Ideas about Voice in Poetry

EXPERT studies of sound in poetry tend to take for granted the phenomenon of voice. My purpose here is to set up some thoughts about voice and its imprints in poetry. The physiological side of the matter is not what I have in mind, and rhythmic profilings of voice-sound are so all-important as to require separate treatment. I shall record, without much elaboration, as brief notes, some of the ideas, interrogatory ideas, that have occurred to me while reading poems and listening to voices in them.

1
The imprints of voice in poetry, pervasive and elusive, are fundamental to the whole range of lyric expression. The question is: What is meant by 'voice', and how does a reader or listener read or listen to it? The field is one in which variables matter, and they may matter significantly even within settled types of sound-patterning. We might discriminate, somewhat as follows: Textuality attracts, directs, and structures the literary intelligence of a reader, and sometimes it may transform his whole predisposition. His training, susceptibilities, detective skills, dialectical powers, all come into play when he gathers, in the act of reading, the manifold shimmering entity that is an imaginative text in its context. Vocality, on the other hand, is, in a sense, the very authority, or source of the shimmer, in a lyrical text. When a poem lacks vocality, as it may do with good reason, or otherwise, because the bird is dead, then this lack too merits attention.

I do not think that vocality is a subform of textuality. I do not think, either, that lyric vocality is exhaustible semantically in terms of suppressed 'differential structures', terms being used - and widely abused - today in studies of the nature of textuality. Even outside the lyric field, vocality may be paramount, as the voice of a narrator, the voices of his characters. There are poems, it is true, that race ahead of the consciousness of their epochs; but poetry also tends to carry into its present some rooty old features of pre-literate speech. It erupts - even when the text has been assembled over typographical and syntactical lacunae - erupts into its present, streaming with the ichor of the archaic.

Some voices are irretrievably lost, of course. It might just be possible for phonologists to reconstruct some of those that lie dismantled in the Chinese Book of Songs. The dynastic Chinese voices, too, even when originally bound to given tunes, had characteristics which are still to be identified (e.g., the tender swinging voice of Li Ch'ing-chao, of the Sung Dynasty).

2
The world consists of manifold signals which any individual, any animal or plant likewise, picks up and interprets sensorily. The sound signals in that manifold, or in segments of it, are no less crucial for being frequently and massively nonlinguistic. If I hear footsteps crossing the roof of my house, I do not go and fry an egg, but wonder who or what is up there. A solitary fisherman, offshore from Halicarnassus in 604 B.C., had he attended to the splash and ripple of waves against the hull of his boat, might have thought that
some other being was around him, at large, but within earshot, even if that other being authorised his element, water, to speak through a different phonetic system from that of the fisherman's Carian.

The manifold voices of the ancient cosmos, subhuman or superhuman voices, might also have engendered in the fisherman's inquiring mind the tremendous thought: 'They alone speak truly who, having learned and understood them, utter the voices of the cosmos.' Instead of accommodating that thought, and as they became Western and aggressive in their ways, peoples of the northeastern Mediterranean entrusted their fate to another thought: 'They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos.'

3
Even then, that latter thought - if it can be taken as a 'one-legged' epitome of the mind of antiquity, as Walter Benjamin suggested - blazed a trail from archaic polytheism to the hermetic Magian teachings of the West, out of which 'modern science' was deviantly to develop. That trail, it is evident, was signposted with linguistic (or pictorial) markers, some of which retained the imprint of the other thought, the one that might have been.

From what essential and regulative power acting through the human vocal apparatus does poetry draw that authority with which it seems to subjugate, if only for its fatal moment, the demons of earth? What is this voice that makes the earth, not as territory but as planet, a freely valued possession of whole historic societies, treasured especially by their nonconforming members? If subjugation and possession are vitiated terms here, we might think, instead, in terms of placative wooing and tenancy, as North American Indians did, and as some still do, at least on ceremonial occasions (the Hopi, the Pueblo).

