9) but any poet could have told you that.
To be clear, Magnus does not profess to know what /s/ or /b/ or any other
phoneme truly “means” rather her work is intended to demonstrate that there are, indeed,
discernable phonosemantic classes. For example, we recently considered the
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phonestheme /gl/, which refers to reflected light. Other classes that Magnus identified for
/gl/ also related to light are:
/gl/ - looking (usually indirect) – glance, glare, glazed, glimpse, glint, glower
/gl/ - reflecting surfaces – glace, glacier, glair, glare, glass, glaze, gloss (5)
Those two classes, in addition to the one mentioned previously, “contain over half the
common words beginning with /gl/ that do not contain prefixes or suffixes” (Magnus 5,
emphasis mine.) Pretty fascinating, persuasive stuff. And, interestingly, Magnus found
that “phonesthemes remained surprisingly constant from language to language” (15). For
anyone who remains doubtful, though, Magnus provides a series of experiments or
“tests” to prove her hypotheses. I will not provide the details of those tests here, but
suffice to say she has created a compelling argument for the phonosemantic case. In
summary, she claims:
…that it is possible by means of a series of repeatable experiments to show that
certain meanings hang out with certain phonemes and others do not. Furthermore,
these meanings form a coherent whole that influences the ‘meaning’ of every
word that contains that sound. The influence of this inherent ‘sound meaning’
does not merely ornament the word, but lies at the very heart of who it is and very
much determines how it may be used. And this ‘meaning’ is surprisingly specific,
though it includes within it a large and multifaceted semantic world (38)
Next, Magnus goes on to provide exactly what it was I’d been searching for: an
explanation of the ‘meanings’ behind each consonant sound. (Curiously, she only
examines consonants, not vowels.) Recall that vowels are:
…any sound occurring in the middle of a syllable, provided that is produced
without any kind of obstruction of the outgoing breath. Sounds that have some
obstruction to the breath stream, such as the bringing of the lips together, are
consonants (Ladefoged 25)
While Magnus warns that it is “impossible to write down phoneme meanings” and that
her descriptions are a “weak approximation, weakened still by the filter of [her]
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interpretations,” I find the majority of her observations captivating and convincing (51).
A sample sound and its accompanying “definition” will give you an idea of what she’s
created. Let’s look at some of her work with the phoneme /p/:
/p/ is a precise ‘special’ place or point or pea or pinprick, which spreads into a
‘plane’ when followed by /l/ or /æ/ (‘pan’). Like /b/, it has a bias. It is preoccupied
with the ‘part’ versus the whole, the ‘prime’ example of many—the princes and
professionals, the peak experiences. This bias also shows up as imposters,
replacements, plants, puppets, and pawns.
/p/ is the most precise and nitpicky of phonemes. Its citizens are priests (paters,
pastors, popes and so on) and prudes—prim and proper. Where /b/ merely
explodes, /p/ with few exceptions (pop, pow) puts or places things on and picks
things from a precise position—that point on a plane…. (53)
Most of that feels right and that’s the thing: phonosemantics is not an exact science. I
respect Magnus and the work she’s done a great deal. I do, however, believe that there
are a few phonemes with which she’s dropped the proverbial ball. For example, she says
very little about /k/ that rings true with the feelings I associate with the sound, especially
when it’s in the final position. Say “attack.” Say “break.” Say “fuck.” All of those words
“feel” sharp, forceful or aggressive to me, associations I link directly with the /k/ sound.
Many people find /k/ to be a particularly harsh sound. I believe this is perfectly
demonstrated by the “bouba/kiki effect.”
Look at the images above. Let’s say that one is called “bouba” and one “kiki.” Which is
which? If you identified the shape on the left as “kiki,” you’re in good company. In tests
conducted by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard in 2001, 95% - 98% of
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subjects identified the jagged, spiky shape as “kiki” and the curvy one as “bouba.” The
effect is even present in children too young to read. The scientists consider this further
proof that the naming of objects is not arbitrary. I find the fact that so many individuals
linked the more “sharp” visual shape with the “sharp” /k/ sound the more rounded or
“bubbly” shape with the softer sound telling. That Magnus said nothing about this aspect
of /k/’s “personality” was shocking.
Similarly, Magnus disappoints with her observations on /m/, which say nothing of
the sound’s “comforting” quality. I was puzzled by this omission because the phoneme
/m/ is responsible for much of my initial interest in the connection between sound and
meaning. When describing my topic, I often used /m/ as my go-to example: Campbell’s
Soup is “mmm mmm good” and “mmm” is what we say if someone rubs our feet. I’d
mention the moment I realized that in every language I knew—even Nepali—the word
for mother contained /m/. Leonard Bernstein, too, noted this aspect of /m/ in his lecture
on “Musical Phonology” at Harvard:
I began by imagining myself a hominid infant, just lying there, contentedly trying
out my new-found voice. Mmmm…Then I got hungry: MMM! MMM!—calling
my mother’s attention to my hunger. And as I opened my mouth to receive the
nipple—MMM—AAA!—lo, I had invented a primal word: MA, mother. This
must be one of the first proto-words ever uttered by man; still to this day most
languages have a word for mother that employs that root, MA, or some phonetic
variant of it. All the Romance languages: mater, madre, mère, and so on; the
Germanic: mutter, moder; the Slavic: mat, mattka; Hebrew: Ima; Navajo: shi-ma;
even in Swahili and Chinese and Japanese they call her Mama. (13)
John Frederick Nims makes similar observations in Western Wind: An Introduction to
Poetry:
We use an m sound—sometimes conventionalized as “yum!”—for warm
appreciation. Probably no other consonant is so expressive by itself. In reply to
“Do you like my dress?” a perfectly intelligible answer would be
“Mmmmmmmm!” The sound is prolonged, no broken off; is internal (behind
closed lips) and hence warm and cherished; is associated with the affectionate and
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sensitive lips, which bring the human child the first pleasure it knows—food and
the warm presence of its mother…Because it is the only sound we can make with
closed lips, we hum it when engaged in such pleasurable activities as eating
something or kissing someone. (173)
We also hum our favorite songs. We might even chant “om” in meditation. /M/ is a sound
of comfort, pleasure and connection. I, too, would describe it as warm. These senses of
the sound /m/ are conspicuously absent from Magnus’ commentary.
