On Voice in Poetry

The Work of Animation

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137308238
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

What do we mean by 'voice' in poetry? In this work, David Nowell Smith teases out the diverse meanings of 'voice', from a poem's soundworld to the rhetorical gestures through which poems speak to us, in order to embark on a philosophical exploration of the concept of voice itself.

1

A Natural Scale

Teevo cheevo cheevio chee

O where, what can thát be?

With this call and response starts Gerard Manley Hopkins’s unfinished ‘The Woodlark’.¹ In light of his youthful diary entry ‘I think the onomatopoeic theory [of the origin of language] has not had a fair chance’,² in light also of his abiding concern with grasping the immanence of God within nature, and in light of the singular phonic experimentation of his œuvre, it might come as a surprise to learn that this is one of the very few occasions in which Hopkins employed onomatopoeia; particularly so given that the lines evince such uncertainty regarding the commensurability of human to animal voice. The two voices rhyme, but any harmony this rhyme might signify is troubled by the dissonance of their respective rhythms: the bird’s chirruping takes four trochees, whereas the listener’s response is not only unmetrical, but its accenting of ‘thát’ leaves the word ‘be’ unstressed, so that the ensuing falling cadence clashes with the rising inflection of the onomatopoeia of the opening line. Harmony between man and nature is both gestured towards, and seemingly closed off.

Latent in Hopkins’s couplet is an insight underpinning so much theory of onomatopoeia: that the imitation of the animal voice (and for the purposes of this chapter I’ll be focusing on the onomatopoeia of voices, rather than of other sounds) within human speech posits resemblance between voices only by admitting a fundamental difference in kind. Such imitation, so the argument goes, is also a form of transcription: the animal voice is transposed into phoneme, that is, its vocality is assimilated into a contrastive system of phonic signs. Such an understanding of onomatopoeia underpins philosophies as varied as those of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Giorgio Agamben (Herder’s pre-dates, and indeed anticipates, the model of the ‘phoneme’). Both posit the origin of languages in voice, but in neither case does this indicate a desire for an originary unity; rather, voice becomes the site for this origin only because voice has already left pure sound behind, indeed, has become not simply phonetic but phonemic. Although voice is portrayed as the vehicle through which resemblance becomes signification, it becomes clear retrospectively that the structure of signification itself (either as cognitive faculty or as system of differences) had, in advance, provided the basis for our ability to discern and produce resemblances.

Herder offers a speculative history of the development of language out of imitations of natural sounds; yet the ‘origin’ of human language is ultimately to be found not in this history but in our human capacity for imitation – the mediating faculty Herder calls Besonnenheit.³ Those sounds which communicate sensation through interjection (cries, groans, exclamations, etc.) Herder terms the ‘language of sensation’, but this is qualitatively different to our imitation of external noises; it is this latter which permits the establishment of conventional signs. When the sheep bleats, it gives unthinking voice to instinct; when we humans, by contrast, take this bleating as a sign for the sheep’s presence, and subsequently reproduce it to signal its presence (or else make present the idea of it in its absence), we recognise it not simply with our ears but with our souls: ‘The soul has recognized it in a human way, for it recognizes and names it distinctly, that is, with a characteristic mark’ (p. 88, my emphasis).⁴ For Agamben it is as system of differences rather than as cognitive structure that language separates human from animal voice. In the phoneme – ‘the negative and purely differential entities that, according to modern linguistics have no signification and, at the same time, make signification possible’ – the ‘animal’ voice becomes phone engrammatos, ‘signifying sound’; this, moreover, entails that sound can signify only on condition of the death of the animal voice.⁵ As Reuven Tsur has had occasion to observe of the bird whose song might seem most easy for a human voice to imitate: a cuckoo ‘emits neither the speech sound [k] nor [u]; it uses no speech sounds at all. But a poet (any poet) in human language is constrained by the phoneme system of his language; he can translate the cuckoo’s song only to those speech sounds’.⁶ Such ‘translation’, on Agamben’s terms, is ‘death’.