4
Braiding of narrative and lyrical codes: a patterning of sounds woven so subtly - even inconspicuously - that one might think the passage in question is a 'narratised' and lexicalised phonic poem. It is as purely phonic, inside its lexical clothing, as anything by the pre-audiolaboratory innovators Kurt Schwitters (1920s) and Ernst Jandl (1960s). Certainly, even then, its tonal tincture is more cantabile than theirs ever tended to be:

She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
  Sorely she wept until the night came on,
And then, instead of love, O misery!
  She brooded o'er the luxury alone:
His image in the dusk she seem'd to see,
  And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
And on her couch low murmuring 'Where? O where?'
(John Keats, 'Isabella, or The Pot of Basil')

Line after line (except for the fourth) there is an oscillation here, a bending back and forth between o and e, into which 'perfect' blends as a soft resolution of the sharp antecedent 'seem'd to see'. There are also several of the strong vocalic contrasts (lines 5 and 6), which Keats eased out of the pitch resources of English, and which raised the hackles of some of his contemporaries, who found such bold contrast, it can be presumed, to be eruptive, not suave enough for 'poetry'.

The aptness of 'perfect' is due not only to sound. Somehow the sounds of the whole line, with its light alliteration - spreading / perfect, arms / air- enact an opening. 'Perfect' can be read as alluding to the shapeliness of the arms, or, with a pained irony, on a more cryptic level, to their being now done for - having no lover to embrace. An opening is somehow enacted prosodically: the gesture portrayed certainly lends itself to visualisation. But any image thrown before the mind's eye here, even a glimpse, not unthinkable, nor so shadowy, of Isabella moaning as she bends back and forth to the o / e oscillation, is floated by phonic means, and so the reader's response is a manifold one. 'Inner eye' and 'inner ear' are invited to interact. These features stand out, being mounted on the delicate braiding of end-ryhmes in the ottava rima - by this time, at stanza XXX, a reader will be taking the verse-form in his stride.

Yet whose voice is this? It was that of John Keats. Now it is an imaginary voice, a voice that was launched by his, but one that has a life of its own in the contemporary air, while it retains his unmistakeable, distinct imprint. That imaginary and unmistakeable voice is a kind of endophone. I propose this designation as one that distinguishes this kind of voice, with its time-traversing potency, from the exophones or voices with which we speak and to which we listen under ordinary conditions.

5
The term endophone might conceivably be of some use to readers who are attentive to sound-patterns imprinted in poetry. How is the endophone likely to behave? How is it detected?

a. The point about vocality in poetry is that sounds are picked up and assembled in timed stretches by an 'inner ear', and they issue from an 'inner voice', this endophone. (Probably we need to rescue the idea of an 'inner voice' from the coils of religious parlance - which indicates only that religious parlance is habitually in a bad state.) Performance can raise such sound-sequences into profile. Actual vocalising, unless it is vitiated by histrionics, can nourish the inner ear's competence to pick up and assemble sequences. Yet the
inner ear is capable of an auditory complexity which exceeds almost any audible vocalising: the latter tends to be reductive, if not falsifying, also it may straighten out shocks and distortions which, to the inner ear, are part of the real thing that is the voice in the text and the delight of the text.

In performance, which should be the best instance, there occurs the falling away of mental entity from linguistic entity, or vice versa. The rift appears, gunfire and screams.

b. It could be argued that it is the act of silent, or at most murmured, reading - that act alone - which can realise the vocal qualities of a text, the sequences of sounds, the timbres, the tonal colourings. That kind of act, reading from a page or recital from memory, can also dwell on patterns of sound, as they exfoliate and intertwine, so as to arrive at a fullbodied perception of the relations (phonic, semantic, syntagmatic) which are being voiced here and now in the text. Thus the silent or murmuring reader construes the text as a symbolic analogue of the planes upon and through which the poet's endophone did once move.

The subtle differential harmonies of the text as voice, are these picked up by the ear alone? Possibly not. The reader's eyes do part of the listening, do their part in identifying and selecting sound-patterns, in the presence or audition of which a delight is experienced and 'soul takes wing'. (It can take wing, too, in the subtly ordered air given off by grammatical balance in the prosiest poems of Brecht, or of Lawrence.)