Despite these shortcomings, Gods of the Word has been incredibly influential in
my thinking about the topic. Most importantly, it has gotten me in the habit of
considering why certain words seem to suit their meanings so well and led me to develop
my own theories. For example, when I first read Aracelis Girmay’s poetry collection,
TEETH, I noted how frequently she used the word “neat.” Though I had some vague
notions then about how well the word fit, I can now see how much that has to do with the
way we must move our mouths to form the word. “Dental consonants” or “dentals” are
those which are articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth. To say “neat,” then,
requires precision because it both begins and ends with dentals (/n/ and /t/). “Neat and
tidy” more than doubles the dentals and carries a certain stiffness; I picture a stern
governess with stick-straight posture straightening up a child’s room. The idiom “as neat
as a new pin” also contains that precision. “Nit-picky” and “persnickety” too. Consider
for a moment that the meanings of “messy” and “sloppy” were swapped with those of
“neat” and “tidy.” Try to imagine that meticulously organized room as “messy” or try to
imagine a hoarder’s cluttered home as “neat.” There’s something vaguely unsettling
about these little thought experiments because the words just don’t fit. Yes, it is difficult
to shift our identification with the meanings we’ve come to know, but I believe the words
don’t “feel right” because their sounds, and the way we make those sounds, conflict with
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the reality of what’s signified. The movements the muscles of the mouth must make to
produce dentals are far more demanding than, say, plosives. Consider how exactly the
tongue must meet the back of the teeth, how forcefully it flicks away. The precision
required to pronounce “neat” and “tidy” makes those words a poor fit to describe a
sloppy, scattered space. I might never have made these observations had I not read
Magnus’ book.
Yet Magnus is not the only author who has contributed to my understanding of
the connection between sound and meaning. Reuven Tsur’s book, What Makes Sound
Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception, offered a wealth of relevant
information. What’s both fascinating and frustrating, though, is how different Tsur and
Magnus’ methods and results were. It became clear quite early in my reading that I would
never find a definitive list or chart of English vowels and consonants and their meanings.
Magnus has her Dictionary of English Sound, Fónagy has his “tables;” Tsur, Nims, and
other authors have their own thoughts. But there are no set-in-stone answers. It was a
bizarre fantasy, I admit, but I had imagined that if I had access to this “secret” formula, I
could write poetry that would elicit from readers exactly the responses I desired. I was
searching for something like the philosopher’s stone to turn my base poetry into gold.
And while that information was not contained in Tsur’s book, his work provided many
remarkable insights and exciting new ideas. I was especially pleased to find confirmation
of my thoughts about dental consonants:
…the increased area of contact of two surfaces, characteristic of palatal
consonants also carried some emotional information. It suggests that the particular
emotional character of palatal consonants is derived from the opposition of this
articulatory gesture to its counterpart in the dental stops /n, t, d/. The opposition is
between a broad area of contact (in palatals) and a well-defined, clear-cut point
of contact in the dental stop. Now, the creation of such a clear-cut, well-
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determined point of contact (as opposed to a broad area of contact) can be
interpreted (or rather perceived) as a gesture characterized by a sense of control
and precision, firmness and determination, being set in purpose; whereas the
creation of a broad area of contact tends to be perceived as a gesture of opposite
character…The smaller the contact, the stronger the feeling of precision,
determinateness, and the send of control (when we hear a person sharpening the
area of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge in articulating
the dental stops, we tend to infer behind it a dominant, authoritative, determined
personality)… (Tsur 48-50)
Not only did Tsur use similar vocabulary (precision), he even conjured the “strict
governess” whose image had popped into my mind earlier. And it’s important to note
that, like Plato before him, and Magnus after him, Tsur connects the meaning of sounds
with their manner of articulation. That is, the “personality” of phonemes is determined
by the way we move our mouths. In Magnus’ mythology, the sounds were gods. There
are many ways in which Magnus and Tsur’s theories are similar but many ways, too, in
which they differ.
Tsur’s understanding of /k/, for example, more closely corresponds to my own
impressions of the sound. As a demonstration of how powerfully sounds influence
meaning, Tsur includes a rewriting exercise first performed by Benjamin Hrushovski.
Earlier in the book, Tsur referenced the following excerpt from one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets to demonstrate the way /s/ can, among other things, reinforce a “quiet mood”:
When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. (Tsur 2)
Hrushovski rewrites some of the lines using words with similar “meaning” but dissimilar
sound patterns. Watch what happens:
When to the crux of crucial quiet thought
I crave and call remembrance of things past… (qtd. in Tsur 30)
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Hrushovski observes:
We have already created a very similar network of sounds, this time based on the
repetition of K, strengthened by the cluster K + R (involving the original word
“remembrance” too). Nevertheless, it seems that this sound pattern cannot
possibly express silence, though “quiet thought” starts with K as “silent thought”
starts with S. It is plausible that a reader will impute to this text something strong
and harsh, reinforced by the sound pattern (qtd. in Tsur 31)
Tsur continues with the analysis by noting that “had the speech sounds no expressive
potential of their own, the network of sounds based on /k/ would have readily assumed
the emotional quality of quietness, which it does not” (31). He even attempts another
rewriting of the original (“When to the quorum of kind, quiet thought…”) yet encounters
the same problem and remarks:
…the /k/ sound retains its hard and strong quality and by no means becomes
expressive of some “kind, quiet” atmosphere originating in the meaning of the
words. The sound pattern becomes either neutral or improper to the emotion
expressed. As this exercise may testify, speech sounds do have emotional
potential of their own, and one may not ascribe them just any quality suggested by
the meaning…(31).
