-
Two citations, for starters, one that will be
familiar enough to students of the Romantic period and
a second that should be more familiar than it
is.[1]
-
First, Shelley's famous claim, at the close of A
Defence of Poetry, that the poets of his age
surpassed those of other ages not because of their
opinions, with which he himself often disagreed, but
because of their ability to tap into something larger
than themselves, a great secular energy, a spirit of
the age. Shelley represents this power with a figure
drawn from recent explorations in the natural sciences
carried out under the rubric of "vitalism." He
calls it "the electric life which burns in their words"
(535).
-
The second citation is taken from Murray Cohen's
Sensible Words, a fine book that traces changes
in eighteenth-century English linguistics and that has
not had the readership it deserves, despite praise from
Noam Chomsky and Edward Said upon its publication.
Cohen's final chapter charts a twofold shift in late
eighteenth-century writing about language, such that
"words . . . come to function less referentially or
logically and more affectively" (109), and that
"sounds . . . become the object of new and
widespread interest" among linguists (107). The scheme
on which the new grammars predicate their work is based
not on "the order of things," but on "manners of
speaking" (103). The new paradigm, Cohen explains,
"defines the linguistic expression of mental activity
in a . . . context [that stresses] communication of
intention through oral/aural signals associated with
feelings or intentions" (106). Ultimately what is
implied is a shift in the concept of "mind": from the
mind "evident in syntactic logic" to "the 'mind' that
is expressed by vocal tones [that give] evidence of
passion" (106).
-
Let us suppose, then, for the sake of a too-brief
argument, that the vitalist "electricity" that appears
in some famous poetry of the Romantic period had
something to do with this new attention to the sound of
words, with a new way of hearing sounds in relation to
a new understanding of the mind as an affective domain.
Let us suppose that there was something distinctive, in
other words, about how Romantic poets reckoned with
"the power of sound."
-
In approaching this topic, we might wish to make a
(familiar enough) distinction between the sounds that
words have and the sounds to which they refer: the
phonetic dimension of language as distinct from the
semantic one.[2]
As for the former, one could certainly point to
passages where key Romantic poems seem, by the very
sound of their words, to simulate vital processes.
Celeste Langan, for example, has dilated brilliantly on
the "oh" at the start of Wordsworth's Prelude in
its relation to the human breath, and on the
implications of changing the "oh" to the capital O with
which the 1850 text begins (172-75).[3]
But we can also find evidence of this sort of vitalist
affective phonetics in Shelley's echo of the "Breath of
Autumn's being" in Ode to the West
Wind—that refrain "hear, O hear! / . . . O
hear! / . . . O hear!" (14, 28, 42). We hear it
again in Keats's dramatization of "forever panting"
(27) in the central stanza of Ode on a Grecian
Urn: "More happy love! more happy, happy love!"
(25)—a line that offers the promise of rising
above "All human breathing" (28) but results in a
"parching tongue" (30).
-
As for the semantic element of sound in language,
the sounds to which words refer: these are everywhere
evident in Romantic poetry, especially in the many
lyrics responsive to the sounds of birds, such as
Coleridge's and Keats's nightingale poems. One even
finds a number of poems in the period that relate these
two kinds of sound effects to each other. Such a poem
is Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection Near
Naples, which begins with "a voice of one delight"
(7) but comes in the end to name itself an "untimely
moan—" (40), a reference to its own moments of
tonal and rhythmic breakdown. The first of Shelley's
initial iambic tetrameter lines, descriptive of what
the poem will later call the "day" (48), had built its
perfectly cadenced syntax with geometric
logic—two clauses per line, then one clause for a
line, then one clause for two lines:
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might (1-4)
Not unlike some of his geometric play with
Pythagorean figures in Ode to the West Wind,
these lines produce what might be called a "squaring
effect" within a poetic space defined by four feet
repeated over four lines. But in the second stanza,
descriptive of the self (and where the first-person
pronoun is first-introduced), these harmonies dissolve,
and the poem becomes a syncopated lament, an untimely
moan:
I sit upon the sands alone:
The lightning of the noontide Ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
(14-18)
The final line of the next stanza produces a similar
effect with a similar semantic reflexivity:
To me that cup has been
dealt in another measure. (27)
The awkward 13-syllable line is almost impossible to
scan and, like line 18, departs from the regularity of
the iambic hexameter lines closing stanzas 1, 2, and
5:
The City's voice itself is soft, like Solitude's
(9)
How sweet! did any heart now share in my
emotion (18)
Will linger though enjoyed, like joy in Memory yet
(45)
Line 27 effectively dramatizes the alien measure in
which the poet has been dealt the cup (or coup)
of which he here complains. Such are the ways in which
the poem earns that self-label as an "untimely
moan."
