Robert Pinsky - The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide

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Contents

To Biz

Nor is there singing school, but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS , Sailing to Byzantium

Introduction

The idea in the following pages is to help the reader hear more of what is going on in poems, and by hearing more to gain in enjoyment and understanding.

Every speaker, intuitively and accurately, courses gracefully through immensely subtle manipulations of sound. We not only indicate, for example, where the accent is in a word like question, but also preserve that accent while adding the difference between Was that a question? and Yes, that was a question.

It is almost as if we sing to one another all day.

We do not need to be taught such things: if they were taught in school, we would find them hard and make a mess of them.

In this regard, the way we use the sounds of language is like the way we use down and up with certain English verbs: I have never heard a child, however small, or anyone, however stupid, make a mistake when discriminating among such expressions as: Can you put me up? and its cousinsDont put me down, It brings me down, I wasnt brought up that way, Then what it comes down to is, why bring it up? and so forth. If we learned these distinctions by making charts and memorizing them, or by rules, we would blunder.

It is the same with what Robert Frost calls sentence sounds. Because we have learned to deal with the sound patterns organically, for practical goals, from before we can remember, without reflection or instruction or conscious analysis, we all produce the sounds, and understand them, with great efficiency and subtle nuance. Because of that skill, acquired like the ability to walk and run, we already have finely developed powers that let us appreciate the sound of even an isolated single line of poetryeven if we have very little idea of the meaningthat someone might quote with appreciation, like,

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs

Or,

In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on, amused

Or,

Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace

Or,

Back out of all this now too much for us

Or,

Let be be finale of seem

Or,

Further in Summer than the Birds

Or,

Sorrow is my own yard

The hearing-knowledge we bring to a line of poetry is a knowledge of patterns in speech we have known to hear since we were infants. If we tried to learn such knowledge by elaborate rules or through brute, systematic memorization, then just as with the distinctions involved in putting up with me and putting me up, we would not be able to use them as fluently as we do.

And yet, having learned these graceful, peculiar codes from the cradlethe vocal codes that poets have used to make works of artwe can gain a lot by studying the nature of what we learned long ago without study: learning to hear language in a more conscious way can enhance our pleasure in lines and poems. Athletes, by study or coaching, can learn to walk or run more effectively.

Study of that kind is the intention of this book: to enhance the readers pleasure in poetry through knowledge of a few basic principles and their tremendous effects. I try to explain the principles in plain language, with a minimum of special terms, objectively, by paying close attention to particular poems and specific words. Technical language, vague impressions about the emotional effects of sounds (the supposedly exuberant or doleful w s, the anxious or sensual t s, etc.), elaborate systems, categories that need memorizing, little accent marks and special typographical symbolsall these, I work to avoid.

This is a brief guide: my goal is not an all-inclusive map but a brief, plain, accurate presentation of the most important points. More exhaustive approaches characterize such good books as Alfred Corns The Poems Heartbeat, Harvey Grosss Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, John Hollanders Rhymes Reason, and James McAuleys Versification. In these sources the reader can find excellent accounts of terminology, detailed discussion of exceptions and anomalies, aesthetic and semantic theories, definitions and examples of received forms.

A wonderful historic account is John Thompsons The Founding of English Meter, from which I have learned a great deal. Thompsons book first sent me to George Gascoignes sixteenth-century Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of English Verse or Ryme, the first such essay in English and still one of the best.

Often, I quote some poetry without identifying the author. (In such cases, the poet is identified in the notes at the back of the book.) The purpose is to defer interesting matters such as a given poets reputation, themes, biography, historical context, and so forth, in order to concentrate for the moment on this books one subject: the sounds of poetry in English.

Theory

There are no rules.

However, principles may be discerned in actual practice: for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or amended.

Art proceeds according to principles discernible in works of art. Therefore, if one is asked for a good book about traditional metrics, a good answer is: The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, or The Complete Poems of Ben Jonson. Two excellent books about so-called free verse are the two-volume Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. One of the most instructive books on short lines is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. To learn a lot about the adaptation of ballad meter to modern poetry, an invaluable work is Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems. No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem.

But a guide can be helpful. The theory of this guide is that poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

Moreover, there is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an experts body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audiences body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artists medium is my breath. The readers breath and hearing embody the poets words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.

Other conceptions of poetry might include flamboyantly expressive vocal delivery, accompanied by impressive physical presence, by the poet or a performer; or the typographical, graphic appearance of the words in itself, apart from the indication of sound. Those areas are not part of this books conception.

Ezra Pound wrote that poetry is a centaur. That is, in prose, one aims an arrow at a target. In a poem, one does the same thing, while also riding a horse. The horse I take to be the human body. Poetry calls upon both intellectual and bodily skills.