Certain sounds, it seems, are well-suited for some contexts and ill-suited for others. They
have, as Hrushovski says, “certain general potentialities of meaningful impression” (qtd.
in Tsur 1). Understanding that /k/ is often correlated with aggression helps us find the
right “home” for the sound. While I might avoid extensive use of /k/ in a poem about
sleeping beside a lover, I could probably use /k/ to great effect in a poem about, say, a
dog attack. I imagine the /k/ god with teeth. Sharp ones.
In addition to his conclusions about dentals and the relative “aggressiveness” of
/k/, I was also intrigued by his work with vowels, his observations (based on the work of
Macdermott, mentioned by Fónagy) that:
…poets may more frequently use words that contain dark vowels in lines referring
to dark colors, mystical obscurity, or slow and heavy movement, or in depicting
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hatred or struggle. At the reception end, readers may have vague intuitions that
the sound patterns of these lines are somehow expressive of their atmosphere.
(9)
And which are the “dark” vowels and which the “light”? Considerable research has
established an “unambiguous tendency” (Tsur 6) to feel the “back” vowels (such as /u/
and /o/) as darker and the “front” vowels (like /i/ and /e/) as lighter, brighterii. In Western
Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, John Frederick Nims, even goes so far as to place all
the vowel sounds on a scale. He explains:
Vowels are in a way like musical notes, so that we can set up a vowel scale (rather
like a musical scale) based on the frequencies that the sounds have in themselves.
Sound, as we know, travels in waves. Since in travels at a constant speed, the
shorter the waves, the more per second—the higher, that is, the frequency of the
sound. Shortwave sounds are high-frequency sounds, shrill sounds, like the ee of
“whee!” The longer the waves, the fewer per second, the slower and deeper the
sound seems to be. The oo of “moon” is a low frequency sound… The upness and
downess of vowel sounds affect is physically in different ways…The highfrequency ee is busier, gives the ear more to process. Its greater activity suggests
greater vitality, speed, excitement than the slower moving, more sluggish waves
of the oo. (162-3)
What follows is the scale which appears in the 2000 edition of Western Wind, listing
sounds from the highest or “front” vowels down to the “back” vowels.
vowel
example
i_
key
e_
cane
a_
kite
_
kit
_
ken
Æ
cat
__
cur
_
cut
__
cot
a_
cow
__
coy
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__
caught, core
_
could
o_
coat
u_
cool, cute
This concept brought to mind a poem of Sylvia Plath’s, “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”
Let’s look at the final two stanzas:
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and
silence. (Plath 15-29)
When I first read this poem years ago, I scribbled “intoxicating” in the margins. If we are
to believe Tsur, then, a part of the magic, a part of the “mood” of this poem is a direct
result of the repetition of “yew” “moon” and “blue,” the inclusion of words such as
“unloose,” “pews” which feature the /u/ sound and “floating” “cold” and “holiness”
which use the /o/ sound. That seems like a fair assessment. Nims would likely agree. He
observes:
Since low notes are related to largeness, they also evoke what is powerful or
awesome or ominous or gloomy. We think of them as dark notes, perhaps because
our experience of caverns and other reverberating hollows is associated with the
dark…Vowels have their characteristic resonance from the shape and size of the
cavities in which they resound—that is, from the way in which we make us of the
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resonating chambers of our mouth and head. The larger the hollow in which a
sound vibrates, the deeper the sounds and the more clearly our nerves and muscles
tell us that we ourselves are embodying largeness, hollowness, darkness…Not
only do the sounds we produce have certain qualities, but out bodies, in producing
them, are trying to be like those very qualities. (165-6)
I would not go so far as to argue that Plath consciously selected back vowels, though I
suspect she was aware of the “feeling” or tone her choices evoked. As further evidence of
Plath’s awareness of this particular vowel sound’s power, Nims cites the fact that over
half of the eighty lines in her poem “Daddy” end in oo.
Now that I am aware of this phenomenon, I can consider the effect of my vowel
choices and intentionally create the desired atmosphere for my poems. If writing on an
“up” theme, I may choose or privilege high-frequency “front” vowels. Nims notes that
Percy Bysshe Shelley “sets the poem in the key of these vowels” when he begins “Ode to
a Skylark” with the four highest-frequency vowels: “Hail to thee, blithe spirit!” (166).
The vowels “set the tone” for the rest of the poem and suggest to the reader what’s to
come. Nims would argue that even the “dullest vowel sound has its individuality” (168).
He uses the i (of “bit”) as an example, stating that it’s been a “favorite of writers trying to
depict things that are brisk, quick, little, slim, glittery” (168). He even notes that Plato
“thought it especially apt for showing movement” (168). He provides “skinny dipping”
(as opposed to “nude bathing”) as an example of effective use. Roman Jakobson explores
this i as well, remarking that the “associability of [i] with smallness and lightness first
noted by Socrates, according to Plato’s dialogue, has been repeatedly confirmed” (187).
That Swift’s Gulliver names the land of dwarfs Lilliput is further proof for Jakobson that
[i] is “smaller.” Every vowel, just as every consonant, has its own characteristics. Like
guests entering a party, each sound lets its presence and personality be known as it enters
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a poem. So I see now how crucial those initial sounds are in creating the desired first
impression—to begin a poem with a certain tone is to make a “contract” with your
readers, to break the tone is to break the contract. If I wish to evoke a more somber,
serious, or deep mood, I might, as Plath does, rely on extensive use of low-frequency
“back” vowels. I’m convinced that even if the effect is subconscious, it is real.
