Speech is not random noise. It is
organized sound; it is, more specifically, a culturally tempered
system of regularly recurrent and structured sounds. It has its
equally tempered tones and intonations, its rhythm and melody, and
these, in their turn, have their social function and cultural
significance. These supra-segmental features of speech are as much
integral to it as are its segmental sounds, and no less systematic in
their make-up. Poetry organizes the sound and their above mentioned
attributes afresh into a pattern of higher order in which the graded
structures of the first order register at every level an overall
heightening of significance. In order words, the sounds of speech are
heightened in their musical expressiveness, the tones and intonations
are tempered into a new poetic scale, the rhythm and melody are
intensified and built into a new complex. Poetry can achieve all this
simply because its whole being is charged with a tension between its
rootedness in speech and its instinctive urge towards music. This
tension is active in every element of a given speech, and we can
heighten the significance of these elements and enhance their value
in proportion to our knowledge of their nature and function. It is
not possible to add any sound, tone or intonation to the given
repertory of them. All that one can hope to do is to finger them into
a new pattern or lilt them into new chords. The less schematic, and
more richly nuanced the pattern, the more charge it will carry,
semantic as well as musical.
Speech is an event in time, it is
essentially movement. Written speech renders this movement visually
through graphic symbols arranged in a sequence. Succession of words
in space is the closest approximation to the essentially temporal
relation between words in utterances. Even a single word, an instance
of speech, shows the same structure; only it is a succession of
phonemes rather than morphemes. Moreover, the temporal sequence or
succession constituting utterances, whether phonemic, morphemic, or
phrasal, is not haphazard; it has its grammar, its set of governing
rules. We should like to maintain that the movement of speech is
controlled and regulated by the same set of rules as govern the
movement in a piece of music. The only difference between the two is
that the operation of these rules in speech is rather free and not
quite so conscious and regular as in music. Also, these rules operate
with musical sounds in music, but with speech sounds in speech.
However, poetry comes nearer music in making these operations more
conscious, regular and purposive. The music or poetry has the same
constituent elements as the ‘music’ of music itself, i.e. ,
rhythm, melody and timbre.
The definition of rhythm in poetry
and music as given by Sidney Lanier in his book The Science of
Verse is: “When the ear exactly co-ordinates series of sounds
and silence with primary reference to their duration, the result is a
conception of RHYTHM”. The point worth stressing is that rhythm is
essentially temporal and is based upon that physical feature of sound
we call duration. It needs stressing because academically respectable
authorities on the subject deny it and make accent, that is to say,
intensity or articulate energy, the basis of rhythm in poetry.
Without going into the genesis of this misunderstanding and with due
regard to the importance of the role of accent in rhythm, we maintain
that it does not generate rhythm. Owing to its regular, isochronic
recurrence, it simply registers, as accurately as is possible in such
cases, the changes in intensity at the relevant points in rhythm.
Accents are ictus metricus, so to speak, responsible for
reinforcing the primary rhythm. They signalise the change in
intensity or articulate energy, demarcate the boundaries of the
rhythmic beats, and group them into bars and measures. While we are
at it, it would not be mere padding if we quote I.A. Richards’s
opinion on the subject and take note of his positive stand. He
considers metre “a more complex and more specialized form of
temporal rhythmic sequence”, but assets that “temporal sequence
is not strictly necessary for rhythm though in the vast majority of
cases it is involved.” It is obvious that Richards, too, considers
temporal sequence to be necessary for rhythm but his ‘not strictly
necessary', the phrase that qualifies his assertion, is prompted by
his anxiety to build a theory of rhythm comprehensive enough to
include rhythm in architecture, painting, and other plastic arts in
which rhythmic elements may not be successive but simultaneous.
Moreover, his analysis of rhythm as a texture of expectations,
satisfactions, disappointments surprisals is too psychological and
intuitive for our frankly physical analysis. Richards’s general,
very general aims are at the root of this hesitant and a little
misleading pronouncement on the temporal basis of rhythm in poetry.
