"Soundings
of Things Done":
The Poetry and Poetics
of Sound in the Romantic
Ear and Era
Sounding Romantic:
The Sound of Sound
Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University
Those of us who may have
been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are
thoughts and not only our own thoughts . . . must be conscious of this: that,
above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else,
are, in poetry, sounds.
-
That's a noble writer,
Wallace Stevens, coming round at last to the subject signaled but delayed in
his iconic essay, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" (32).
But, we hear you murmur, Sounding Romantic? or in line with the MLA Convention call, sound
in Romantic poetry and poetics?[1]
Either way, it seems counter-intuitive: words, especially poetic ones, affront
the new Romantics with unwanted trading in "poetic diction" (Wordsworth and
Coleridge anyway, though Keats rather liked camping it up), or a too parodyable
mimetics ("Oh woe is me! oh misery!"). But still, these are technical
transactions, and whatever the gambit, poetry is words, and words work in us,
through us, with sounding. We might even endorse Stevens' radical
constitutiveness: "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the
words" (32). No things but in words. But
how sound is this concession?
-
When
we read poetry, we may
sound the words out loud,
or may sound them in
the head, or mute the
sound in scanning. A
curious business, reading:
the sound of words silently
sounded. And hence the
nearly signature Romantic
romance of unsounding
unto silence. It's
printed, imprinted everywhere,
once you think about it. Romanticism, in
the old high canonical
mode, prizes
a metaphysics of silence,
beyond words, beyond even
the range of sound, deep
within, way beyond the
material or any mere phenomenological
instance.
-
Yet its poets had to
say so in words—hence that poetics of silence. We all know the stations
of this cross.[2]
Coleridge loves a world "Where the breeze warbles and the mute still Air / Is
Music slumbering on its instrument" (The Eolian Harp 31-32), with mute
recalled in, and by, a Music that is only metaphor, and with still
signifying both the quiet and suspense of this imaginary slumber. Even the
pentameter halts in spondees: "Where the breeze warbles and the mute
still Air"—Where a slight breath through Air before
the brief lilt: "Is Music slumbering on its instrument." This
is a poet who tunes sounds to subside into being "Silent with swimming sense" (This
Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison 39), or its gothic twin, that "strange / And
extreme silentness" that vexes meditation in Frost at Midnight (9-10).
Sound here, save those hissing s's, seems interruptive, a dream-scape, like the
"moonlight steeped in silentness" that surveys the Mariner's return to home
harbor (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 478).
Wordsworth's
paradigmatic poet is a figure of silent attentions, mute above the Boy of
Winander's grave, or curious about those "wreathes of smoke / Sent up, in
silence, from among the trees" (Lines, Written a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey 18-19), or honoring the blessing of "an eye made quiet" (48), or
romancing an innocence that participates in, is even promised dominion over
"the silence and the calm / Of mute insensate things" ("Three years she grew"
17-18): all pauses of deep silence tuned to a metaphysics of eternity, the
salvation beyond, and through "the silent Tomb" ("Surprized by joy"), with the
effect of making "our noisy years seem moments in the being / Of the eternal
Silence" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality 154-55), where "ears" are
subtly indicted in the subvocal of "noisy years." Dorothy Wordsworth, in
bodily decrepitude years after the moment of Tintern Abbey, sighs of the
"robe of quiet [that] overspreads / The living lake and verdant field" (Lines
Written . . . April 6th 9-10), as if this were a burial shroud
for a life in sound, too, now stilled.
-
Keats's celebrated
luxurious reveling in language, a physiology it often seems, makes all the more
arresting his romancing of suspense unto negation. Reading Chapman's rendition
of Homer was no silent sense, but a voicing out loud that gives Keats the sense
that he has "heard CHAPMAN speak out
loud and bold"—a sensation for which the loss of one's own desire (or
capacity) to speak is the reciprocal after-effect. Hence the simile-doubling
of the listening reader as kin to conquistador Cortez suddenly "star[ing] at
the Pacific, . . . / Silent on a peak in Darien" (On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer). This "conclusion is equally powerful and quiet," marveled
Leigh Hunt as he introduced Keats to readers of The Examiner (1 December
1816).