Other techniques that I look forward to applying are those of “concealed
alliteration.” The ideas were first put forth by Kenneth Burke in an essay titled “On
Musicality in Verse” but are summarized in Tsur’s book. Burke uses passages from
Coleridge to demonstrate the devices which are described as “the repetition of sound in
cognate variation, acrostic scrambling, chiasmus, augmentation and diminution.” Tsur
refers to Burke at length:
His introductory example of “the repetition of sound in cognate variation” is
“bathed in the mist” where, he says, if we take into account the “close phonetic
relationship between b and m as phonetic cognates, we find that ‘b- b- the m-’ is
concealed alliteration. ‘B-b the b-’ would be blunt and even tiresome…and were
‘mist’ replaced by some word beginning with a phonetically disrelated sound,
such as w, z, or k, the particular kind of musical bracketing that the poet got here
would be lost.” He proposes for such concealed alliterations the term colliteration.
We may next note an acrostic structure for getting consistency with variation:
In “tyrannous and strong,” for instance, the consonant structure of the
third word is but the rearrangement of the consonant structure in the first:
t-r-n-s is reordered as s-t-r-ng…Perhaps the most beautiful example of
consonantal acrostic in Coleridge is the line from “Kubla Kahn”: “A
damsel with a dulcimer,” where you match d-m-z-l with d-l-s-m plus r.
As an example of chiasmus, Burke quotes “Dupes of deep delusion,” which is “oo
of an ee ee oo.” From music Burke borrows the terms augmentation and
diminution.
In poetry, then, you could get the effect of augmentation by first giving
two consonants in juxtaposition and then repeating them in the same order
but separated by the length of a vowel. Thus in
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
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That slid into my soul,
you find the sl progression in “sleep,” “slid,” and “soul,” but it is varied in
its third appearance by augmentation: sl, sl, s-l. As an instance of the
contrary process, diminution, we have
But silently, by slow degrees,
where the temporal space between the s and l in silently is collapsed in
“slow”: s-l, sl. (39-40).
To clarify, “cognate” consonants are those that have the same place of articulation. This
explains part of the pleasure one might find in saying “Puss in Boots” or “peanut butter.”
After all, a /b/ is just a voiced /p/. And both “puss” and boots” end with the sibilant /s/,
while “peanut” and “butter” require a lot of precise tongue-to-teeth tapping (which might
prove difficult with a mouthful of peanut butter…). Tsur helpfully provides Burke’s
diagram which shows the breakdown of cognate consonants (/n/ branches off into /d/ or
/t/ and so on…). I’m particularly excited about applying the techniques of “colliteration”
because their effect is subtle yet powerful; readers may not even know why they enjoy a
passage so much, merely that it provides pleasure.
Often we don’t know how or why we take pleasure in what we read—yet that
sounds or certain combinations of sounds can be the source of this satisfaction seems
undeniable. The multitude of internet sites exploring the topic confirms a widespread
interest in the pleasure afforded by our language. One website I recently discovered lists
the author’s, “Dr. Goodword’s,” selection of the “one hundred most beautiful words in
the English language.” Two recent posts on one of Good magazine’s blogs, “The Words
We Love, and Why” and “Why Do We Hate the Word Moist,” examined word attraction
and word aversion. Both posts were illuminating. I was surprised to see that “moist” was
chosen as the most distasteful word—a word that has been giving me the heebie jeebies
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for as long as I can remember. How comforting to know I’m not alone! The blogger,
Mark Peters, asked his readers why they disliked the word “moist” so much. Many,
predictably, mentioned that it had unpleasant sexual connotations. However, I felt that
Ben Zimmer, editor of the Visual Thesaurus, had a more convincing argument. He notes
that “other hated words such as Ointment and goiter share the ‘oi’ sound with moist:
There must be something about that diphthong that gets under people’s skin” (qtd. in
Peters). Peters continues: “Maybe he’s onto something: wet, damp, soaked, drenched,
soggy, and water-logged have similar meanings to moist, but they don’t inspire the same
kind of hostility.” I suspect that it’s a combination of both our embedded associations
with the word and the ‘oi’ sound, which, though not the same, is similar to,
the _ sound of “mud” [which] has generally undesirable connotations. One
scholar has listed many uh words that express dislike, disgust, or scorn:
“blunder,” “bungle,” “clumsy,” “humdrum,” “slum,” “slush,” “muck,” “muddle,”
“slut.” We could think of others: “dump,” “crummy,” “sludge,” “chump,” “bunk,”
“punk,” “runt,” “pus,” “muss,” “fuzz,” “puffy,” “repugnant”…When we sort of
push a grunt up, with tongue, cheek, and lips left slack, what comes out is an
“Uh.” (Nims 169)
Then why was “kumquat” one of Peters’ favorite words? I wonder. “Rutabaga” was
another. Certainly, there are a lot of different factors that go into our identifying a word
as pleasant or unpleasant. Nims confesses that there are many exceptions to any “rule”
you might try to come up with regarding sound and sense but believes this does not
“disprove the expressiveness of sound” but merely “shows that in some words that
particular element is inert or subordinate to other considerations” (169). The repeated /k/
sounds of kumquat take on none of the aggression we’ve seen in other words. The _ or
‘uh’ sound takes on none of the disgust. One could argue that Peters only likes the word
because he knows it refers to a delicious fruit. But what if you’ve never tasted a
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kumquat? Let’s admit it: “kumquat” is just plain fun to say. Peters would argue that it’s
both the way the words make our mouths feel and our understanding of their meanings;
he talks about our favorite words as those that “combine meaning and mouthfeel in the
lexical equivalent of a chocolate milkshake.” So a mellifluous word or a series of words
could be comparable to that blindfolded-in-front-of-the-refrigerator scene in 9 _ Weeks
(in which Mickey Rourke erotically spoonfeeds Kim Bassinger)? Can a poem be
delicious? Yes. It’s really not that surprising when you think of those oral metaphors we
use for reading: we might “devour” (or “gobble” or “gulp” down) a book or we might
“graze”iii at our leisure. In his poem, “Making the Mouth,” Stephen Corey says “To taste
and speak are twins—” (49). Now “taste” the first stanza of Aracelis Girmay’s “Ode to a
Watermelon”:
It is June.
At El TaContento near 17th,
the cook slices clean
through the belly of a watermelon,
Sandia, dia santo!
