Part 7 (2/2)
Originally, no doubt, every word had an emotional coloring, if only that of a child's curiosity; and some words have meanings too deeply rooted in feeling ever to lose it. No amount of familiarity can deprive such words as ”death” and ”love” and ”G.o.d” of their emotional value.
Words like these must forever recur in the vocabulary of poets. Yet, since in living discourse a meaning is seldom complete in a single word, but requires several words in a phrase or sentence, a word which by itself would be cold may partic.i.p.ate in the general warmth of the whole of which it is a part. Consider, for example, the last line of the final stanza of Wordsworth's ”The Lost Love”:--
She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and O!
The difference to me!
The first three words, by themselves, are completely bare of emotional coloring, yet, taken together with the last, and in connection with the whole stanza, and in the setting of the entire poem, they are aglow with the most poignant pa.s.sion.
As for the image, the last of the aspects of a word, the judgment of Edmund Burke, in his ”Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful” still remains true: in reading words or in listening to them, we get the sound and the meaning and their ”impressions” (emotions), but the images which float across the mind, if there are any, are often too vague or too inconstant to be of much relevance to the experience. They are, moreover, highly individual in nature, differing in kind and clearness from person to person. The recent researches into imageless thinking are a striking confirmation of Burke's observation. It is now pretty clearly established that the meaning of words is something more than the images, visual or other, which they arouse. Probably the meaning is always carried by some sort of imagery, differing with the mental make-up of the reader, but the meaning cannot be equated to the imagery.
For example, you and I both understand the word ”ocean”; but when I read the word, I get a visual image of green water and sunlight, while you perhaps get an auditory image of the sound of the waves as they break upon the sh.o.r.e. Sound, meaning, feeling, these are the essential const.i.tuents of discourse; imagery is variable and accidental. It is impossible, therefore, to found the theory of poetry on the image-making power of words. [Footnote: For the opposite view, consult Max Eastman: _The Enjoyment of Poetry._] And yet, imagery plays a primary role in poetic speech. For, as we have observed so often, feelings are more vital and permanent when embedded in concrete sensations and images than when attached to abstract meanings. Through the image, the poet confers upon his art some of the sensuousness which it would otherwise lack. It is not necessary that the image appear clear in the mind; for its emotional value can be conveyed even when it is obscure and marginal. When, for example, we read,
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot,
the word ”bitter” may arouse no vivid gustatory image, the word ”bite”
no clear image of pain; yet even when these images are very dim, they serve none the less to establish the feeling of intense disagreeableness which the poet wishes to convey. Poetry, therefore, because it is more emotional than ordinary speech, is more abundantly imaginal.
Having distinguished in a general way the four elements of speech--sound, meaning, feeling, and imagery--we are prepared to study them singly in greater detail. We want to build out of a study of these elements a synthetic view of the nature and function of poetry, and apply our results to some of its newer and more clamant forms. Let us begin with sound. In our first chapter we observed that the medium of an art tends to become expressive in itself,--that in poetry the mere sound and articulation of words, quite apart from anything which they mean, may arouse and communicate feelings. What we have called the primary expressiveness of the medium is nowhere better ill.u.s.trated than in poetry. But just what is expressed through sound, and how?
Every lover of poetry is aware of the large share which the mere sound of the words contributes to its beauty. This is true even when we abstract from rhythm, which we shall neglect for the time being, and think only of euphony, alliteration, a.s.sonance, and rime. There is a joy truly surprising in the mere repet.i.tion of vowels and consonants.
For myself, I find a pleasure in the mere repet.i.tion of vowels and consonants all out of proportion to what, a priori, I should be led to expect from so slight a cause. And yet we have the familiar a.n.a.logies by means of which we can understand this seemingly so strange delight, the repeat in a pattern, consonance in chord and melody. If the repet.i.tion of the same color or line in painting, the same tone in music, can delight us, why not the repet.i.tion of the same word-sound?
In all cases a like feeling of harmony is produced. And the same general principle applies to explain it. All word-sounds as we utter or hear them leave memory traces in the mind, which are not pure images (no memory traces are), but also motor sets, tendencies or impulses to the remaking of the sounds. The doing of any deed--a word is also a deed--creates a will to its doing again; hence the satisfaction when that will is fulfilled in the repeated sound, when the image melts with the fact. And the same law that rules in music and design holds here also: there must not be too much of consonance, of repet.i.tion, else the will becomes satiated and fatigued; there must be difference as well as ident.i.ty,--the novelty and surprise which accompany the arousal of a still fresh and unappeased impulse. This is well provided for in alternate rimes, where the will to one kind of sound is suspended by the emergence of a different sound with its will, and where the fulfillment of the one balances the fulfillment of the other. All these facts are ill.u.s.trated in such a stanza as this:--
Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust.