-
Usually for Keats,
silence is an affront that rouses opposition, say, by hailing urn as a "still
unravished bride of quietness" (among the puns in still is unsounding)
and a bearer "of silence and slow time" (Ode on a Grecian Urn 2), the
metrical mimesis here slowing the sounding of and slow time. Keats is
soon after what poetry can sound as "unheard melodies" over and against, and
"more endear'd" (11-13) than, this unyielding silence.[3]
"Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought," the poet says, as prelude
to teasing it into speech: "thou say'st . . ." (44-48). So, too, Shelley's
apostrophe to Mont Blanc's "Silence" projects a carte blanche, a blank slate
upon which "the human mind's imaginings" may perform its work of words. The
very name sets out, by punning historical revision, to put a personal claim
(Mon Blanc) on the erasure that so agonized Milton's lament, "a
universal blanc / Of nature's works to me expunged and
razed" (3.48-49; thus blank was spelled in the 1667 text).
-
As these conflicted poetics of silence suggest,
none of the metaphysics, none of the epistemics, none of this would matter,
materialize to consciousness, but for sound. "Speak si[l]ence with thy
glimmering eyes," Blake invokes the Evening Star (To the Evening Star),
with an audible sigh of "silence" in "eyes". Well before Simon & Garfunkel sang "And the vision that
was planted in my brain / Still remains / Within the sound of silence," Romantic poets were there, and tacitly theorizing
the contradiction. Garrett Stewart's seminar will take us further, showing not
just one sound in this phenomenology but an auditorium pulsing with potential
auralities, sometimes with thematic import, that press into the auditions of
reading and the arrays of textuality.
Not the least of the
agents in this romance is the word sound, not only the honorary trope of
our convocation, but a meta-trope for poetry in the ear, whether heard or
silently audited, more endear'd. It's a meta-trope too because it's a
homophone: our word sound is variously drawn out from different
etymologies, which come together from a prodigal polyglot past by chance or
choice. There's the Latin sonare: the very word is like a bell for
poets, the fount of sonnet ("little sound") and persona
("sounding through"). Petitioning for, and sometimes crowding into the same
literal space, and open for punning (O Pun! to honor Charles Lamb),
there are the Old English tributes of sound (test the depths), sound
from a different source for healthy (sane); and with a slight
shift, as in sound asleep, whole, entire; and across the waters (more
etymology yet) what Milton heard at Creation (his epic one) as "Sounds and
Seas" (PL 7.399), almost verbs, with a too-poignant punning on sees,
what the blind poet can do no more. All these sounds play as
synchronic kin, whatever the divergent etymological histories, and the
accidental event of phonemic confluences is one of the loves of poetic
language: the aura that condenses new senses.
The event of reading
poetry, proposes Coleridge, is rich in such pulses and impulses—so he argues
with a simile for our audition (one to which Stewart gives pride of place in Reading
Voices): a reader proceeds "like the path of sound through the air; at
every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement
collects the force which again carries him onward" (Biographia Literaria,
chapter 14). Coleridge's simile is
self-reflexive, since sound itself is a shaped path, or organization, of air.
My audit of "sounding Romantic" in what follows is undertaken with the sound of
sound, with an ear to its figuring, not just of preverbal pulse, or
nonverbal metaphysics, but as a sonic force, especially in poetry, of
self-reflective intensity.
An almost primer of
this recreation, a playing with poetic infrastructure is Robert Southey's jeu
d'esprit, "The Cataract of Lodore," a poem shaped, phonically and
metrically, into a cascade of sounds that coincide with lexical sense and often
seem to drive it as a primary expressive force:
Turning
and twisting,
Around
and around
With
endless rebound!
Smiting
and fighting,
A
sight to delight in;
Confounding,
astounding,
Dizzying
and deafening the ear with
its sound. (64-70)
Even sight to delight in
plays in cadence more as a sound to rebound, and Southey gleefully rings the
sound of that key word through a chord of anticipatory rhymes. Descending from
his Laureate perch, Southey seems even to render Mont Blanc and
Milton's Hell into light verse for delight:
And
so never ending, but always
descending,
Sounds
and motions for ever and ever
are blending,
All
at once and all o'er, with
a mighty uproar,
And
this way the Water comes down
at Lodore. (118-21)
And this way, too, the poem
titled "The Cataract of Lodore" comes down to the proper name from the rush of
sound with which it rhymes more than once—"All at once and all o'er, with a
mighty uproar." The poetics of up and down is so changeable and
interchangeable (all at once) that the last line seems a merely arbitrary end
for soundings that, once in motion, appear endlessly variable, always
descending, the very word a relay-rhyme that contains and undoes ending.