This collaboration between ear and eye may also be reinforced by the other senses, if not subliminally regulated by those senses. The spreading of the perfect arms has a tactile aspect, for instance. More, as the patternings of sound in the lines are blent into a narrative sequence which, itself, tells of the sounds being uttered by Isabella, a phonetic-semantic chord is struck which vibrates - or it is diffused like an arpeggio - through a reader's imagination. The reader imaginatively somatises the vocality of the text, for it has aroused in him various other sense-traces, which may be hard to fix. Is it a temperature, a scent, a response of the flesh to the enfolding dusk, through which Isabella spreads her perfect arms?

6
A hypothesis: the activities, even along a brief continuum, of the inner ear depend on a profound and stable rapport between the central nervous system (psyche) and externals, whether the latter are actual, or, via a text, virtual. In one of his most cryptic sayings, Mandelstam indicated how far the poetic word can go against the whole grain of the Saussurian view of language as a system of conventional signs: 'The word is a psyche. The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers, freely, like the soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten.'

The indistinctness of voice, the absence of this pneumatic word, in much poetry being written today, written and attended to, is the mark of a poisoned relationship between psyche and externals. In the old listenings of poets, the psyche (again, central nervous system) could in its own good time enter into communication with particulars no less concrete and critical than the sound of a dog lapping water from a gutter, the flit of an eyelid, rustlings of rag or taffeta, an owl's heartbeat. The furore of street traffic (spatial displacement) and the uncertainty (time-desiccation) of living (only partly and anxiously living) have shut inner ears, thresholds to the psyche and its manifold perceptions, shut them off from secret and unbidden resonances of the present here and now likewise.

As far as the inner ear is concerned, the world has been silenced; and the sound-values of single words or word-groups have been largely marginalised. This silencing is concurrent with a kind of suspicious hyper-reflexivity affecting prose: witness the types of erudite discourse which put one in mind of jottings, complete with the usual flourishes and groundlessness, in the dossiers of an intellectual secret police. If dead souls can be said to have speech, that speech is so mouthed as to have little or no interior auditory value. It is noise, like the noise of American or German voices to be noticed among tougher, soft-spoken people like the Turks, who nurse their fires in secret: glib and piercing voices, they chop the foreign air and do not signify.

Signifying in poetry, to the contrary, occurs as a phonic event. That event may occur, however, on an ultravocal level, and its experiential density, subtlety, and volatility may call upon a reader to exercise a kind of clair-audience.

7
With such terms as endophone and ultravocal I seem to be reaching out toward a revised conception of 'classic restraint'. What was the ancient magic power, the aura, of the sacred word, in pre- and proto-literate societies, if not its rarity and volatility? The power brims, but does not overflow. The reticence commended in classical poetics was, perhaps, an attempt to recuperate that power, which secularism was eroding. Longinus, if he may be invoked in this rough-hewn context of mine, argued that the 'sublime' occurs when all the soul's powers are brought to a harmonious head in the play of lyric utterance. Holderlin rephrased this finely in his last version of 'Griechenland':

                             But he sets
                A limit to the stride unchecked
By measure, then
                   The soul's powers and
                  Affinities draw in tight,
              As golden blossoms do, together,
 So that beauty may dwell on earth
More fondly, and a spirit of some kind
              Makes commoner cause with men.

What a pity that sublime utterance ended up as orotundity and as what plain folks call hog wash.

Reticence matters, in crime as in theology: like God, the arch-criminal wisely refrains from obtruding singly, in overt action, or directly in the public view - otherwise he forfeits power. The prattle of much everyday speech spilling over into poetry has a similar effect. The loosening of restraint, in expressions that are linguistic but voiceless, vocal but without artistic discretion, numbs or kills the nerve of lyric vocality.

- Decomposing fruits of the inescapable 'Fall of language-mind' - to quote Benjamin again: there's no gainsaying that Fall, by which (in Benjamin's phraseology) 'mental' and 'linguistic' entities come apart; does not their being wholly coalescent, as some suppose, rest on an illusion which is also laid upon us by that Fall?