Lanier’s definition of rhythm
categorically states that the ear must co-ordinate series of silence
as exactly as series of sounds with reference to their duration for
rhythm to arise from the arrangement of words in verse-lines. The
emphasis should be laid on the function of necessary, almost
inevitable, silence in the interstices of syllables, words, and bars.
It is as integral to the structure of verse lines as the sounds
themselves. Negatively, it has nothing to do with the silence about
which Eliot grows so philosophically lyrical in one of his gloomy,
metaphysical outpourings:
Words move, music moves
only in time; but that which is
only living
can only die. Words, after speech,
reach into
the silence…
We appreciate his awareness of the
similarity underlying the movement in poetry and in music, but we
should like to distinguish the silence into which the words, after
speech, reach from the silence without which the words, through
sounds alone, cannot create rhythm. Eliot’s silence is the eternal
sink of speech. It is the inevitable end of all speech. This suggests
to us that in the beginning was only silence, but man by his infinite
labour carved the word out of it, and thus made it eloquent. It is
this eloquent silence that we are stressing together with the sounds,
whereas Eliot is primarily preoccupied with the stillness of silence,
which precedes or follows and utterance. In his critical evaluation
of the voice of Milton, Francis Berry rightly emphasizes the acoustic
as well as semantic value of the pauses of silences, and observes:
“Now the pauses, those medial, or terminal, creative silences…
are an acoustical necessity granting the special kind of voice
assumed, and required, by the poetry with its “sense variously
drawn out from one verse into another. A pause or suspension at the
end of each line is acoustically required for a sufficient
absorption. – or dying away – of the resonance generated. Without
such a pause, the opening sounds of the following line or half-line
would be ‘drowned’ or blurred. But what is required by acoustics
is also required semantically. During the silence the listeners are
left to ponder the associations roused or speculate their own
continuation of a sense which has been suspended.” He then
illustrates the function of the Miltonic pause of “cliffhanger”
thus:
- At last //
- Far/in th’ Horizon // to the North / appear’d//
- From skirt to skirt / a fierie Region, // stretcht
- In battalions aspect …
Berry’s comments on the lines:
“After (1) ‘at last’ (the vowel of ‘last’ is very long,
almost disyllabic, beginning deep-pitched it rises slightly in scale
to terminate in the forward sibilant [s], and following plosive [t],
there is a pause//. During that pause the resonance generated by the
[a] diminishes and dies away. (The longer, the more forcefully it is
sounded, the lower its tonic pitch, the greater the resonance
generated and the longer the pause needed for its absorption.) But
during that pause, while the resonance dies away, each member of the
audience – and this applies to each reader if he is hearing
Milton’s voice and not simply perusing the lines with his eyes –
is creating for himself his own object of expectancy…”
The nature of the terminal, creative
pauses or silences has been thoroughly explored by linguists, and it
is now generally held that English language has three clause
terminals. What we call pause is designed as ‘clause terminal’ by
the discipline of modern linguistics. These clause terminals are of
three kinds:
FADING: a rapid trailing away
of the voice into silence. Both the pitch and volume decrease rapidly
.
RISING: a sudden, rapid, but
short rise in the pitch. The volume, does not trail off so noticeably
but seems to be comparatively sharply cut off.
SUSTAINED: a sustention of
the pitch accompanied by prolongation of the last syllable of the
clause and some diminishing of volume.
These terminal pauses may be
illustrated in given order with the help of the following extracts:
Fading terminal pause
after ‘loss’ :
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss
;
Rising terminal pause
after ‘behind’:
The trumpet of a prophecy : O wind
;
If winter comes, can spring be far
behind?
Sustained terminal pause
after ‘thee’:
There be none of Beauty’s
daughters
With a magic like thee”
Similarly the medial creative pause
can be shown to be functional in rhythmic structure of a verse line
as integral to the living melodic lines of verses. After this brief
statement of the general bases of rhythm in poetry we propose to do
some illustrating and specifying. Read the following lines:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales
and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the
breeze.