- As
Southey's political enemy
Byron knows, sound of
words is fun, and becomes
no small part of the fun,
and political punch, of
Byron's Don
Juan—from
the way Juan
refuses
a continental chime with want ("I
want a hero") to insist on English
matchmaking with new
one, to
the wicked sounding Southey
to
rhyme with mouthey, to
the way Byron settles other political
scores with how one sounds the
names. English national hero,
Napoleon's vanquisher at Waterloo,
the Duke of Wellington, gets a French
twist at the outset of Canto IX,
rung and wrung on Byron's disgust
of war glory:
Oh
Wellington! (Or 'Vilainton',
for Fame
Sounds
the
heroic
syllables
both
ways.
France
could not even conquer your great
name,
But
punned
it
down
to
this
facetious
phrase—
Beating
or beaten she will laugh the same.)
You
have
obtained
great
pensions
and
much
praise;
Glory
like yours should any dare gainsay,
Humanity
would rise and thunder 'Nay!'
Sound keys the reverse-politics.
In the French story Wellington gets punned down to Vilainton
(villainous manner), and the protest Nay, without even sounding the
syllables another way, says Ney: Napoleon's field marshal. The
manuscript shows Byron writing Vilain ton as two words, to sharpen the
pun, and equivocating about Ney or Nay: 'Query, - Ney? - Printer's
Devil,' he scrawled in a footnote, which was put into the publication
(Giuliano, ed. 60-61).[4]
-
Though Waterloo may
seem far afield from the War in Heaven, our close-listening (a form of
close-reading) is, by multiple Romantic routes, a heritage of Paradise Lost,
full of sounds—not the least, the sound of its own extraordinary verse.
Though it has high argument, this is also a poetry in love (too much in love,
Milton could worry) with its matter, the pitch and tone of its sounds, for
better or worse, for sin or salvation. If Johnson complained famously at the
end of his Life of Milton that blank verse—blank of rhyme for the
ear
"as a distinct system of sounds"—was "verse only to the eye" 294),[5]
we may recall that to blind Milton this blank verse was first and always a
poetry of sound, sounded in the head, aloud to a secretary, and never
seen, by him anyway, on the page. For Milton, the blank page is profoundly,
radically, a place of sound. His was "a voice whose sound was like the sea,"
said Wordsworth (London 1802)—the alpha-theorist of The Power
of Sound—with an undersound in "like the see" that plays
back to Milton's "Sounds and Sees."
In all these punning
measures the word sound keys a poetic differential from words as
information. Though the line of difference can be anyone's call, sound
is the poetic medium. "Quite an epicure in sound," was Wordsworth's lifelong
impression of Coleridge, and he was among the beneficiaries (Hall 42). Having
listened (over the course of two weeks in the dead of winter, January 1807) to
Wordsworth reading The Prelude, Coleridge finds himself at the close
"Absorb'd, yet hanging still upon the sound" (To a Gentleman 111), with still
(again) catching quiet, stasis, and a duration of sound
still in the air. In this blank verse, Coleridge lets sound find a rhyme
(with metrical stress) in his last line: "And when I rose, I found myself in
prayer" (112). Coleridge's Eolian Harp—the icon of a mind tuned—is called
into the verse with a sounding in the poet's correspondent voice and a tease of
rhyme: "hark!" (13). What we can't hear (the harp's music) is intimated by a
poetry in love with the sound of sound:
And
now, its strings
Boldlier
swept, the long sequacious notes
Over
delicious surges sink and rise,
Such
a soft floating witchery of sound.
(The Eolian Harp 17-20)
Such witchery is the
sounds, the vibration of sequacious / delicious surges
(undertoning urges) / such a soft floating
witchery of sound.[6] The
word sound soon echoes, in a phrase about itself: "Melodies round
honey-dropping flowers" (23), enriched by the dropping of the round
sound into the flowers. Even boldlier, a strangely
arresting sound in so rare a word, seems half-created to herald this
insurgence.
-
No wonder then that
the hymn Coleridge boldly added in 1817, to "the one Life, within us and
abroad" (26ff), is so intricate with its sound, Life heard again
in the relays of light: "A light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light"
(28). Allegorizing poetic presence, Coleridge not only suggests that sound,
like light, is a powerline through the air; he's also working with the chiasmus
of sound as a phonological paradigm. Even the sound of the simile-word like
echoes light as it sends the sound of sound into power.