8
The tract I am living on goes with access rights to a small wooden dock five minutes' walk away, built by bricoleurs thirty years ago, and from this dock you can swim in this neck of Lake Austin. At this point it is an old river course. On the far side there is a great limestone cliff stretching in either direction as far as you can see, densely overgrown with oak, elm, and towering water-cypress. You can dispose yourself on the planks of the dock and contemplate the water, the cliff, and the vegetation. Quite soon, if not prepossessed by self-interest, you come to sense an affinity between your body and the landscape. The landscape is hardly landscape any more: it is a space, as closely knit, variable, integral, necessary, muscular, and functional, as your own body is. The water is liminal: there could be something about the motion and weight of the water that qualifies it to act as mediator between body-space and this segment of world-space. Aeons ago, the water carved out that cliff, which, on days when the water hasn't a ripple, looms across at you, mirrored without fault. Your body consists also, in some part, of water. It goes sideways, this water; the cliff goes up as well as sideways, trees too. Your body does similar things. Its concerns are posited by its occupying, in simultaneity, a vertical and a horizontal axis. I'm not saying that oaks have elbows or thoughts, or that rocks are subject to sunburn. The intermetaphoricity of body and space has limits, upon which you alone can decide. Sound-patterns in poems likewise: when Roman Jakobson microanalyses sound in lines by Blake, or Khlebnikov, he is leaving common sense to others who may have some use for it. When the great French archaeologist Capitan was trying to read palaeolithic glyphs out of weathering marks on a rock surface, he was suffering from senile lithomania. No: the intermetaphoricity of body and space, mediated by water, has a real weight, to which measured fantastic play may contribute much, but which eludes perfect measurement, because of the Fall of language-mind away from body, on its unpredictable evolutionary track athwart consciousness or with it.

Yet this manifold which may be intuited, whatever the ego is doing to interfere, alerts imagination to its task, a ludic task. As endophone rather than reductive exophone, voice can perform this task. It is, if I may risk saying so, and by saying so not be taken to mean anything nostalgic or otiose, the task of moving minds, by weaving tissues of linguistic sound, toward a restitution of the lost flesh of God, at least toward a re-membering of his forgotten flesh.

In that now lost, forgotten, or abandoned flesh, the old thinkers- being disinclined, unlike their successors, to drain the colours out of everything - felt the multiplicity of the One. Was it ever palpable? Were they right? Does presence, after all, not not-exist in a world of total inter-reflexivity, but have being, as this or that phenomenon, once the perceiver has been granted the transparency from which reflection has been flushed? Cannot then imagination, which is a power of wondering, activate the whole body of consciousness to play, like an orchestra, as One? In the course of history, any guarantee of such actual presence, actual perfection, was scrapped. Where ananke is sovereign, there are no guarantees. Yet there are poems, which paradigmatically bite on the flesh, lost, forgotten, or our own. For one, Valéry's 'Le cimetière marin'. At the end, vast abstractions epitomising the dramatic thrusts of Ionian thought, with all the consequences, come to rest concretely in the sound-radicles of the last line - 'Ce toit tranquille où picoraient les focs'. Hardly any actual focs forage in the green lake I am poising over, but my dove-sailed reflections pick about its 'roof, and now if I swim I am foraging for an order, for a sense of Change, a way to kick the world awake, as it passes by, snoring in the unthrottled motors, trapped in the pointless revolutions of propellers.

9
The timbre of the voice launched by Alexander Pope can be at times as viscerally thrilling as that of Josephine Baker, in her songs of the Thirties. Her flips from coyness to headstrong and dizzying femininity are a match, any time, for Pope's turns of architectonic wit. The one has a wicked intelligence, the other a spellbinding presence: both had the edge over most performers, for they practised a wizardry that shatters the very folderol such visceral voicings are prone to generate:

                         a voice-net
      shrivels us in its chimeras
                           G. Sobin
'Celebration of the Sound Through'

10
Oral tradition and the pneumatic word:
a. George Borrow's The Romany Rye has been as good as forgotten. Yet it is a narrative museum of all the varieties of English spoken in those areas where Borrow travelled in the 1820s. The sounds of those varieties are articulated as cadence and as syntax, quite apart from vocabulary. What an ear he must have had. The imprints of voices in their speech-cadences and syntax are as audible, as indelible, as any pneumatic phrasing or polyphonic designing in poems by unforgotten poets. What a memory, what powers of endophonic mimicry Borrow must have had, at the tip of tongue and pen, to write everything down, just as if he had invented it.