-
Upon these conceits for relating the phonetic and
semantic dimensions of affective sound in poetry (known
well enough to students of the Romantic lyric) are
built yet more complicated structures of sound and
sense. The relation of sound to affect, Cohen suggests,
is an explicit topic for the age, an active subject for
discussion by poets, critics, and philosophers. This is
a point for which we can find persuasive evidence in
familiar places—in the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, for example. In light of this recognition,
should we not be on the alert for poems that not only
stage the relation of these two kinds of sound in
poetry but also deal with it discursively?
-
Just such a poem can be found among the later
writings of Wordsworth, an ode composed in 1828 and
published in 1835 and in fact titled: On the Power
of Sound. Wordsworth went out of his way to give
this poem a certain prominence in his late collections,
placing it in the concluding position for the
prestigious grouping he called "Poems of the
Imagination." Twenty-one-year-old Mary Ann
Evans—later, George Eliot—read the poem in
1840 and wrote to a friend to praise it lavishly
(Letters 1: 68). As Wordsworth's prefatory prose
Argument makes clear, the poem is framed between
explicit references to two "ears" and to the two
spiritual powers associated with them. It opens with an
extended address to a spirit who inhabits the
labyrinthine cave of the human ear, and it ends with a
tribute to Lord God of all, who is said to possesses
the "ear" into which all the sounds of the world are
ultimately poured. Most of the poem along the way is a
dramatization of the great efficacy of auditory
stimulation across an enormous range of circumstances.
Consider stanza 2:
The headlong streams and fountains
Serve Thee, invisible Spirit, with untired
powers;
Cheering the wakeful tent on Syrian mountains,
They lull perchance ten thousand thousand
flowers.
That roar, the prowling lion's Here I
am,
How fearful to the desert wide!
That bleat, how tender! of the dam
Calling a straggler to her side.
Shout, cuckoo!—let the vernal soul
Go with thee to the frozen zone;
Toll from thy loftiest perch, lone bell-bird,
toll
At the still hour to Mercy dear,
Mercy from her twilight throne
Listening to nun's faint throb of holy fear,
To sailor's prayer breathed from a darkening
sea
Or widow's cottage-lullaby. (17-32)
It doesn't take much knowledge of Wordsworth's early
poetry, certainly no more than he might have expected
from his late readers, to hear this passage as a kind
of echo-chamber of his own early lyric subjects,
especially those of the period from Lyrical
Ballads to the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes.
The allusions are multiple. Wordsworth wrote more than
one poem "To the Cuckoo," but we also find here echoed
the "ten thousand" flowers from "I wandered lonely as a
cloud," the prayerful nun of the sonnets, the sailors
and widows of the early narrative poems, the bleating
sheep of Michael and The Last of the
Flock, and of course the streams and fountains from
all over the Wordsworthian oeuvre. Why this
self-recapitulation?
-
One might justifiably declare the burden of these
lines to be that, no matter how great the variety of
sounds in our experience, all can be understood to
serve the spirit that inhabits the human ear. Exactly
how the poem enacts this point, however, demands some
careful attention. If we reinvoke the distinction
between two kinds of sound effects, we can note that,
with the possible exception of the "Toll . . .
toll" echo to simulate the sound of the "lone
bell-bird" (28), the stanza's way of invoking
particular sounds is simply to refer to them. The rush
of the streams and fountains, the roar of the lion, the
bleat of the sheep, and the call of the cuckoo enter
the poem only insofar as we know what those words mean
and thus attach auditory associations to their
occurrence there. Likewise for the human sounds: the
nun's throb, the sailor's prayer, the cottage-widow's
lullaby. For a stanza so long on the representation of
diverse sounds, it is surprisingly short on
onomatopoetic devices.[4]
-
At the same time, however, all the diverse sounds
semantically indicated are articulated in words that
can themselves be sounded. These sounds, the sounds of
the words themselves, are patently organized to
constitute the poem's formal auditory system.