We feel this power in the first pulse of the line, in the imperative verge that
shimmers "A light" into "Alight."[7]
-
Coleridge was a
reflective theorist as well as effective poet of these events, of meaning
generated by the happy accidents of words in sounds:
N.B.—In
my intended Essay in defence of
Punning—(Apology
for Paronomasy, alias Punning)
to defend those turns
of words,
che l'onda
chiara
E l'ombra non
men cara,
In
certain styles of writing,
by proving that Language itself
is formed upon associations
of this kind . . . that words
are not mere symbols of things & thought,
but themselves things—(Notebooks 3:
3762)[8]
Associations are accidents
of sound, in which words as things gain unsuspected power. When the poetry
generated in The Lime-Tree Bower concludes with a sigh that "No Sound is
dissonant which tells of Life" (76), Coleridge arrays the line to speak twinned
values: even as all sounds tell of one life, no sound is dissonant from, alien
to life. The very negation carries an echo of itself in Soun(d is Disson)ant.
In telling of the
unlife of the Arctic, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is haunted by sounds so alien
that even the word sound becomes phantasmic:
The
ice was here, the ice was
there,
The
ice was all around:
It
cracked and growled, and roar'd
and howl'd,
Like
noises in a swound!
(The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner 59-62)
In this ice-sounding, noise
is mere simile for the assault: swound is a ghost of sound, a
rhyme-word that lurks in the aural field without precipitating. And (we may
well wonder in reflex) what the hell is that swound flaunted for
reference? It sounds like a nonce-compound of wound (coiled), wound
(injury), and sound—another of those Coleridge inventions, exquisitely
desynonymized from near kin, ad hoc, for this moment only. OED tells us that swound
did exist before this (and cites this instance, too), but from long, long ago,
when orality was the medium of poetry. So for this retro-ballad of 1798-1817,
Coleridge recalls swound as a patently forgotten sound, an archaeology
unearthed: it's an swoon old-form (same etymology),[9]
and (even better!) a variant of sound.
In this simile,
Coleridge is not doing anything so mundane as listening to Pope's advice that
"the sound must seem an echo to the sense." He's producing a scene of sound
that sounds like etymology, as if invoking Pope's tidy couplet —"'Tis not
enough no Harshness gives Offence, / The Sound must seem an Eccho
to the Sense" (An Essay on Criticism 364-65)—then estranging the
lesson, to draw out what the line's verbal sequence manages to produce against
its injunction: how sense comes, by alliteration and stress, in echo of sound—sound
preceding sense, and in Coleridge's verse becoming it, in a swound that
is a wounding of sound.
Coleridge must have
been remembering this terrific sublimity of sound when he recalled, a decade
on, a storm on the lake of Ratzeburg, in sentences so exquisitely tuned to
phonics as to suggest an event still in the writer's ear:
there
was a storm of wind; during
the whole night, such were
the thunders and howlings
of the breaking ice, that
they have left a conviction
on my mind, that there are
Sounds more sublime than any
Sight can be,
more absolutely suspending
the power of comparison, and
more utterly absorbing the
mind's self-consciousness
of it's
total attention to the object
working upon it. (Rooke, ed.
2: 257)[10]
Coleridge also seems,
tacitly, to be hearing Burke on the "sublime passion" of "sounds":
The
noise of vast cataracts, raging
storms, thunder, or artillery,
awakes a great and aweful
sensation in the mind . .
. and by the sole strength
of the sound, so amazes and
confounds the imagination,
that in this staggering, and
hurry of the mind, the best
established tempers can scarcely
forbear being borne down.[11]
Burke awakes awful
sensation in his sounds: the alliterations, the swelling of sound in confounds
and down, the strange reverse-birth in forbear being borne down,
the line made slow and heavy by these very sounds.
Across the poignant
course of his sublime Rime, Coleridge writes the verse of sound in a
chord of antithetical returns. This is the Mariner's delusionally beatific
swoon, the revival of the dead crew, rendered and remembered with a vibration
in the sound of sounds:
Sweet
sounds rose slowly through
their mouths,
And
from their bodies passed.
Around,
around, flew each sweet sound,
Then
darted to the Sun;
Slowly
the sounds came back again .
