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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]
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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).
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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).
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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?
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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]
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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.
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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."
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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