Here, for example, the ”f”-sound in ”fear” finds harmonious fulfillment in ”furious”; the ”t”-sound in ”task,” its mate in ”ta'en”; the ”g”-sound in ”golden,” its match in ”girls”; ”sun” and ”done,” ”rages”
and ”wages,” ill.u.s.trate a balance of harmonies; while in the consonance of ”must” and ”dust,” the whole movement of the stanza comes to full and finished harmony.
Thus taken together, word-sounds, as mere sounds, are expressive of the general form-feelings of harmony and balance. But can they express anything singly? Is there anything in poetry comparable to the expressiveness of single tones or of colors like red and blue and yellow? To this, I think, the answer must be, little or nothing. Almost all the expressiveness of single words comes from their meaning. At all events, the sound and meaning of a word are so inextricably fused that, even when we suspect that it may have some expressiveness on its own account, we are nearly incapable of disentangling it. As William James has remarked, a word-sound, when taken by itself apart from its meaning, gives an impression of mere queerness. And when it does seem to have some distinctive quality, we do not know how much really belongs to the sound and how much to some lingering bit of meaning which we have failed to separate in our a.n.a.lysis. For example, because of its initial ”s”-sound and its hard consonants, the word ”struggle” seems to express, in the effort required to p.r.o.nounce it, something of the emotional tone of struggle itself; but how do we know that this is not due to the a.s.sociation with its meaning, which we have been unable to abstract from? Even true onomatopoetic words like ”bang” or ”crack”
derive, I suspect, most of their specific quality from their meaning.
They do have, to be sure, a certain mimetic impressiveness as mere sounds; but that is very vague; the meaning makes it specific. The sheer length of the word ”mult.i.tudinous” in Shakespeare's line, ”the mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine,” seems to express something of the vastness and prolixity of the seas; but would it if it were not used as an adjective describing the seas, and if it did not have just the meaning that it has? Of course, in this case, the mere sound is effective, but it gets most of its effectiveness because it happens to have a certain meaning. Moreover, even the very sound quality of words depends much upon their meaning; we p.r.o.nounce them in a certain way, with a certain slowness or swiftness, a certain emphasis upon particular syllables, with a high or low intonation, in accordance with the emotion which we feel into them. This is true of the word ”struggle” just cited. Or consider another example. Take the word ”blow.” Who, in reading this word in ”Blow, blow, thou winter wind,”
would not increase its explosiveness just in order to make its expressiveness correspond to its meaning?
There is, therefore, a fundamental difference in this respect between single word-sounds and single colors or tones; they are not sufficiently impressive in themselves, not sufficiently separable from their meanings, to have anything except the slightest value as mere sounds.
In collocation, however, and quite apart from rhythm and alliteration, this minute expressiveness may add up to a considerable amount. In Matthew Arnold's lines,
Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies crash by night,
the hardness and difficulty of the consonants in their c.u.mulative force become an independent element of expressiveness, strengthening that of the meaning of the words. Or in Tennyson's oft-quoted line, ”the murmuring of innumerable bees,” the sounds taken together have a genuine imitative effect, in which something of the drowsy feeling of the hive is present.
Following the general law of harmony between form and content, the beauty of sound should be functional; that is, it should never be developed for its own sake alone, but also to intensify, through re-expression, the mood of the thoughts. The sound-values are too lacking in independence to be purely ornamental. Poetry does indeed permit of embellishment--the pleasurable elaboration of sensation--yet should never degenerate into a mere tintinnabulation of sounds. The rimes in binding words should bind thoughts also; the tonalities or contrasts of vowel and consonant should echo harmonies or strains in pervasive moods.
It is by rhythm, however, that the chief expressiveness of the mere medium is imparted to verse. But here again we shall find sound and meaning intertwined--a rhythm in thought governing a rhythm in sound.
Only as a result of recent investigations can a satisfactory theory of modern verse be constructed. The making of this theory has been largely hampered, on the one hand, by the application of the quant.i.tative principles of cla.s.sical verse to our poetry; and, on the other hand, by forcing the a.n.a.logy between music and verse. The insufficiency of the quant.i.tative scheme for English verse is not difficult to perceive. Such a scheme presupposes that syllables have a fixed quant.i.ty of duration, as either long or short, and that rhythm consists in the regularity of their distribution. But, although there are differences in the duration of syllables, some being longer than others, there are no fixed rules to determine whether a syllable is short or long; and, what is a more serious objection, it is impossible to find any regularity in the occurrence of shorts and longs in normal English verse,--in all verse that has not been written with the explicit purpose of imitating the Greek or Latin. An examination of any line of verse will verify these statements. Take, for example, the first three lines of Shakespeare's song,
Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingrat.i.tude.
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