. . (352-56)
This is a symphony of sounds,
exhaled through the vowels and the slide of s's in rose slowly
through (with a phonotext- effect in rose lowly) to issue up and out
from mouths that seem formed for sounds and resound in the rhyme
with Around, around and the slow return of its own sounds.
Coleridge may seem spendthrift of such effects, as
we hear Keats crisply urging poets to be "misers of sound and syllable" (Incipit
altera Sonneta). For his sonnet-sonics, Keats did not spend the word sound
until his tenth line, and waited for its return until his close, in the sound
of a Muse free from bondage of rhyme: "She will be bound with garlands of her
own"—among its weavings, the sound of sound unchained from rhyme
scheming to echo within this bound. In a haunted dream-epic Keats
allows himself the extravagant imagination of a sound without syllable, the
sensation without sense:
Or
thou might'st better listen
to the wind
Whose
language is to thee a barren
noise,
Though
it blows legend-laden
through
the trees . .
(The Fall of Hyperion
3.4-6)
—a verse he copies in a
letter, underlining the compound, eager to share it with one of his most
attentive readers (Richard Woodhouse) "on account of" its "fine sound." As if
caught up in the sweep, Keats may have transcribed the line with two thoughs:
"Though it blows legend-laden though the trees." Editors usually follow
Hyder Rollins in supplying a dropped r to get th[r]ough (Letters
2: 171), but Keats often writes with a shorthand emphatic downstroke that
implies two letters, and I think in this case he may have been so caught up in
the fine-sounding of Though / blows / though that he let it ride.
In the Keats phonotext
of 1819, the fine sound of legend-laden echoes the leaf-fring'd legend
that "haunts about" the Grecian Urn, to tease with a latent sound effect (Ode
5). There is some evidence, moreover (Andy Elfenbein tells me) that legend
was sounded in Keats's day with a first long e; if so, leaf gets
an echo, along with a pun on legion'd—a word Keats sounds in fantasy in
The Eve of St. Agnes, where "legion'd fairies pac'd the coverlet" of
Madeline's quiet sleep (xix). On the Urn site, Keats manages, with fine visual
poetics, to bring an unsounded "ring" within the fring'd legend, as if
the sound were ready for audition.
-
It's a fine sound that
plays, too, in Autumn "on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep" (To Autumn 16),
a suspense of motion and music—as if in this poppy-drowse, all sound sleeps
in heavy ease. Keats's deft slide in these registers reminds us how sound
may multiply, variously, in chords of sense: as tone, as character, as depth,
as resonance. It is Keats's irrevocably sound sleep of death that prompts
Shelley to imagine Echo pining away "Into a shadow of all sounds:—a
drear / Murmur" (Adonais 134-35), a trace of waning sight (shadow) that
gains this phonic effect. On another pulse, the "sound of life" heralded in Prometheus
Unbound draws aural sensation into recognition, the world-enkindling
"seldom-heard mysterious sound" learned from the artist who wrought a guitar
into a vibrant instrument (With a Guitar, to Jane 75). "Sounds as well
as thoughts have relations, both between each other and towards that which they
represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been
found connected with a perception of the order and relation of thoughts,"
Shelley proposed in his Defence of Poetry (SPP 514)—the same
paragraph in which he insisted on "the vanity of translation," and seems, even,
to offer a small case in point in the quiet chord of Sounds and found.[12]
-
No one broods more
over sound, caressing words as things (so the poet put it in a note to that
sound-haunted ballad, The Thorn) than the iconically-ironically named
Words-worth. In his own audit, he identifies a habit that feels diachronic:
Have
felt whate'er there is of power
in sound
To
breathe an elevated mood, by
form
Or
image unprofaned: and I would
stand
Beneath
some rock, listening to sounds
that are
The
ghostly language of the ancient
earth . . .