Prosodists trained in linguistics nowadays refer to
this as a poem's "verse design," its meter and rhyme
patterns conceived as a recurring pattern. The "verse
design" is what modern criticism calls the "rhyme
scheme" together with what might be called the
"metrical scheme." "Scheme," in a slightly looser
application to poetic description, was a term in play
in late-eighteenth century Britain, and thus available
to Wordsworth, who employs the term suggestively in the
Argument to On the Power of Sound.
-
Here Wordsworth seems to have taken this looser
sense of a poet's "scheme" and to have pushed it toward
the later and more technical senses of "rhyme scheme"
and "verse design." The Argument offers an account
of the poem's central line of development in the
following terms: "The mind recalled to sounds acting
casually and severally.—Wish uttered
(11th Stanza) that these could be united
into a scheme or system for moral interests and
intellectual contemplations" (2: 323). That "wish," it
is fair to say, is realized in the poem's own formal
scheme or system of sound. And this scheme is in turn
both expressive of and governed by a larger, indeed a
cosmic regime of sound, one that Wordsworth describes
at the start of stanza XII:
By one pervading spirit
Of tones and numbers all things are controlled . . .
The theme of poetic harmony—a revision of the
Augustan conceit of concordia discors—is
an important one for many of the major male Romantic
writers, not the least Wordsworth, and his attention to
it was crucial in the composition of The
Prelude, where it anticipates some of the themes of
On the Power of Sound.
-
In Book First of The Prelude, the theme of
harmony is first figured negatively, during the poet's
dramatization of his early failures with the poem:
It was a splendid evening, and my soul
Did once again make trial of the strength
Restored to her afresh; nor did she want
Eolian visitations—but the harp
Was soon defrauded, and the banded host
Of harmony dispersed in straggling sounds,
The harmonics then appear in the poet's account of
his success, once he has managed, despite himself, to
get his great epic poem underway:
The mind of
man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music. There is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society. (1805: 351-55)
To gain a sense of how these passages differ from
what we find in On the Power of Sound, we need
only compare them with the 1850 text, a revision that
appears for the first time in a manuscript of 1832,
just a few years before On the Power of
Sound:
Dust as we
are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. (1850: 340-44)
This talk of an "immortal spirit" likened to musical
harmony, and of a biblically "inscrutable" workmanship
by which it is brought to being, separates the already
Burkean poet of the great decade from the Christian
poet of the 1830s. To put the matter in other, not less
apposite, Wordsworthian terms, it separates "natural
piety" from Christian piety.
-
In On the Power of Sound, then, it is as if
Wordsworth, with a kind of redundant reflexivity, were
recomposing the straggling sounds of his earlier work
into a sanctioned order, thus legitimating at once the
soundness of its poetic principle and the principle of
its poetic sound. There is of course considerable
variety in the way the poem fulfills the requirements
of its formal scheme of meter and rhyme—variety
in the sound of individual words and of the sound
patterns by which they are combined. But one might say
that this is a far subtler sense of variation than that
of the widely varying sounds to which the poem refers
in its semantic register: the roar, the bleat, the
shout, the throb, the prayer, the lullaby. (One
might well argue that the human sounds are themselves
already more homogenous, more shaped and cadenced, than
the animal sounds.) Through the double-sided
sound capacities of poetry (and indeed of
language)—its capacity both to be sounded and to
refer to sound—the poem thus seems to suggest two
conclusions: first, that the pre-semantic sounds of the
world are made meaningful by their being semantically
distinguished in such words as roar, bleat,
shout; second, that when these words are themselves
brought into the formal sound pattern of a
poem's distinctive music, they can be "heard" as
constituting yet another kind of order: let's call this
musical order "post-semantic."