& honey bees
grown in glistening temples
dance away from their sugary hives
ants, in lines,
beetles, toward your red,
(if you are going east, they are going east)
over & over
toward your worldly luscious,
blushed fruit freckled with seeds. (Girmay 1-14)
Knowing what I know now, it’s no surprise I fell so hard for this poem when I first read it
two years ago. Girmay sets the stage: it’s June. While that oo sound can, as we know,
come off a bit gloomy, here our positive associations with the word mellow it into
deep/sensual instead (as with “the juke & wet of it,” which appears in the third stanza).
Then look at the next three lines—there are well over a dozen dentals! The effect is
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almost Pavlovian; every time our tongue slaps the back of our teeth our attention is
brought back to our mouths which water at the mention of this luscious melon. The mood
set by the initial oo is furthered by the similar sounds in “cook,” “through,” and “fruit”
(“ooze” and “gooey,” though not present, come to mind) and the diction spot on. Look,
for example, at the word “slice,” how perfectly it suits its meaning, how to say it is to
enact it, how to say it is to “slice” the air. Look at the word “belly” with its bulging /b/—
imagine if she had chosen “abdomen” or, even worse, “heart.” How that would change
the tone! With “Sandia, dia santo” Girmay brings together the Spanish words for
“watermelon” (“sandia”) and for “holy day” (“dia santo”) using their phonetic similarity
to suggest that they may have even more in common than sounds. Her use of alliteration,
assonance and near rhyme (noon, moan in stanza two) throughout the poem is
staggering—when a sound is introduced it is almost always repeated within the same line.
I love the way the /g/ in “grown” plays with the /g/ in “glisten” and how the “ten” of
“glisten” is mirrored in the “tem” of “temples” just as the /l/s and /t/s of “glisten” and
“temples” give off sparks in “grown in glistening temples.” The poem concludes with the
warm appreciation associated with “hum” and the deep sensuality (established early on
with oo sounds) of “blooming”:
Tongues will lose themselves inside you,
scattering seeds. All over,
the land will hum
with your wild,
raucous blooming.
(12-3)
Despite all this evidence pointing to the contrary, some still deny the connection
between sound and meaning. This, naturally, makes poets uncomfortable. Octavio Paz
explained his reluctance in accepting Ferdinand de Saussure’s contention that the relation
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between sound and meaning was the result of “arbitrary convention” by saying “My
misgivings are natural: poetry is born of the age-old magic belief in the identity of the
word and what it names” (qtd. in Wimsatt 30). A child mourns when she learns it was her
parents, not Santa Claus, who left presents beneath the Christmas tree because a measure
of magic and mystery has been lost from her world. To tell a poet that words do not, in
fact, contain magic, that they do not carry the soul of what they symbolize, is to deliver a
similarly heart-rending blow. In an entry on “euphony” and “cacophony” in M.H.
Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms I found this interesting dismissal of the
connection:
Euphony is a term applied to language which strikes the ear as smooth,
pleasant, and musical, as in these lines form John Keats’ The Eve of St.
Agnes (1820),
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, an argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
Analysis of this passage, however, will show that what seems to be a purely
auditory agreeableness is due more to the meaning of the words, and to the ease of
uttering the sound combinations, than to the melodiousness of the speech sounds
themselves. The American critic John Crowe Ransom illustrated this fact by
altering Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s euphonous “The murmur of innumerable bees”
to “The murder of innumerable beeves”; the euphony is destroyed, not by the
change in two of the speech sounds, but by the change in reference… (60).
I could hardly disagree more. Of course the switch in reference from “murmur” to
“murder” plays a significant role in our perception of the tone of the Tennyson passage,
but Ransom and Abrams are wrong to dismiss the ability of speech sounds to convey
meaning. The comforting /m/ at the core of “murmur” has an entirely different feel from
the bolder dental plosive /d/. I believe that even if the references could somehow be
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wiped clean from our minds, “murmur” would still have soothing quality, while “murder”
would sound more aggressive.
I doubt, however, that any of sound symbolism’s critics would deny the existence
of onomatopoeia (the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound
made by or associated with its referent) (“onomatopoeia”) or mimesis (the imitation or
representation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and
art) (“mimesis”). It’s obvious that some words do sound like what they mean: fizz, bang,
beep, whoosh, and splash to name a few (think comic books, think Todd Rundgren’s
“Onomatopoeia”). A word is onomatopoetic if it mimics the sounds that its referent
makes (“tick tock” for a clock, or my favorite Nepali phrase: “garang gurung” which
means thunder). Mimesis, more broadly, attempts to capture some aspect of the referent’s
nature that is not necessarily audible. We describe these mimetic words as “ideophones.”
Ideophones may be onomatopoetic and imitate sound, but they may also appeal to our
other senses—“glimmer” or “glitter,” as we know, do create the impression of
shimmering light (a more recent slang word “bling” also conjures up the image of
shiny—and expensive—gems and metals. German’s word for lightning, “blitz,” also
comes to mind). So how are poets using these forms of imitation to enhance their work?
Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” is often cited for its suggestive use of sound: “the rhythm of the
words suggests the movement of a locomotive: ‘An engine, an engine/ Chuffing me off
like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen…’” (“onomatopoeia”) Kay Ryan is
another poet using these techniques to great effect. Let’s examine her poem “DROPS IN
A BUCKET” and see if we can discover the ways it works:
At first
each drop
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makes its
own pock
against the tin.