(The Prelude, 1805
2.324-28)
"The 'power in sound' is
the severe music of the signifier or of an inward echoing that is both
intensely human and ghostly," says Geoffrey Hartman (99), hearing in these
lines an even more radical strain in "the relation between textuality and
referentiality," the way this poet's words respond to a priority of sound that
beckons as "a potentially endless descent into the phantom ear of memory,"
saved only by an impulse to textualize the sounds, install them, measure them
in poetry (101-2).[13]
We feel the pulse
almost as an element of style, in this poet's argument that words matter for
their soundings: among the "reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are
frequent beauties of the highest kind" is "the interest which the mind attaches
to words, not only a symbols of the passion but as things, active and
efficient" (Note to The Thorn, Lyrical Ballads 1800; his
italics). And so the luxury of words as things of sound—whether it "the sound
like thunder" that is not thunder, but the motion of eternity ("It is a beauteous
Evening" 8); or the "sounds / Of undistinguishable motion" (The Prelude 1805:
1.331-32) that are not eternity, but the reflux upon an imagination still
haunted by boyhood thefts (how rare to put the sound of undistinguishable
to work in blank verse); or the luxuriously echoing redundancy, with a metrical
stress, of "heard the murmur and the murmuring sound" in
the nut-tree grove that is the undertone of epicurean boyish sexuality (Nutting
37) with an under-chord of Milton's Eve, remembering her call from
self-reflection to Adam by a sound of "murmuring waters" (Paradise Lost
4.453).
-
What a world of winter
gets generated by, and surrounds, a recollection of a whole pack of bellowing
boys, as their ice-skates hiss and fly along the sounding board of the lake:
All
shod
with
steel
We
hiss'd along the polish'd ice,
in games
Confederate,
imitative of the chace,
And
woodland pleasures, the resounding
horn,
The
Pack, loud bellowing, and the
hunted hare.
So
through the darkness and the
cold we flew,
And
not a voice was idle: with the
din,
Meanwhile,
the precipices rang aloud,
The
leafless trees, and every icy
crag
Tinkled
like iron, while the distant
hills
Into
the tumult sent an alien sound
. . .
(The Prelude 1805:
1.461-71)
Half-rhyming aloud
and sound,[14] and
making both echo loud and resounding in the train, Wordsworth
fills the verse with sound everywhere and alien—a weird auditorium that
he amplified in 1836 by replacing the merely space-filling Meanwhile with Smitten,
to echo in the relay from din to precipices. Even in the
auditorium of 1805, the relay of sent is already sounding in distant,
in tumult sent, and the hiss of sint across the line of "hill(s
/Int)o."
As Wordsworth's verse
shows in more than a few traces, sound is a memory, an imprint poetry strives
to capture:
My
eyes are dim with childish
tears,
My
heart is idly stirr'd,
For
the same sound is in my ears,
Which
in those days I heard. (The
Fountain 29-32)
It is sound
that stirs the heart to recover what was heard, and it is sound, too, that
recovers, finds lost years in m(y ears). On this cue, we may
hear idly stirring inside "ch(ildi)sh." For Wordsworth it is
often sound that stirs and flows feeling from past to present:
I cannot paint
What then I was.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like
a passion . . . (Tintern Abbey 76-77)
Reciprocally,
an adult reads back from sight to sound:
The
gentleness of heaven is on
the Sea:
Listen!
the mighty Being is awake,
And
doth with his eternal motion
make
A
sound like thunder—-everlastingly.
("It is a
beauteous Evening" 4-8)
The manuscript shows no
final period (Curtis, ed. 464)—a scriptive mimesis corresponding to the force
of everlastingly not only in sense but as a pervasive sound, sweeping up
the phonics of "the Sea: / Listen . . . / hi(s e)ternal
. . . thunder—-everlastingly." Hearing is
believing.
I think Keats has a
memory from Wordsworth of this sounding—though it is Shakespeare's Lear
that he says is in his ear at the seashore in April 1817, where the everlasting
sound is the sea itself, not figure but instance. The sonnet he writes seaside
sees what can be gained by ear industrious and attention meet, if one were to
promote sound into a formal a-rhyme. It is all immediated by
Edgar's fiction for his blind father, "Hark, do you hear the sea"? (as if,
even, to say this sea?), an invitation that fails in the asymmetry of
Gloucester's completing the line one foot short and in a weak rhyme with sea
(on an unstressed syllable), "No, truly" (4.6.4). Writing about writer's block
to fellow-poet J. H. Reynolds, Keats does hear the sea and wants Reynolds to,
too, by turning Shakespeare's sea-scene into a sound stage of recreation (with
absent Reynolds doubling blind Gloucester):
.
. . the passage in Lear—"Do
you not hear the sea?"—has
haunted me intensely.
On
the Sea.
