Unit 2
Aesthetic Texture

 

Introduction

In this Unit, we will examine the phono-aesthetic patterning, or the 'sound effects', of literary language.

In order to complete this Unit successfully, it would be useful to have the following book to hand:

Verdonk, Peter (ed.) (1993) Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Text to Context, London: Routledge.

Readings from this book will be given later in the Unit.

 

The Phonological Fallacy

Here is a nursery rhyme:

Incey wincey spider
Climbed up the spout.
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain.
So incey wincey spider
Climbed the spout again

As usual with nursery rhymes, there are regular features here at a variety of linguistic levels. There are repetitions at the levels of

as well as many patterns at the phonological level. For example, there are repetitions of whole phrases that also serve to echo the sound of these phrases ('incey wincey spider' twice) as well as lexical repetition ('out', 'climbed', 'the spout') that, again, can be heard in a reading-out-loud. At a more micro-level, there are certain consonant clusters that are repeated (/sp/ in 'spider', 'spout'), and a set of three diphthongs that thread through the rhyme: /ai/ in 'spider', 'climbed, 'dried'; /au/ in 'spout', 'down'; and /ei/ in 'came', 'rain', and 'again' (unless, of course, you do not have an RP-like accent, in which case 'came' and 'rain' has /e:/ and 'again' does not rhyme with them).

Given this density of phonological parallelism and foregrounding, it is tempting to assign meanings to particular sounds. Faced with an incey wincey spider, it is easy to say that the 's' sounds denote or 'mean' the spider's actions. Slithery slimy snakes, crashing cymbals and clanging gongs, 'et o ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole', all suggest very strong sound effects by connection with the actual denotational meaning of their words (from a children's playground game, St. Paul and Verlaine, respectively). These word shape-sounds come very close to seeming like onomatopoeia ('crash', 'bang', 'fizz', 'slurp', 'squelch').

However, we must be careful to make a distinction between true onomatopeia ('crunch', 'splat', 'thud') and those sounds that 'borrow' significance only because of the specific context in which they occur on this occasion. For example, there is not really anything damp, wriggling, cloying, wet or even cunning and underhand in the sound of the letter 's' (and I have been careful to illustrate this by avoiding using the words moist, slithery, slimy, viscous, or even sneaky and sly). You can quickly demonstrate this by going to the 's' section in the dictionary and finding how many words do not bring sliminess or sneakiness or slitheriness to your mind. I have deliberately picked this example from all the letter-sounds since it is often cited as one of the few cases in which English does seem to attach a meaning to a single sound. However, though there are several words with word-initial 'sl' that belong in the semantic field of 'slippy' or 'slack' objects, there are so few it can hardly be seen as a general rule. In almost all cases of other letter-sounds, the association between sound and sense depends on the situation of occurrence.

In short, a strong connection between sound and sense can be seen to be a sort of phonological fallacy. It would be wrong to say that /d/ sounds, or /ai/ sounds, or even 'incey wincey' sounds have a particular meaning in any general sense. The most we can say is that certain texts place sound parallels in specific arrangements, and then the denotational meaning of the words themselves might suggest an aesthetic interpretation of the sound-patterns. In other words, it is the idea of the spider that helps us read 'incey wincey spider' as sounding like a creepy crawly thing.

Of course, the repetition of a patterned sound also foregrounds it and encourages us to attach aesthetic sense to it. Subjectively, I attach a sense of sharp, quick action to the plosive consonants in 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, where's the peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked?' and I 'hear' the sound of the sea in 'She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore'. Phono-aesthetic patterning, then, is a matter of the textual foregrounding of sound-patterns given local significance by the overall meaning of the text.

 

Sound Effects

Texts are often judged successful on the craft which they display in easily allowing readers to interpret phono-aesthetically. For example, in the following lines from Auden, almost all readers interpret the varying rhythm of the stress patterns across the two halves of each line as 'sounding' like the railway train that is denoted by the text. Some readers extend this to see the rhyming couplets as being analogous to rail-tracks:

This is the Night Mail crossing the border
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass, and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily, she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

Activity

Try to read this passage out loud for yourself, in order to notice how Auden disrupts the rhythm established in the first stanza. It seems that this prevents the poem from becoming monotonous. It is interesting that most readers do not interpret this variation as Auden being a bad poet and 'messing up' the pattern; instead they 'thematise' the varation and read it as the variation of the train's wheels over points and gradients. Did you alter the way you read from the third stanza onwards, in order to keep the sense of rhythm? If you did, isn't it strange that you feel you want to help Auden out here, rather than tripping over the lines? Notice, too, one of the dangers in encoding sound-effects too closely in writing is that it makes the reading dependent on accent. Auden's conservative RP would easily rhyme 'poor' and 'door' whereas some British accents would pronounce these differently; and only a conservative RP accent would today rhyme 'course' and 'across'.

