"Soundings of Things Done": The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era

¹ My thanks to Susan Wolfson and Maureen McLane for searchingly helpful conversation on this essay.
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² Such a distinction has been fundamental to the modern study of poetry at least since I. A. Richards's course-setting Principles of Literary Criticism (1924).
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³ See also Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," and Garrett Stewart's essay in this issue of Praxis.
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⁴ Wordsworth's attention to such matters is well-attested. Recall his comment in the Preface to the Poems of 1815—a memorable instance of Wordsworth listening to Wordsworth—on the (Milton-influenced) line in Resolution and Independence, "over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods": "The stock-dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating the note of the bird; but, by the intervention of the metaphor broods, the affections are called in by the imagination to assist in marking the manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to listen to it, and participating of a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation" (2: 437). Here sound and sense unite in a single word, while On the Power of Sound requires a full poetic "scheme," divinely sanctioned, to bring about such resolution.
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⁵ "The Colonialist Beginnings of Comparative Musicology"; see also Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds.
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⁶ It is this later text that I discuss here.
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⁷ I elaborate this reading of the "Intimations" Ode in "Wordsworth's Great Ode and the Progress of Poetry."
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⁸ Compare the repeated "But for . . ." in Felicia Hemans's The Sceptic, the context not terribly dissimilar:

And say, cold Sophist! if by thee bereft
Of that high hope, to misery what were left?
But for the vision of the days to be,
But for the Comforter, despis'd by thee,
Should we not wither at the Chastener's look,
Should we not sink beneath our God's rebuke . . . (457-62)

I don't mean that Hemans echoes Wordsworth, though "the vision of the days to be" certainly invokes the idiom of the early stanzas of the "Intimations" Ode. Since The Sceptic is likely a response to Byron (see Sweet and Taylor), it is interesting to speculate on Hemans's possible invocation of the idiom of Byron's nemesis, Wordsworth. At the very least, her clear syntax serves as a foil, in Empson's phrase (see n. below), to the "shuffling" grammar Ode IX. In Shelley's Mont Blanc—the publication (1817) falling between Wordsworth's Ode (1807, 1815) and The Sceptic (1820)—a well known But for crux occurs:

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled. (76-79)