In time,
there is a
thin lacquer
which is
layered and
relayered
till there’s
a quantity
of water
with its
own skin
and sense
of purpose,
shocked at
each new violation
of its surface. (Ryan 1-21)
What first struck me about this poem, aside from its unusual concept, was its effective
imitation of sounds. The critical reading I’ve done has allowed me to see how Ryan has
achieved it; while Tsur identifies /p/ as the least ‘metallic’ of the plosivesiv, it takes a
decidedly metallic quality when joined with /k/ in “pock.” The word “drop” fits its
definition well, with the /p/ suggesting both the roundness of a drop of water and the
action of dropping or falling—the ‘explosion’ suggesting impact. Having “drop” and
“pock” near each other in lines 2 and 4 effectively mimics a droplet of water coming into
contact with a tin bucket (not unlike Berryman’s “Plop, plop. The lobster toppled in the
pot…”). Ryan’s extensive use of /t/ and /k/ sounds: “at” “first” “makes” “its” “pock”
“against” “tin,” “time,” “till” “lacquer” simulates the tapping of raindrops well. Then, as
the water begins to fill the bucket, we get more “watery” /w/ sounds: “quantity,” “water,”
“with,” “own.” The sibilants, “its,” “skin,” “sense,” “purpose,” “shocked,” “surface,”
appear later as the water seethes, or hisses, at every “violation” it suffers. Whereas before
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I might simply admire how poets such as Ryan create such effective mimesis, now I
understand how it’s done.
While we can identify the individual sounds responsible for success of Ryan’s
“DROPS IN A BUCKET,” its effectiveness is due, in large part, to its patterning—in
other words, the sounds “work” because of the way they are arranged in the larger
system: the poem. So far, we’ve examined the “micro” — how individual sounds or
words convey meaning, but what of the “macro”— sound patterns and rhythms? Can
these larger systems of sound carry meaning of their own? I think so. Let’s begin with
repetition. One needn’t be a rhetoric scholar to recognize that repetition of words or
phrases can have a powerful effect on readers or listeners—just watch Martin Luther
King’s “I Have a Dream” or any of Barack Obama’s similarly-styled speeches. Both men
are great orators, yes, but what “resonates” or “reverberates” most are those repeated
phrases (MLK’s “I have a dream…” or Obama’s “Yes, we can.”). But that’s just
scratching the surface. The effect of even more extensive repetition can be almost
hypnotic; in The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes cites the “many ethnographic
examples: obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites. The Buddhist nembutsu
etc.: to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified” (41). (Can
we add jump-rope rhymes and children’s chants to this list?) These examples suggest that
repetition has the power to affect our emotions (or motions, in the case of double-dutch)
or perhaps even alter our consciousness. One poet who believed whole-heartedly in the
power of repetition, and other forms of sound patterning, is Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Hopkins felt that repetition was the best way to reveal a word’s “inscape.” A
Hopkins’s neologism, “inscape” is tricky to define—it’s a bit like “inner landscape” or
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“design” but closer to “essence” or Magnus’s “inherent meaning.” Based on his writings,
we can presume that he would have seen the “poetry” in the “well-formed prose” of
King’s and Obama’s speeches, just as he admired the Bible’s “incantatory repetitions”
and the work of poets, such as Walt Whitman, who used repetition without strict meter.
Hopkins wrote:
Now there is a speech with wholly or partially repeats the same figure of grammar
and this may be framed to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above
its interest of meaning. Poetry then may be couched in this, and therefore all
poetry is not verse but all poetry is either verse or falls under this or some still
further development of what verse is, speech wholly or partially repeating some
kind of figure which is over and above meaning, at least the grammatical,
historical, and logical meaning (qtd. in Wimsatt 5).
“Over and above” are the most important words in the above passage, as they begin to
express Hopkins’s belief in the power of repetition to “detach” a word’s “inscape” and
unlock meanings beyond or before our intellect, to unveil “what Wallace Stevens calls
‘imaginative or emotional meanings’ and many others denominate by similarly affective
terms such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘musical’ (qtd. in Wimsatt 27). What Hopkins is suggesting
here, and throughout his writings on poetics, is that this kind of repetition allows us
access to something deeper. In Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm,
Lettering, Inscape, author James I. Wimsatt examines Hopkins’s use of repetition in St.
Winefred’s Well, the poet’s unfinished drama:
Since the echoing well is the centre of interest and action in [St. Winefred’s Well],
and Hopkins describes the Echoes as a song designed for the drama, a highly
musical treatment of the lyric text is appropriate. The musicality comes through in
the text in the word and sound repetition throughout: ‘No there’s none, there’s
none, O nó there’s none,’ ‘O there’s none; no no no there’s none’ (lines 5, 13).
The phonic quality of the sonorant ns contributes to the musicality of these lines
in the ‘Leaden Echo’ section of the work, as do the sonorant ss and rs of its final
lines, where ‘despair’ is repeated five times. The ‘Golden Echo’ section that
follows is more than twice as long, and proportionally more complex phonically,
but it is equally repetitious. It begins with ‘Spare,’ echoing the final syllable of
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‘despair’ that ends the previous part, and it proceeds to verses like ‘Give beauty
back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God beauty’s self and beauty’s giver’ (35).
The final six lines culminate the verbal repetition and the build-up of sonorant rs
and ns, especially in the multiple repetitions of ‘fonder’ and ‘yonder.’ (57)
Leonard Bernstein also took interest in the poem and spoke of it during one of his
lectures on music (“The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity”) at Harvard. He describes
the poem as “almost music.” Wimsatt quotes Bernstein at length in Hopkins’s Poetics of
Speech Sound, but disagrees with him with regards to the poem’s accessibility:
Hopkins is wallowing in gorgeous sounds, and so are we, his readers. What is
gained thereby, and what lost? What is lost is easily told: structural clarity,
immediacy of meaning.’ What is gained is ‘an intense expressivity born of sheer
sound, rich, complex, chromatic sound that doubles and redoubles in itself,
creating new meanings of its own, sonorous meanings, — nonsemantic meanings,
so to speak. Quoting the poem’s last two lines, with their repetitions of ‘Yonder,’
Bernstein asserts, ‘This ecstatic poetry has a chromaticism that leads the ear far
away from the lucid, C-majorish meaning of “how to keep beauty from vanishing
away?” …Instead, the ear is led toward the new pleasures of sheer sonority, and
on to bigger and better ambiguities.’ He concludes ‘Phonology has virtually taken
over. Syntax is all but vanished, leaving a semantic vacuum’
Attentive reading of the poetic text, however, produces good, immediately
available sense from the words. At the same time, in finding that the verbal
sound carries a non-verbal musical significance, Bernstein’s analysis does support
Hopkins’s theory by seeing the poetic sound as carrying independent ‘nonsemantic’ – affective – meaning. (58)
It’s difficult to say how Hopkins would feel about Bernstein’s labeling of his work as
“almost” music. I suspect he’d be offended. Hopkins made it clear that he considered his
poems “verbal music,” and as such, he was rather particular about how his poems should
be performed. He made extensive use of diacritical marks (some borrowed from music)
as a way to ensure their correct delivery and in his final years he even suggested that
“exemplary” phonographic recordings might be a way to make certain future generations
could voice his poems properly. This all makes sense when one considers his education—
Hopkins’s schooling reinforced his understanding of poetry as a form of music:
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The significance he attaches to speech sound notably accords with the ideas of
classical rhetoricians as they developed from the sophists to Isocrates and Cicero.