 

You can see how well-crafted Auden's poem is when it is read alongside an example from the famously bad poet William MacGonagall:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seemed to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say-
'I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay'.

 

Activity

Can you establish a linguistic measurement of why one of these poems is well-crafted and one is awful? You should make two lists, simply descriptively, of as many features of the Auden and the MacGonagall poems as you can think of. Then attach your evaulative interpretations to each feature. For example, you might descriptively identify an example of a certain type of repetition in each poem, but you might decide that one has an elegant interpretation and one is clumsy. Notice how you can separate pure description from evaluation. This close awareness and distinction is a key skill in stylistics.

 

For a virtuoso example of sound symbolism, here is a poem by Robert Browning:

Meeting at Night

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Most of the sensual interpretation felt by many readers of this poem is carried in the patterns of individual phonemes. Here it is not simply phoneme repetition but phonological types and categories that the poem forms into patterns. For example, at the simple phonemic level, there are a significant number of 'l's in the first 4 lines. However, all but two of these /l/ phonemes are realised as 'light /l/' phonetic examples (that is, articulated with the tongue-tip at the front of the mouth); the two exceptions are the 'dark /l/' in 'startled' and 'little', and they occur together. Moreover, these /l/ sounds can be more generally categorised as 'liquids' or 'semi-vowels', and other sounds in these categories occur nearby: /j/ in 'yellow', /w/ in 'waves', and the nasals in 'long', 'land', 'and', 'moon' and 'ringlets'. These nasals continue into the last two lines of the stanza, and are joined by the /g/ and /k/ sounds of 'gain', 'cove' and 'quench'. Essentially, these two sounds are the same sound (velar plosives), differentiated only by the voiced/unvoiced distinction. Two more plosives, this time bilabial /p/, are set together to alliterate 'pushing prow', and the alliteration is echoed in the last line of the stanza in a variation of sibilants ('pushing', 'quench its speed', 'slushy sand').

It is the density of sound patterns that foregrounds the sensual interpretation of this part of the poem. Readers often talk about the sound-effects of the sea and the waves, the night and the boat. Taken with the metaphorical expressions that personify the scene ('startled... leap', 'fiery ringlets... sleep'), some readers have attached sensual and sexual meanings to the sound-patterns throughout the stanza.

 

Activity

Using a similar sort of phono-aesthetic analysis, try to produce a similar sort of brief stylistic analysis of the second stanza of Browning's poem.

 

I have focused in this Unit on the phonemic segments in literary texts. Of course, literary effects can also be generated at suprasegmental levels of stress, intonation, rhyme and rhythm. It is useful to be able to mark up written text in order to express the likely prosody of reading. There are several possible notational systems that allow you to do this. A traditional system differentiates between stressed and unstressed syllables or 'feet' and treats these pairs as 'iambs' which can then be combined into larger sequences. Thus, for example, verse metres can have names like 'iambic pentameter' (5 pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables: 'E're half my days, in this dark world and wide' - Milton), trochaic tetrameter, and so on. Rhyme endings are usually presented in a lettered rhyme scheme: ABCBDCAC (Incey Wincey Spider), AA BB CC DD EE FF GG (Night Mail), AAABB CCDDAA (MacGonagall), ABCCBA ABCCBA (Meeting at Night). Any traditional guide to poetic metre can give you many examples of these descriptions.

 

Activity

You can see, in this sonnet by Milton, how the suprasegmental features of rhythm, rhyme and metre correspond with the syntactic arrangement of the lines as they run on to each other. Attempt an analysis of this poem, matching up any prosodic evidence you can describe with an interpretation that you find satisfactory. The sonnet (14 lines in iambic pentameter) is often entitled 'On His Blindness'.

When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

At this point you should read two chapters from Verdonk (1993):

Chapter 4 by Walter Nash: 'The lyrical game: C. Day Lewis's "Last Words"' for a stylistic analysis including prosodic features, and

Chapter 6 by Richard Cureton: 'The auditory imagination and the music of poetry' for an interesting discussion of how literary sound-effects are perceived.

 

Further Reading

Attridge, D. (1995) Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cureton, R. (1992) Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, London: Longman.

Hobsbaum, Philip (1995) Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form, London: Routledge.

Leech, G.N. (1973) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman.

Short, Mick (1996) Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, London: Longman.

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