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Romantic Measures
Stressing the Sound of Sound
SUSAN J. WOLFSON
Sounding
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, riding round at last to the subject impending in his famous essay, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words. With a radical constitutiveness, Stevens insists that a “poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.”1 If this declaration entails, in effect, a serialaxiom, “No things but in words, no words but in sounds,” how might meter matter in this path? Meter is not words but wording arranged for stress; it is not sound but a tempo for sounding, tuned to what T. S. Eliot calls “auditory imagination”: “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.”2 It is one of the keys, Derek Attridge proposes, that invigorate the “difference” of poetic language: “sequences of sounding words rather than strings of inert symbols whose only function is to point to their encoded meanings.”3 The path I pursue in this chapter involves canny moments in Romantic poetry which conflate what Attridge’s sentence keeps in distinction: events that make meaning with metrical stress on words of sound and sounding.
Reading poetry, we sound out its words, aloud, or in the head. It is with a deftly emerging pun on this articulate art that Coleridge opens a lecture in 1818:
Man communicates by articulation of Sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the Ear—Nature by the impression of Surfaces and Bounds on the Eye. . . . Art . . . is the Mediatress, the reconciliator of Man and Nature—The primary Art is Writing.4
In the subtle auditorium of the first sentence, a memory in the ear catches the rhyme of Sounds (with a relay across paramountly) to Bounds—returning the optics for sounding and then, from the sonic articulation, projecting the claim for Art. Yet as Coleridge knows, nature’s impressions may call imagination toward bounds of sound, too, evoking a metaphysics of silence, deep within, way beyond the material or any phenomenological impression. The poetic paradox is that sound must take us to these limits, on subverbal metrical paths: the soft-settling cadence of “I have stood, / Silent with swimming sense” with a spondee-stress at stood, / Silent (This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, lines 38–39); the whispering iambics of “The moonlight steep’d in silentness” in the Mariner’s return to his home harbor (The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, line 515); or the “strange / And extreme silentness” vexing meter no less than meditation in Frost at Midnight (lines 9–10). In The Eolian Harp, Coleridge muses on a vast and various auditorium of
Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where—
. . . . . . . . . . .
Where the breeze warbles and the mute still Air
Is Music slumbering on its instrument!
(lines 29, 32–33)5
Blending rather than contraposing audible breeze and mute air, Coleridge sounds out a sensation of temporary cessation and still latent potential in the pause at spondees in mute still Air. How artfully he tunes the rhythm of syllables to this effect: Where, echoing the expansive every where—, draws warbles into the sound of Air, across which mute vibrates in Music and instrument. “Taking therefore mute as opposed not to sound but to articulate Speech,” Coleridge embraces the old trope for painting for “Fine Arts in general—muta Poesis—mute Poesy” (1818 Lecture, 2:218).
Wordsworth (in an irony of his name) likes the far registers of the strong silent type. He is most iconic in the lilting seduction of “the silence and the calm / Of mute insensate things” (“Three years she grew,” lines 17–18), or a stark arrest at a Boy’s grave, the meter halting to four stresses and a long dash: “I have stood, / Mute——” (“There was a Boy,” lines 31–32).6 Keats, with a counter-tendency to luxuriate in the sound of silence, can imagine a stealth “Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness” and paces this out on alliteration and falling accents (The Eve of St. Agnes, line 250). Or, again with an unstressed ess, he hails an urn first as a “still unravished bride of quietness” (still, too, involves unsounding), then as a bearer “of silence and slow time,” slowing his tempo to spondees at and slow time (Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 1–2).7 More extravagantly yet, Blake invokes the Evening Star to “speak si[l]ence with thy glimmering eyes,” prompting with his own sound of “silence” in “thy . . . eyes” across a gerund, glimmering, that hints star-speech as well as starlight.8
As these poetics of silence report, none of the metaphysics, none of the epistemics, none of this would matter, materialize to consciousness, but for paths of sound. Shelley’s call to the “Silence” of Mont Blanc issues a carte blanche for “the human mind’s imaginings” in audible production. Evoking blind Milton’s lament, “a Universal blanc / Of Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d” (Paradise Lost, 3.48–49), Shelley’s title, Mont Blanc, by Franco-phonics, says Mon Blank, “my blank; my blank verse”—a metrical field that might redeem Milton’s lament with infinite sonic productivity unimpeded by visible nature.9 It is in the “Art” of meter that “Sounds,” Coleridge argues in that 1818 lecture, become poetry: “passion itself imitates Order, and the order resulting produces a pleasurable Passion (whence Metre)” (2:17–18).
Wordsworth could waver about this order for meter. Even in a single document, his 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he can sort it (variously and not consistently) as a conventional signifier of “verse,” as a pleasurable addition not integral to poetic imagination, as a regulator of passion, as a pulse of passion. Conceding meter as a traditional “exponent or symbol” of verse (ix), he will insist (to Coleridge’s distress) on “no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”—except for the “metrical” element (xxvi), which he relegates to a merely conventional, “superadd[ed]” “charm” (xxviii). A few pages on, however, he is floating another, psychologically fraught argument (closer to Coleridge, here): the regulatory function of meter in ensuring “manly” poetry. If the aim of his mode of poetry “is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure,” and if “excitement is an unusual and irregular state of the mind” in which order is attenuated, words prove too powerful, or “images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them,” there is a peril of “excitement . . . carried beyond its proper bounds.” Against the “co-existence” of excitement, meter, as a “co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state,” can have “great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling” (xxx–xxxi).
Yet even this efficacy proves questionable in some ballads—most conspicuously, the meta-metrical “Strange fits of passion,” where meter is the heartbeat of passion’s helpless, misgiving fits.10 In The Old Cumberland Beggar, an irregular metrical line gives a tempo to, rather than tempers, passion. Its site is a scene of mechanically repetitive lines—a misfit of form (Wordsworth argues in retrospect) that he calculated for a surprising, arresting passion. The Beggar
. . . plies his weary journey, seeing still,
And never knowing that he sees, some straw,
Some scatter’d leaf, or marks which, in one track,
The nails of cart or chariot wheel have left
Impress’d on the white road, in the same line,
At distance still the same.
(lines 53–58)
The mechanized prospect, so repetitive as to numb cognition, mimes blank verse: the measured marks on a white surface, pressed into a same line—“a covert metaphorical application to the verse-lines themselves,” as Christophe...