-
Such an account may help to explain why Wordsworth
goes on to spend so much of the rest of this poem on
the question of music. In this, too, Wordsworth seems
to be revisiting work of his "great decade,"
specifically a poem from the 1807 volumes titled The
Power of Music, a verse reflection on how musicians
playing to a crowd on Oxford Street provoke strong
emotion among diverse listeners. The great Orphic theme
of music's power became a kind of obsession in the
Romantic period, for reasons related to those explored
in Cohen's analysis. Vanessa Agnew has recently been
developing an ethno-musicological account of how this
topic came to have such importance from about the time
of Charles Burney's musical travel writing in the
1790s.[5]
Indeed there is much more to say about Wordsworth's
late reworking of the 1805 Prelude along these
lines and about his late return to poems in the 1807
volumes. For now, I attend to the question of how On
the Power of Sound rewrites the poem in which he
developed the theme of "natural piety," the poem that
is arguably the most important single lyric that
Wordsworth published in the 1807 volumes, perhaps in
any volume: the simply titled Ode, better known
by its elaborated title of 1815, Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood.[6]
-
On the Power of Sound, like the "Intimations"
Ode, is a long lyric in roman-numbered stanzas;
at 224 lines and fourteen parts it is slightly longer
but on the same order of magnitude as the Ode.
At the opening of stanza III, Wordsworth addresses the
sounds to which he has referred in stanza II, beginning
with lines about the phenomenon of echo that themselves
echo the "Intimations" Ode:
Ye Voices, and ye Shadows
And Images of voice—to hound and horn
From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows
Flung back, and, in the sky's blue caves,
reborn-
On with your pastime! (33-37)
This passage recalls two moments in the
"Intimations" Ode. The first, the opening of
stanza IV, addresses the songs of the birds and lambs,
creatures named in stanza III:
Ye blessèd Creatures, I have heard the
call
Ye to each
other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee. (36-38)
The second is the reprise of these lines at the top
of stanza X, where the speaker says, in effect, "on
with your pastime":
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the
young Lambs bound
As to the
tabor's sound! (168-70)
In the context of all the other allusions to the
early poetry, these take on special force.
-
Most important for my purposes, the final stanza of
On the Power of Sound includes a pointed and
complex echo—to the ninth stanza of the
"Intimations" Ode, arguably the poem's pivot,
and one of the most complex passages in all of
Wordsworth. Here, first, is the concluding stanza
of On the Power of Sound:
XIV
A Voice to Light gave Being;
To Time, and Man his earth-born chronicler;
A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing,
And sweep away life's visionary stir;
The trumpet (we, intoxicate with pride,
Arm at its blast for deadly wars)
To archangelic lips applied,
The grave shall open, quench the stars.
O Silence! are Man's noisy years
No more than moments of thy life?
Is Harmony, blest queen of smiles and tears,
With her smooth tones and discords just,
Tempered into rapturous strife,
Thy destined bond-slave? No! though earth be
dust
And vanish, though the heavens dissolve, her
stay
Is in the WORD, that shall not pass away. (209-24)
The audible allusion is to the passage that records
the sudden eruption of joy at the top of stanza IX in
the "Intimations" Ode, more specifically a few
lines on, when the poet says that it is not for the
"simple creed" of childhood that
I
raise
The
song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate
questionings
Of sense and outward
things,
Fallings from us,
vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a
Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But
for those first affections,
Those
shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what
they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us,
cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To
perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor
man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy! (139-60)
What is involved in the crowning echo of this
passage in On the Power of Sound—this
return to the question of whether "noisy years" are
mere "moments" in a metaphysical Silence?
-
Each passage, let it be noted, solves a problem
posed in preceding stanzas. In the "Intimations"
Ode, the problem is the puzzle voiced at the end
of stanza VIII: why the growing child hastens his
maturation by fitting his tongue to the dialogues of
business, love, and strife. The answer comes when the
poem is able to see these acts of "endless imitation"
as expressing not a submissive accommodation to the
world of custom but a defiant skepticism about the
world of sense. The relief that erupts into the poem in
that pivotal exclamation at the top of IX—"O
joy!"—is not for the child's "simple creed" but
for his doubts, newly understood in the child's verbal
play. The child turns to mimesis as to a world of
forms, one that expresses his distrust of the world of
passing sensations.[7]
In On the Power of Sound, the problem posed is,
as the Argument puts it, how to unite all the sounds of
the world—so dangerous in their
potency—into "a scheme or system for moral
interests and intellectual contemplation" (2: 323)-or
what stanza XI punningly calls a "scale of moral
music—to unite / Powers that survive but in the
faintest dream / Of memory" (170-72, my italics).