b. The endophone, as it voices the internality peculiar to lyric speech, is likely to generate 'deep' sound-structures. These may be immediately detectible, or they may lurk so far below the 'surface' as to be audible only in a theoretical way. (A sage in music will detect scarce-performable instrumental values in a score.) Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' might be read as a five-part orchestration of the vowels of English, accenting each in the following sequence, while breathing patterns of others around them: i/e/u/o/a (corresponding to the five strophes).

This hypothesis will be meaningless to many, unprovable to the rest. It is a hunch, however, which can have some heuristic value, clarifying the celebrated crux of the last few lines. What I perceive as a vowel-orchestration alerts me to the hidden foundation of the whole Ode, perhaps the foundation running under all the Odes that Keats wrote in 1819. That foundation could be described as an état d'âme of perceptive wonder at the profound fluidity of experience, and about the liminal character of objects in experience, their suspension across life and death being one limit to such a psychic perception.

The arresting of vowel-flow by means of orchestral thickenings - or groupings - corresponds as a phonic event to the dialectical interplay of then and now, there and here, action and portrayal, pursuit and capture, which is the vibrant fabric of the Ode's language as an aesthetics of eternity. Keats sublimated this aesthetic from the roots of the English sounds, or he radicalised it, down into those roots, as if it had always been there, latent in those roots, waiting for this voice to raise it up. The riddle posed by the end - Who speaks? The poet or the urn? - might be answered with 'Both; but constraints of grammar and punctuation required the duet to sound like a solo.'

This answer is a legitimate guess, prompted by reading the putative deep phonic structure as an analogue to Keats' vision of a great undulance traversing all things, here momentarily crystallised in an image of presence, an inexhaustible image of fleeting presence.

This coherent vision of liminality is the Ode's orchestral voicing of a wonder, in a breath of time, that subject and object, reader and text, object and portrayal, such a richly figured 'thing' and such a profoundly responsive imagination, can blend into one another and still be, through all similarity, separable. In that separability dwells the distancing and paradoxical movement of a freedom. The wonder, with this freedom, here, as its authority, is a primal mode of lyric imagination, lyric sensibility. It is the mode through which, mediated by the endophone, the essential and regulative 'power', mentioned earlier, arrives in the world as a formative agent, benign, fructifying - as language.

Without the elasticity of that freedom, which actualises self for engagement in the historical world, for the contest with ananke, for the struggle against indistinctness in that world, wonder is prone to play havoc with everything. It will play havoc until something turns it back on itself; lacking any freedom to apply itself otherwise, it is turned back on itself, to meet its own awful interior medusa - voiceless void.

REFERENCES

Voice of a narrator (section 1): this is not only to be heard as we hear it in, say, Emily Brontë, Henry James, E.M. Forster, L.F. Céline, or Thomas Mann. There is an oral narrative about a Trickster, among the Panamanian Kuna people, in which slight coughs punctuate the telling; these coughs are markers - of suspense, emphasis, and tempo (Joel Sherzer, Kuna Ways of Speaking. Austin, University of Texas Press 1983).

Walter Benjamin, Reflections. New York, Harcourt Brace 1978, p. 92 and p. 327.

Osip Mandelstam, from 'The Word and Culture' (1921), in Selected Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press 1977, p. 52. (Translated by Sidney Monas.)

Roman Jakobson, 'On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-Painters,' Linguistic Inquiry, 1, 1, 1970.

Gustav Sobin, Celebration of the Sound Through. New York, Montemora Foundation 1982, p. 21 (unnumbered).

Leo Spitzer, 'The "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or Content vs. Metagrammar,' in his Essays on English and American Literature. Princeton University Press 1962.

Hölderlin: for the passage quoted from 'Griechenland,' see Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and Eduard Mörike, ed. Christopher Middleton, University of Chicago Press 1972, p. 121.