It
keeps eternal Whisperings around
Desolate
shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts
twice ten thousand Caverns; till
the spell
of
Hecate leaves
them their old shadowy sound.
often
'tis in such gentle temper
found
That
scarcely will the very smallest
shell
Be
moved for days from whence it
sometime fell
When
last the winds of Heaven were
unbound. . . . [15]
Keats, comments Christopher
Ricks, interpolates the coercive "pressure of not" (175) and perhaps,
with a poet's ear, adds the tenth syllable to Shakespeare's line. We see
him working sound through it all: Sea / Intensely / To the Sea—right
into the first rhyme, with Sea itself, in the subtle undercurrent of
sound in "keep(s E)ternal." The whispering is also of the portmanteau Seaternal,
an undertow of Wordsworth's "hi(s e)ternal"
("beauteous Evening" 7). In Keats's sea-listening, the shadowy sound of sound—heard
in the undercurrent of "Whisperings around" (surround and sound)—even
washes into the echo-chamber of those ten thousand Caverns,
reverberating across desolate shores . . . spell . . . shadowy . . .
scarcely . . . sometime . . . last, keyed to the a-rhyme chord of sound
in the waves of the s's.
-
This is a meditation
of sound in the deepest register, but as Keats and especially Wordsworth know,
sounds haunt, in synonymy, sometimes, with the accidental collusion with the
verb. Hence, Wordsworth's present participle sounding as searching,
sonic information when sight is of no avail:
Three
sleepless nights I passed in
sounding on,
Through
words and things, a dim and perilous
way . . .
(The
Borderers, 4.98-99)
In the blind
chamber, "passed in" intimates a din before its sounding,
then echoed eerily in the paranym of dim, a slide of sound that one is
tempted to audit as the terrain of "perilous sway." Though without all the
threads of this rich texture Wordsworth gives the Solitary similar lines to
follow:
By
pain of heart—-now
checked—-and
now impelled—-
The
intellectual power, through
words and things,
Went
sounding on, a dim and perilous
way!
And
from those transports, and these
toils abstruse,
Some
trace am I enabled to retain
Of
time, else lost;—-existing
unto me
Only
by records in myself not found.
(The
Excursion, Book III 699-705)
In the
archeology of this trace is Wordsworth's Note to The Thorn about the
mind's attachment "to words . . . as things, active and efficient, which
are of themselves part of the passion"—the literal re-cord, a recalling
to the core/cor. The sound recovers what the sense negates.
Coleridge was arrested by this sense of
sounding, and made it a self-description at the end of Biographia
Literaria Chapter 4: "I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly
patience of my readers, while I thus go 'sounding on my dim and perilous way.'"
Recollecting his first acquaintance with Coleridge, Hazlitt endorsed the
transfer:
I
accompanied him six miles
on the road. It was a fine
morning in the middle of winter,
and he talked the whole way. The
scholar in Chaucer is described
as going
Sounding
on his way.
So Coleridge
went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject,
he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice.[16]
The sound of
Coleridge himself seems the path through air, or in its winter climate, the
hiss of sliding from subject to subject, sliding on ice.
-
The sound
of sounding as prescient of deep knowing is nowhere more audible for
Wordsworth than in a strange recollection of death by water. In The Prelude
he recalls a boyhood sensing of such an event:
Seeking
I knew not what, I chanced to
cross
One
of those open fields, which
shaped like ears,
Make
green peninsulas on Esthwaite's
Lake.
(1805 5.457-58)
The simile is
not chance, however, for the event, as the poet now knows, was all about a
sounding of information, of random seeking turned to succeeding:
The
succeeding day—
Those
unclaimed garments telling a
plain tale—
Went
there a company, and in their
boat
Sounded
with grappling-irons and long
poles:
At
length the dead man, 'mid that
beauteous scene
Of
trees and hills and water, bolt
upright
Rose
with his ghastly face . . . . (5.466-72)
The telling
that is the intuition, the discovery worked through that half-punning homonym, sounded,
are the verbal actions that bring this scene to sight. Called into the verse
by a seemingly random, now motivated simile ("like ears"), sound is already in
the air, and in retrospect texturing the verse from boat to beauteous
to bolt upright. The revelation at hand is even more palpably auditioned
in "sounded"—a dead homonym, with a Miltonic formation.[17]
- Such
sounding without sight,
dim and perilous for the
haunted, can seem to a
sighted poet who can't
paint what then he was,
a fantasy of perfect harmony:
Thus lived he
by Loch-Leven's side
Still sounding
with the sounding tide,
(The Blind
Highland Boy 91-92)
The sounding is in the
world, past and present, and in the sensibility of the boy himself, in whom all
sounds echo, and still sound in Wordsworth's reservoir for the poetry of sound.