The solution to the poem's puzzle, that is, involves
the recognition that all sounds ultimately pour into
the ear of the Lord God of all, the author of the
all-creating Word. The world is thus the Word,
understood as a perfectly circular figure of sound's
power.
-
To see just what is at stake in Wordsworth's late
reprise of his famous lines about the "Silence" and the
"noisy years," we need to attend still more closely to
the solution in stanza IX of the "Intimations"
Ode. It is, I suggest, hedged around by
syntactical ambiguities. These depend chiefly on two
prominent echoes internal to the passage. "But for . .
. / But for" (141, 148), and "Which . . . / Which"
(150, 157). The first "But for" follows on "Not for"
(139: "Not for these I raise") and so may denote "Not
for these but rather for . . . ." The second "But
for," however, is syntactically placed ("But for those
first affections, / Those shadowy recollections") so
that it may also suggest "except for" (e.g. "there but
for the grace of God go I"). This raises a question as
to whether the second "But for" clause is to be
understood in apposition with the first or as a
qualification of it—a matter of serious
instability to the grammar and logic of the
passage.[8]
Likewise, though we feel confident that the first
"Which" modifies those "affections" and "recollections"
just named in the same sentence, with only a comma
pause (148-50), it is difficult to know whether the
second "Which" ("Which neither listlessness, nor mad
endeavour . . . / Can utterly abolish"; 157-60) is in
apposition to the first, or whether it modifies what
has just been named, separated by a semicolon: "truths
that wake, / To perish never; / Which" (155-57). If the
latter reading is possible, then we have a question as
to the grammatical "mood" of the immediately preceding
"Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make / Our noisy
years seem moments in the being / Of that eternal
Silence: truths that wake" etc. (153-55). If the syntax
is modifying, is its mood declarative (those affections
and recollections do uphold us), or
imperative/exhortatory (Uphold us, truths that
wake!)? The effect of this further instability is
to let the key point about just how the noisy years are
made to seem thus hover between a statement and a plea,
a fact and a hope.
-
The larger effect of all these syntactic ambiguities
in the "Intimations" Ode is to undermine the
logic of the decisive transition to joy, and thus
ultimately to lodge the poem's claim to find
consolation—affective renewal—in something
like the sound of its own words. In On the Power of
Sound, on the other hand, the primacy of sound's
affective power is more like the problem than the
solution. The whole poem, in a sense, is about just the
kind of effect that Wordsworth so brilliantly manages
in the "Intimations" Ode: Wordsworthian
"shuffling," William Empson called it (151-54).[9]
On the Power of Sound is about the electric life
of auditory affect. This effect, whose secular power
strikes the older Wordsworth as dangerous, must now
give way—not to the older "logic" of Murray
Cohen's pre-enlightenment language scholars, but to
Christian Logos, the Word issued and received by
the Lord God of all, a transcendental figure that
dissolves all distinctions of read or said, declarative
or imperative. The sound of this Word is not only
virtuous but also virtual. It is the sound of the power
of sound.
-
Retrospectively, then, the later poem's moral
sentence—its categorical "No" to the question of
noisy years and eternal silence—reveals something
crucial about the earlier poem, and about the electric
life which there is in its words, in its auditory
effects and affects. Despite its references to "the
fountain light of all our day" and "master light of all
our seeing" (151-53), despite its metaphors of sunlight
and skyscape—"trailing clouds of glory" (64) and
the coloring of "Clouds that gather round the setting
sun" (196)—the "Intimations" Ode is
finally absorbed in the sheer sound of its own named
affections. Wordsworth may have had his second thoughts
about this feature of his extraordinary early lyric,
but for Shelley it was perhaps the most cherished
feature of a poem that much preoccupied him. It was the
feature that made the "Intimations" Ode very
much a lyric of its age.
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