[Tim Love]

The Sound of Poetry

With the rise of isms (deconstructionism, eco-feminism, post-colonialism) in recent years, literary theorists have rather neglected sound effects, often quoting Saussure's view that the sounds of words are arbitrary.

But they're not. Of course we've always known that chickens cluck and cows moo, but the influence of sound goes wider and deeper than that. We 'chip little bits' but 'chop logs'. Twigs are small; trunks are big. There are exceptions (big should refer to little things, and bugs should be big) but words derive from many sources and we should expect some exceptions.

The more that these trends are studied the more universal they seem - petit, piccolo and klein contrast with grand, grande and gross. And the trends go beyond simple concepts like size. With some poets it's possible to guess the theme of the work without understanding a word of it by calculating the relative proportion of sounds - the guess isn't always correct but I'm amazed that it's possible at all. People have tried to create dictionaries of sound meanings. Here's an extract about the L sound from Galt's book

Positive skews in love poems and narratives: strong positive skews in "tender" and "musical" poems. Negative skews in poems of family and home, nostalgia, and humor, with a negative skew for "non-musical" poems which is just below the level of significance. This phoneme certainly distinguishes, in Storm's verse, between "musicality" and its opposite, and its presence can evidently also contribute to a feeling of "tenderness"

If isolated sounds aren't arbitrary, still less are the sounds of sentences and poetry whose patterns produce effects that isolated words can't. In Violi's book Haj Ross spends 40 pages on the sounds in "The Tyger" pointing out dozens of features such as

• The sound F only occurs on even-numbered lines, and gangs with R.
• while all the words in the Tyger line except one are bisyllables, this line being themost polysyllabic of the whole poem, all of the words in the Lamb line are monosyllabic

These effects are in addition to the regular patterns of stress, rhyme, etc. However, with free verse these dispersive patterns are beginning to dominate. We lack the vocabulary to describe them well, and I suspect they often go unnoticed (at least consciously) by readers. Here's an extract by Ruth Padel where she describes an easily missed pattern in Michael Longley's Ceasefire

Achilles, the key name, appears in every stanza. Its central syllable is repeated in the first stanza ("until", "filled", "building", with a sideways echo in "curled" ...), reappears in the second, resonates in the third with "built" and "still" (plus an echo in "full"). and reaches a climax in "killer": bringing out the fact that "Achilles" has the sound of that word "kill" in his name

Interest in sound effects has revived because 1) computers can now analyse a lifetime's work in minutes; 2) brain-scanning has enhanced our understanding of music's effects; 3) the study of pragmatics has attracted attention to the non-semantic effects of words. If music can be profound, why not the sound of words? It too uses repetition combined with variation. It too has incantatory power. The semantics can modulate sound's meaning much as the choice of instrument can affect music's meaning. A violin's C isn't the same as a trumpet's, just as oo is recognisable but differently received in moon and spoon.

Though we may never return to the clogged tongue-twisting of William Barnes'



With fruit for me
The apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden lea.
</pre>
we might hope for more tolerance of poets like Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. When they stop making sense perhaps they're not lapsing into non-sense but instead bringing out the tonality of words, an alternative mode of meaning making sense an echo to the sound.

<H2>Books</h2>

• "Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm", Alan B. Galt, Herbert Lang, 1973
• "52 Ways of Looking at a Poem", Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus, 2002
• "The Sounds of Poetry", Robert Pinsky, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998
• "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Patrizia Violi (ed), Brepols Publishers, 2000

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim:
As one for whom sound has always been as important as sense (or maybe I should say inseparable from sense), I appreciate your point. It's amazing that to this day one can "study" literature at many a university and never hear any literature; it's left dead on the page instead of having life breathed into it by a human voice.
If I read you correctly, however, you seem to be arguing for some degree of inherent meaning in sound. It's an interesting claim. There's always the possibility that in a big family of languages, Indo-European, for example, the sounds of the ancestor words have continued to influence the formation and use of new words. Or maybe there's something about the sounds themselves that seems to reproduce something from nature or that is universal in human experience.
But as interesting as those matters are, I don't think your other point rests upon them. By the time we're old enough to start using language on our own, the sound patterns of our mother tongue have already come to seem perfectly natural to us. The names of things seem intrinsic. No matter what nature does, our nurture feels so much like our nature that in ordinary life we rarely distinguish between the two.
Richard

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Tim

Thanks for such a well considered essay. Unfortunately, I believe for most, poetry has become a written language and not an oral one.