This is a poet forever seduced by the sound of sound—
O listen! for the Vale
profound
Is overflowing with the
sound.
And so does the poetry.
This couplet (7-8) is consciously not neoclassical, with this force for ears
trained on formal containments. 7 pauses in silent space, then as the syntax
flows over to 8, the sound runs softly through the stresses and slips of
"overflowing with the" toward a rhyme-echo in sound—as if returning
from the echo-chamber of the "Vale profound." The very injunction, "O listen!"
overflows into "(Is o)verflowing." Bearing this flow in her memory, Dorothy
Wordsworth writes to a friend:
There is something
inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those two Lines
Oh listen! for the Vale
profound
Is overflowing with the
sound—
I often catch myself
repeating them in disconnection with any thought, or even I may say,
recollection of the Poem. (EY 650)
In an echo drawn from
without carrying the full recollection, she catches the sounds for her
listening pleasure, a pulse of sound that I think she means to hold onto in
shifting her brother's period to a dash of prolonged audition. It is a
sounding of sound (as Adam Potkay also remarks) that plays across the
arrangement of the 1807 Poems, into the next poem, Stepping Westward,
a title recorded from a local greeting to the foot-travelers ("What you are
stepping Westward?") that Wordsworth cherishes, in a pace of regular meter, for
a "sound / Of something without place or bound" (13-14). And it is a sound that
more than a few listeners transferred to the poet himself. Blackwood's
"Christopher North" (John Wilson) gives an account of Wordsworth "pacing in his
poetical way . . . and pouring out poetry in that glorious recitative of his,
till the vale was overflowing with the sound."[18]
Shelley takes this
scene of boundless audition to the Alps, and replays it with a sense of poetry
aspiring, not to tame, but to run wild with antiphony and metrical disorder:
Thy caverns echoing to the
Arve's commotion
A loud, lone sound no other
sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that
ceaseless motion
Thou art the path of that
unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine!
(Mont
Blanc 30-34)
"Like the path of sound
through the air" is Coleridge's simile for the retrograde motions of reading. If
Shelley's Defence that poetry is not poetry without a striving for "a
certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound" (SPP 514), the case
is severely uncertain here, with the poetry wresting the path of sound into a
primary commotion of mind.[19] The
sound-streaming tribute of his poetry is its anagrammatic churning of caverns
/ Arve's / art pervaded / art / Ravine.
While sound achieves an end-rhyme at line 40's "the clear universe of
things around," the formal chord is already belated in the train of the triple
chord of sound in the commotion of 30-34 about the phenomenon itself.
Even the expansive pun of surround in "things around"
figures what is already in motion. Is this, too, what Keats heard, in tune with
Wordsworth, in those "whisperings around" at seaside?
For Shelley, unresting
sound is the mode of the verse, discharging the very words and their inventory
of letters from the end of the first stanza and into the dramatic turn to the
apostrophe in the next:
Where waterfalls around it
leap for ever,
Where woods and winds
contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly
bursts and raves.
2
Thus thou, Ravine of
Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
(9-12)[20]
Shelley makes his claim for
the sounds of poetry as its very sense, and with echoes everywhere of Milton (Paradise
Lost), of Wordsworth (Tintern Abbey), of Coleridge (Kubla Khan),
and not the least his own harvest:
Now lending splendour,
where from secret springs
The source of human thought
its tribute brings
Of waters, with a sound but
half its own (1-6)
In the phonic roll of
gerunds, sweeping up the very ontology of things, Shelley sounds the
poem's first couplet-rhyme in a pun on tribute brings (tributary
stream; gift), and meta-poetically intensifies the chime by contributing the
final t of the lines' penultimate words, secret and tribute
itself, to the rhyme chord. Thus sound is set to echo in its
own (its sone), half in the transformations of the echo-relay.
Shelley releases sound to such a pitch as to court the sense that if one
were to worry the secrets behind sounds there would be only blank space, not Mont
Blanc. But, as Shelley is at pains to say in and through Mont Blanc, poetry
is called to a sound-source that is but half owned. This is not shearing but
sharing: it's half owned not because sound out there is radically untamable and
unnamable, but because the sound of
poetry is an audition that is always a
sounding of another's words with tributes of one's own.
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