Dramatic Voice
Some day I'll write an essay on dramatic voice in poetry. I thought I'd have done so by now, but the interruptions are too many, the time too short. So what I'll do here is pile up a few notes and see if they engender discussion.
In his essay "On Emerson," Frost declared that "Writing is un-boring to the extent that it is dramatic." Statements like this bring us into an area of discussion that is hard for prosodic purists to follow, because, I think, we're talking about technique that goes beyond technique, measure that goes beyond measure. Now that is dangerously close to the poppycock of Williams's "variable foot," so I should be clear that I don't mean anything of the sort. One can write in strict iambics with very selective variations and still have what Frost would call dramatic voice. What we're talking about here is his "sound of sense," yes, and we're also talking about tone and all that jazz. We're talking about "sounding" like a person instead of something more mechanical and contrived, and obviously across time one's notions of such "sound" are going to change.
On a purely philosophical level, of course, a "text" has no sound. Your voice has the sound, and how you choose to perform a given text is the sound of that moment. In an oral culture at the dawn of poetry, the sound of your voice would be understood to be the poem, whereas now we associate such sounds with the words on the page and speak of a poet's "voice." Jack Foley reminds me time and again to re-read Father Walter Ong's book on orality versus the text-centered idea of "literature," and he is right to do so.
But in practice I find it helpful to think that what I am writing has a voice. Humor me for a while. When I read the medieval poem "Western Wind," I don't come away from the words with the impression that this is to be screamed or sung out like "There's No Business Like Show Business." I have instead the impression of a quiet, private voice, yearning to go home, a voice that in a mere four lines might change mood considerably.
Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
That apostrophe of line 3 might be any things--it might be muttered under the breath--but we can say that it's not a scream of fright, can't we? So we can say that even before we perform them, or at least while we perform them "in our heads," some texts are suggestive of vocal range. A poem might suggest speed or slowness, volume or quietude, a sort of emphasis inhering in the words but, as it were, over the words or under them as well.
Jack will tell me this is nonsense. I am content to speak nonsense--sorry, I mean type nonsense--if it helps me get closer to what I mean.
In "Poetry and School" Frost made his well-known statement that "Almost everyone should almost have experienced the fact that a poem is an idea caught fresh in the act of dawning." I love several things about that statement, not least the two "almosts," as if he's winking at us the whole time he's making his declaration. This is of course like Yeats saying that no matter how hard we work on a poem, it has to "seem a moment's thought." This is also what novelists like Nabokov mean by their metaphors for charming and luring and entrapping us in their illusions. Artists are (like mothers and nuns, right?) worshippers of images, but also makers of images and manipulators of images, a prospect that takes us dangerously close to the politicians.
I digress. Why does some verse strike us a "workmanlike," satisfying its technical demands, but somewhat less compelling than other verse? Frost would have said the difference is in the drama, the force of emotion through the words. Look at a passage of ten-syllable lines from Yeats. You can sure talk of technique in the shifting position of the caesura, the use of enjambment, etc., but you've got to say the thing aloud to know what a magnificent piece of verse writing it is:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
I've always thought of Yeats's ottava rima stanzas as being like little verbal hand grenades pulsing with contradictory energies so that the form was just about to explode. But it doesn't explode. It is contained. And in the final stanza of his great poem Yeats recovers himself into something that, however necessary, is a shade less magnificent:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
If one reads the poem with an eye to dramatic voice, one can feel the force of an entire personality behind it (enriched by our understanding of Yeats's life and ideas, of course); one can "hear," as it were, a man in conflict with himself, trying to control his conflict finally with an idea, then realizing that the idea will be about the very world that tormented him in the first place. One has to talk about the poem the way an actor would talk about a speech of Shakespeare, working through the issues of motivation and the ambiguities as he refines his performances.
But by dramatic voice Frost did not only mean something so intense and impassioned. He meant also what Heaney calls the little spring of human speech worked into a line. If I choose, I can get picky about the use of the word "Hark" in Frost's "Come In," but if I grant him a little audacity I can see the marvelous pacing of his lines. The poem is a great lyric, but it is driven by dramatic voice, a process of the performing mind:
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
This is a sort of high-wire act in which the perimeters of form and the exigencies of "voice" are managed with a great, rueful deftness.
In "Conversations on the Craft of Poetry" with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, Frost opined that "you've got to act up." He associates acting and writing, and I think I understand him here. He associates writing and performance, and knows that even in conversation people are performative. He wants to get some of that apparently spontaneous performance into what he writes because he doesn't want to sound like a book--he wants to sound like a person.
Here's Frost in the interview:
"What sayest thou, old barrelful of lies?" Chaucer says. What'd you say, "old barrelful of lies"? And you can hear it talk just the same today--and all of it. That why it exists. It's beautiful, anywhere you look into Chaucer:
Since I from love escaped am so fat,
I never think to have been in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean.
This is Chaucer talking too. It's just the same now. I hear the country people talking, England and here, with these same ways of acting up. Put it that way--call it "acting up."
You act when you talk. Some do more than others. Some little children do: some just seem to be rather straight line, but some switch their whole body when they talk--switch their skirts. Expressiveness comes over with them. Words aren't enough.
Now, leaving Frost, I'm back at the difficult dilemma of my opening. In a sense, words aren't enough, yet a poet has only words to work with (if we're talking of text, that is). This is where the force driving those words must surprise us, must open up the unexpected in diction or in thought that keeps a thing fresh and alive. This is the idea of the dramatic voice that we can bring to the process of writing, knowing full well that we will eventually release the poem to the freedom of other voices who perform it as they please, but knowing we offer some guidelines in the words as we write them.
When I think of the very best poets--the best of Larkin, say, as I come to appreciate him more and more--it's partly the powerful sense of a living contemporary or near-contemporary I hear in the poems that draws me to him. I might not agree with his pessimism on all occasions. I might tell myself that I do not fear death as Larkin did, though perhaps I'm wrong to say so. But my disagreements pale in comparison with the dramatic reality, the presence of human reality, inhering in his words.
Again, I am willing to admit that as philosophy this idea of dramatic voice does not hold water. But I know of no other way to speak about that quality separating the sheep from the goats, as it were, the living word from the dead one.
David Mason
[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 19, 2004).]
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