I wonder how many poets posting here actually read their own poems aloud, to hear hear the rhythms and sounds? Damn few, especially on the Non-Met, where (imo) the necessity for doing so is even greater.

[Zita Zenda]

I love to read my poems aloud, and I must read others’ poems aloud if I am to offer any crits. I would imagine that everyone who writes a poem would read it aloud, to be sure…

52 ways, huh?

[Tim Love]

Jerry: Thanks for such a well considered essay - it's more a journalistic spin-off article than an essay. I've never liked the Victorian mimetic used of sound in poetry (I often found it laughable) but I'm prepared to put my trust in science.

zbaby: I would imagine that everyone who writes a poem would read it aloud, to be sure… - Not at all. Many poets write for the page nowadays (some use crossing-out, bulletmarks, etc). At one reading I went to the multi-published poet said afterwards that she hadn't read the poems before - to herself or anyone else.

[Zita Zenda]

Actually Tim, you are right. I can recall writing for the page (a long time ago), and after reading aloud found the poem not as interesting... hhmm

[Thomas Newton]

Jerry,

Thanks for such a well considered essay. Unfortunately, I believe for most, poetry has become a written language and not an oral one.

When I read I pronounce each word in my mind, so everything is oral with me. This does drop my reading speed to 150 words a minute though.

Thomas Newton

[Rose Kelleher]

Interesting essay - what do they say about w and n? Think how beautiful swans are, and how beautiful the word "swan" is! The windblown down of a swan...wafting...on a pond...in the noon sun...

I'd like to read more about this, but I'm wary of buying another big fat scholarly book that I'll end up not reading. Tim, of the books you've recommended, which if any do you think would be the most, er, approachable?

Jerry, I can't imagine critting without reading the poem aloud first -- and I certainly read my own stuff aloud before posting it (whether it shows or not is another matter). I always assumed everyone here did that.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited February 12, 2004).]

[Tim Love]

what do they say about w and n? - I can't recall, and besides it's likely to vary from poet to poet.

Tim, of the books you've recommended, which if any do you think would be the most, er, approachable? - I didn't mean to recommend them. The Padel and Pinsky ones are readable. Various quotes are at http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/asp/ and (brace yourself) <A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/quotes.html>http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/quotes.html</A>

and I certainly read my own stuff aloud before posting it (whether it shows or not is another matter). I always assumed everyone here did that. - maybe here, but not always elsewhere. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets aren't the only people who might not bother. How does one pronounce poems that have crossings-out, hectares of white space, etc. I'm trying to write a Magic Square poem (a venerable chinese form where the poem can be read in various ways) and sound by a long way isn't first in my priorities. The poem will have many "sounds".

Besides, when you read a poem written by someone else, what accent do you read it in? Should you assume that the poet "wrote" in her/his own accent? Do you impose your own?

[Rose Kelleher]

Thanks for the links. Just curious, will the source code for the Java program be publicly available when it's done?

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets aren't the only people who might not bother. How does one pronounce poems that have crossings-out, hectares of white space, etc

I see what you mean. It's a big world out there.

Besides, when you read a poem written by someone else, what accent do you read it in? Should you assume that the poet "wrote" in her/his own accent? Do you impose your own?

I normally just read the poem aloud in my own accent, unless it's full of dialect, in which case I attempt to mimic the speaker's accent (just be glad you're not there to hear it). Sometimes I'll stumble on a rhyme like fork/talk, and try to adjust my own accent slightly to accommodate it. It'll be interesting to see how your program handles that. As to what one should assume or do, I don't know.