Yet Agamben’s ultimate concern, like Herder’s, is with origin not as historical source but as ontological foundation. For what the translation of onomatopoeia shows us is a condition that Agamben considers latent in every vocal utterance. All language is marked by a no-longer/not-yet structure whereby it has ceased to be pure animal voice but has not yet become the pure gramma of the written word. This provides the temporal frame within which language can ‘take place’; such taking place, lies in that disjunction ‘between the removal of voice and the event of meaning’. Yet he goes further: this ‘taking place’ ‘is the other Voice whose ontological dimension […] constitutes the originary articulation […] of human language.’⁷ ‘Articulation’ here is both jointure and separation: language ‘says itself’ not by making itself the content of its utterance, but by setting in motion that opening movement which permits its own saying. If ‘Voice’ lies anterior to language, it is because it ‘articulates’ language.

Cipher of voice, onomatopoeia devocalises; such is the paradox that animates it. And, as Agamben’s account shows, its teleology of devocalisation pervades not only speculative histories but also (equally speculative) ontologies of language. Nor is it restricted to those theories which situate language’s origins of language in onomatopoeia. ‘L’Abbé Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, searching for language’s (pre-) historical origin, find an unexpected afterecho in the theories of infantile language development offered by Guy Rosolato, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok; all suggest that the original impulse for language arises out of interjection, inchoate and immediate cries of need or passion which eventually metamorphose into language as a system of signs. Language, it seems, requires both voice, and the devocalisation of this voice. In the following I would like to trouble this process of devocalisation.

Crucial in onomatopoeia is how vocal sound is given over to imitation – in this, it sets up a distinction between imitating sound and the original: for Herder this is mediating consciousness capable of imitation, for Agamben the differential structure of the phoneme. But in each case, we find a shift from resemblance to conventional signification. This is certainly what Hopkins’s ‘The Woodlark’ traces – as becomes clear in a later passage, when the lark’s song, transcribed onomatopoeically, gives way to a monologue rendered verbally:

And the córn is córded and shóulders its shéaf,

The ear in milk, lush the sash,

And crúsh-sílk póppies aflásh,

The blóod-gúsh bláde-gásh

Fláme-rásh rúdréd

Búd shélling or bróad-shéd

Tátter-tángled and díngle-a-dánglèd

Dándy-húng dáinty héad

(p. 132)

Here we encounter a transformation in the poem’s soundworld, most strikingly in the use of two of Hopkins’s most characteristic prosodic gestures: the coincidence of alliteration with stresses symmetrically within the line (corn/corded, shoulders/sheaf; blood-gush/blade-gash; Bud shell/broad-shed; Tatter-tangle/dingle-a-dangled; dandy-hung/dainty head), and the condensed ‘sprung’ accenting, piling clusters of monosyllabic stresses one upon the other (most strikingly in the eight consecutive stressed syllables: ‘blóod-gúsh bláde-gásh / Fláme-rásh rúdréd / Búd shéll[]’).⁸ This sounds remarkably unlike the onomatopoeia of the opening: when the lark’s voice becomes ‘speech’, it makes a series of different demands on our own voicing. Anthropomorphism, like other forms of tropic equivalence, necessarily admits the difference it seeks to broach; here this difference is registered in the poem’s prosodics as well as its rhetorics. Here we might in fact see Hopkins’s poem to be responding to its ‘acousmatic’ predicament:⁹ ‘where, what?’ asks the woodlark’s listener, and the poem continually tries to fill in a body through verbal sound where the bird’s own body remains hidden.¹⁰ In its transformed soundworld, the poem pushes the latent differential structure of onomatopoeia to its conclusion: namely, that imitation is ultimately based not on resemblance, but on a figural and metonymic, rather than metaphorical, association which takes as its starting point the arbitrary relation between the sound that imitates and the sound imitated. But, by the same token, the poem is now more than imitation: it becomes the exploration of Hopkins’s prosodic and gestural repertoire, a testing of vocal range.