These rhetoricians saw in the patterns of speech sound what Steven Katz calls an
“epistemic music,” a verbal music that carries affective or sensory meaning that is
constitutive, a kind of meaning that enters before the verbal sense is realized”
(Wimsatt 5, my emphasis).
Hopkins’s beliefs bring to mind Ezra Pound’s definition of melopoeia: “wherein the
words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property,
which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning (Pound 25). Melopoeia explains, in
part, the pleasure I take in having, say, Neruda’s poems read to me in their original
Spanish and my “sense” of their meaning, despite my lack of Spanish language skills.
This is poetry on the “borders of music” (Pound 28).
And few, if any, would deny the power of music to move us. Yvor Winters does
not doubt the “devotional feeling of Byrd or Bach, the wit and gaiety of much of Mozart
and Haydn, the disillusioned romantic nostalgia of Franck” (qtd. in Gross 10) but will not
go so far as to connect the rhythms of poetry, its “verbal music,” to emotion. Why?
Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, authors of the ambitious Sound and Form in
Modern Poetry, do not share Winters hesitations and are clear in their conviction that
“…rhythmic structure neither ornaments conceptual meaning nor provides a sensuous
element extraneous to meaning; prosody is a symbolic structure like metaphor and carries
its own weight of meaning” (2). Much as Magnus argued for the power of individual
phonemes to convey meaning, the authors contend that prosody (a broad term
encompassing not only metered verse, but all the forms “rhythm” can take), too,
expresses meaning above and beyond the “ideas” of a poem. Their ideas are further
clarified in the opening to Chapter 1, “Prosody as Rhythmic Cognition”:
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A poem is a symbol in which idea, experience, and attitude are transmuted into
feelings; these feelings move in significant arrangements: rhythmically. It is
prosody and its structures that articulate the movement of feeling in a poem, and
render to our understanding meanings which are not paraphrasable. Prosody
enables the poet to communicate states of awareness, tensions, emotions, all of
humanity’s inner life that the helter-skelter of ordinary propositional language
cannot express. (8)
Later in the chapter their sentiments are phrased more simply and boldly: “Our view is
that meter, and prosody in general, is itself meaning” (10). Gross and McDowell provide
a Dickinson poem as a striking example of how prosody not only supports meaning but is
meaning:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
A prose paraphrase (a deliberate heresy) tells us that profound suffering leaves the
mind and body in a curious state of detachment. The mind sees the body from a
great distance; feelings of depression, inadequacy, indifference afflict
consciousness but cause no tremor of emotion. Life has been arrested; the soul has
crossed over to the country beyond despair.
Our paraphrase is inadequate, of course. The experience is rendered in the
movement of the lines, and part of what the poem “means” is the movement itself.
Syntax, meter, quantity, and pause, articulate feelings of formal detachment,
stupefied indifference, and ceremonious numbness, and rhythmic structures
conveys these “ideas.” (13)
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The authors continue with their analysis of the poem’s successes, examining the quantity
of vowel sounds (that is, “long” or “short”), the “hesitating” effect of the dashes, and how
these contribute to the felt movement of the piece. Of the last line, they observe,
“Prosodic movement carries over beyond the final sound in much the same way that a
Beethoven adagio slowly progresses into the silence of apparent time” (14). Again and
again Gross and MacDowell draw parallels between the structures of music and those of
poetry:
Prosody is the musical element in poetry because it reveals time in its passage and
the life of feeling that moves between points then and then. Prosodic structures
are akin to musical structures because phonetic patterning and syntactical
expectation constitute a semantic system, a language, as it were. Like music, the
language of prosody rises out of abstraction; at first it represents nothing, but may
come to suggest everything (14).
And just as somber lyrics would be a mismatch for a catchy, upbeat tune, the authors
agree that prosody should have “mimetic value” (18). Throughout the book, poets are
evaluated on their prosodical “sensitivity.” Robert Browning, for example, is criticized
for employing strong equal stresses that “march with equal boisterousness in the silence
of sleep-time and at noonday” (Gross and MacDowell 77). A poem’s sounds should
correspond with its ideas. Or, as Roethke put it, “rhythm must move as the mind moves”
(qtd. in Gross and MacDowell 262).
Hopkins understood this. His rhythms and his “lettering” (the “end-rhyme,
alliteration, assonance, vowel progressions and similar devices” Wimsatt explores) were
never mere flourishes but integral parts of his “content.” Wimsatt explains:
Hopkins employs lettering, alliteration most centrally, to give remarkable phonic
complexity to his sprung rhythm verse. In order to understand how this
complexity contributes to the emotional force of this verse, we might invoke T.S.
Eliot’s intriguing doctrine, which states than an ‘objective correlative,’ an
embodiment of feeling, potentially may be inherent in art work: “The only way of
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expressing emotion in the from of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’: in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that particular emotion; such as when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’
(1949, 387). The facts lead to a sensory experience, which evokes the emotion.
Instead of objects, situations, or chains of events, we might suggest that Hopkins
offers a complex organization of sounds as the ‘formula’ of the emotion. The idea
that patterning of verbal sound can have emotional content is supported by the
profoundly emotional effects of pitched music, another form of patterned sound.”
(91)
As an example of this effect, Wimsatt examines the first quatrain of the lengthy sonnet,
“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”:
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on
an airbuilt thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng;
they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair. (qtd. in
Wimsatt 91)
Of this excerpt, Wimsatt notes, “Exhilaration characterizes the sound in this quatrain,
which seems to be born in the authors feeling of elation as a cosmic observer, and, as
with pitched music, communicates the inherent feeling to the auditor” (91). But how does
Hopkins achieve this? “The forceful beat, emphasized by series of matching feet with
secondary stress, the heavy punctuation, and especially the alliterations combine to
produce a strong staccato, made up of quick, excited sets of short syllables” (92) is
Wimsatt explanation of why this passage works. While I’m not entirely convinced by
Wimsatt’s analysis (after all, working in a bar has given me the opportunity to scan hard
rock and the strong stresses and alliteration of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”
could be described similarly), I must confess that Hopkins does, somehow, evoke the
appropriate emotions.
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Interestingly, the rhythms of a poem often came to Hopkins even before the
words. In a letter to fellow poet, Richard Watson Dixon, Hopkins explains that
“Deutschland had its inception in ‘the new rhythm’ that had been ‘haunting’ his ‘ear’”
(qtd. in Wimsatt 128). T.S. Eliot also reports beginning with sound: “I know that a poem,
or a passage of poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it
reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the
image; and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself” (qtd. in Wimsatt,
128). That some of Eliot’s poems were born of sounds is not surprising. Of his work,
Gross and McDowell say, “no rhythms have shown such power to summon emotion to
the forefront of consciousness (161). While I’m no great Eliot fan, I have to respect that.
Hopkins and Eliot are not alone, however. From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Robert Frost to
Maya Angelou, poets of every sort have expressed the primacy of rhythm in their poetry.
Though a rhythm provided the fodder for these poets, I don’t believe this is the
only way to begin; I suspect that a poet who already has an “idea” can work towards
selecting an appropriate rhythm and using prosody to support her “meaning.” Strong
stresses, for example, might convey energy or passion. Feminine endings “fall.”
Caesuras could be used to pace a piece; each pause slows things down. Tight form could
contain what might otherwise be out of control. Rhyme? I have only just begun to
understand the power of rhyme (though I’m impressed by the theories of Paul Chowder,
the fictional poet-narrator of Nicholson Baker’s recent novel, The Anthologist, who
describes rhyming as “the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will
happen next” (55). It’s like “chain smoking,” he says, in that you “light one line with the
glowing ember of the last” (56). It’s difficult to say exactly how different prosodical
31
techniques enhance meaning. Nevertheless, I believe the ways we poets arrange carefully
selected words, the ways we create patterns with sound, can move beyond mere
adornment to become essential features of our poetry. These methods reveal nuances and
shades of meaning to our readers, focus their attention in new ways, and allow them to
consider novel connections between words, sounds, and ideas. It’s raising a kaleidoscope
to the sun — the beauty’s in the light shining through little bits of colored glass given
symmetry by the mirrors. These techniques deepen. They heighten. They enrich.
I’ve searched high and wide, but there is no chart which identifies the precise
meaning, the symbolic value, of each vowel and consonant. And though Aristotle’s
theory of mimesis suggests “iambs for action, trochees for narrative, and so on (qtd. in
Wimsatt 137) there is no cheat sheet for metrical feet or other prosodical choices either. I
never found the “formula.” Yet, I still believe there’s magic in sound. Perhaps what I
sense is something like T.S. Eliot’s conception of “auditory imagination”:
What I call ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm,
penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating
every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin
and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through
meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the
old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most
ancient and the most civilized mentality (118-9).
Eliot knew, too, that there’s more to a poem than first meets the eye (or ear). But Eliot
refuses to make this easy for us; he doesn’t offer any tips for tapping into this “auditory
imagination,” or show us the way in. That’s fine. I feel it. I’ll find my own way.
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Notes
i
See Tsur 70 for a further analysis of this trend.
ii
Similarly, major chords are consistently perceived as “bright” and “happy,” while minor chords
are evaluated as “dark” and “sad.” A recent study by Norman D. Cook titled, “A Psychophysical
Explanation for Why Major Chords are ‘Bright’ and Minor Chords are ‘Dark’” presents many compelling
ideas. Cook contends that the answer to the age-old question of why chords are perceived this way is to be
found in the “sound symbolism of human languages and animal vocalizations: decreasing vocal pitch is
used to indicate strength and social dominance (commands, assertions), whereas increasing pitch signals
defeat and social weakness (questions, uncertainty). The affect of major and minor chords is thus inherently
positive or negative because the tonal structures have ancient evolutionary implications of high or low
social status.”
iii
iv
Suggested by Barthes 13
Tsur asks, “Why does the clock say tick-tock or the like in many languages rather than, say, pitpot? The reason is to be sought in the relative metallicness of the phonemes. The sequence /p, t, k/ is the
voiceless analogue of the sequence /b, d, g/; and /p/ is the least metallic phoneme of the sequence.
Language cannot give an exact imitation of the noises of nature. While natural noises are of an infinite
variety, and their perception is continuous rather than categorical, the linguistic sounds imitating them are
limited to about thirty phonetic categories perceived categorically. Consequently, the resemblance of the
phoneme combinations to the imitated natural noises is necessarily poor; at most, ones speaks of certain
aspects of certain groups of phonemes that are more or less analogous to certain outstanding properties of
the noises: voiceless plosives are more abrupt than other speech sounds, and the plosives /k+t/ are more
metallic that /p+t/… “( Tsur 18).
33
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