When Hopkins tests the vocal range of sprung rhythm and alliterative patterning, he introduces sonorous correspondences between speechsound and birdsong which cannot simply be grasped as imitation; nor do they remain at the level of the phoneme as a discrete unit. Hopkins’s alliterations attain their force through their syntactic-prosodic accumulation; similarly, if the accents punctuate any forwards movement, such punctuating nevertheless depends on this movement (for instance, the triple rhythms of the opening line of this excerpt). The individual figure of sound arises from out of a broader rhythmic continuum; it serves to ‘dynamise’ the vocal material, as Yuri Tynianov puts it, but only as it works with, and against, the dynamism of the material. Tynianov observes that, in verse, segmentation functions as dynamisation.¹¹ Building on Tynianov’s insight, let us dwell on the relation between the segments of syllable and lexical stress and the ‘suprasegmental’ contours of prosody as a whole. The term indicates metaphysics passing itself off as ‘methodology’: starting with individual segments and building them up into intonation contours, phonological phrases, and other prosodic phenomena which reside above (‘supra’) the segments themselves.¹² Yet the dynamism of Hopkins’s poem suggests the inverse – that what is ‘above’ the segment does not supervene but rather creates an anterior phonic context of movedness, which renders these segments discernable as such. This is perhaps the moment at which Hopkins’s poem must outstrip its onomatopoeic opening. In part, this is as the poem’s sonic exploration veers away from resemblance; but it also signals a shift away from onomatopoeic sound as unit, searching out correspondences between phoneme and the auditory unit germane to be rendered as phoneme. Hopkins has, of course, not disposed of phonemic patterning; yet he is working on a very different temporal plane.

In this respect it finds a striking counterpart in another fragmentary address to a bird, from around the same period – this time to a cuckoo:

Repeat that, repeat

Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,

With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound

Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:

The whóle lándscape flushes on a sudden at a sound¹³

We saw with Hopkins’s use of onomatopoeia that the introduction of the bird’s voice into the poem’s soundworld served not simply to harmonise bird and human voice but to insist on their disjunction, and here too it is an absent nature that is addressed, so to be endowed with some kind of presence: address thus gives way to incantation. Indeed, the poem describes a double movement. On the one hand, it focalises away from the opening address into an evocation of the poet’s experience of the birdsong, which finally becomes the experience of the ‘whole landscape’, as it ‘flushes, on a sudden, at a sound’; on the other, it responds to the bird’s acousmatics by internalising the birdsong into its soundworld, not as onomatopoeia precisely (though words like ‘rebound’, ‘trundled’, ‘hollow’, ‘flushes’, ‘sudden’, seem to attain a phonic, almost iconic, efficacy), but through vectors of syntactic and rhythmic intensity, as if thereby to engender the very responsiveness of nature that the address had sought out. The former movement shifts from the bodily exuberance of a ‘pure’ voice (here figured by the cuckoo’s spontaneous song) to referential description; the latter would retain this exuberance as language’s very ability to call upon nature to show itself, or at least to recreate the cuckoo’s song from out of its continuing absence.

But not simply ‘recreate’. Compensating for the fact that the cuckoo does not ‘repeat’ its song, the poem turns inwards to produce its own ‘song’, a song which, as we saw with the tour de force accented passage from ‘The Woodlark’, diverges from the bird’s own call to explore the poem’s own vocal-verbal medium. What is at issue is not simply re-animating the cuckoo, but rather what I am terming poetry’s ‘work of animation’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Voice in Poetry: Opening up a Concept
• 1 A Natural Scale
• 2 Vibration and Difference
• 3 Turnings of the Breath
• 4 ‘The Multitudinous Tongue’
• 5 Getting the Measure of Voice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index