Each line consists of eight
syllables, and takes nearly four seconds to utter or articulate them
all at an average speed consistent with clear vocal articulation and
equally clear aural perception. The increase in the intensity is
marked at every second syllable, and is accompanied by a concomitant
rise in the pitch. Thus the lines are grouped into four bars of equal
duration, that is, a second each. There is obviously a simple and
exact relation between any two syllables, or any two bars, and among
all the eight syllables and all the four bars in the line. They are
simple because they can be expressed in whole numbers; they are
exact; the change in the speed cannot alter the proportion obtaining
between them. In these lines the proportion between time and syllable
may be stated as 1:2, i. e., two syllables every second. It is this
simple and exact temporal relation which produces in us the sense of
primary rhythm. The introduction of accent, and the consequent
grouping of beats gives rise to another rhythmic flow, which is in
intimate contact with the primary rhythm, but has certain individual
features not perceptible in the primary rhythm. The active, vital
presence of regularly recurrent changes is one such feature. All
these six lines are extremely regular, but is not allowed to get
tiresome and tedious; it is enlivened with a few artistic variations
in the secondary rhythm, as in ‘Fluttering and dancing in the
breeze’. The first bar is in duple falling rhythm (i.e., trochaic)
which is different from the established norm of the duple rising.
Another instance of variation is present in ‘a host, of golden
daffodils’ and this variation indicated by the use of comma is
realized by a truly artistic sliding of phrasal, medial pause a bar
earlier. The normal phrasal pause is attested to very neatly in
‘Beside the lake, beneath the trees’ where the presence of comma
at the end of the second bar is as striking as the existence of
caesura in a heroic couplet. The metre of these lines may be
described in terms of the traditional prosody as iambic tetrameter
with variations.
Wordsworth’s lines are simple and
graceful examples of regular poetry. Perhaps, this regularity is
demanded by the mood and the theme of the poem; maybe the intentions
informing and energizing these lines require the regularity. But
there is another kind of poetry on which Ezra Pound cites the opinion
of a musician. “The leader of orchestra said to me, ‘There is
more for a musician in a few lines with something rough or uneven
such as Byron’s
There be none of Beauty’s
daughters
With a magic like thee
than in whole pages of poetry.”
These are the opening lines of Byron’s Poem appropriately called
“Stanzas for Music’, and here are some lines following them:
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me;
When, as if its sound were causing
The charmed ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull’d winds seem
dreaming.
The poem consists of two stanzas of
eight verses each; and these eight lines are further divided into two
groups of four verses each. But what is rough or uneven about them?
First, the lines do not consist of
equal number of syllables; the first four lines are divided into two
alternating sets of eight and six syllables, rhyming alternately; of
the next four lines, the two at the beginning preserve the syllabic
structure of the preceding lines, but the last two vary it by showing
only seven syllables. Moreover, these lines exhibit two different
rhyme schemes. This, then, is the unevenness Pound’s
musician-informant noted with satisfaction: diverse, varied syllabic
structure of the verse lines occupying different time periods, and
equally varied rhyme schemes displaying a pleasant interplay of
tone-colours. We notice similar unevenness in the arrangement of
time-beats: duple rising beside triple rising, followed by a pure
triple rising, alternating with a verse line tense with varied
rhythmic pulsations. No two successive lines show the same syllabic
structure, and even when it is so, they do not possess the same
rhythmic structure and the same accentual groupings. The following
two lines may be cited as an example:
The waves lie still and gleaming
And the lull’d winds seem
dreaming;
The rhythm of the first line may be
considered to be duple rising consisting of three bars with – ‘ing’
left out: the line is hypermetrical. But the second line opens with a
triple rising followed by a duple rising, and then it closes with a
duple falling. In other words, the poet deliberately counterpoints
syntactical articulation with the metrical articulation, plays off
silence against sound, falling against rising, so that the total
rhythm of the poem is alive with the contrasting interplay of varied
movements. It is the rhythmic ambiguities of this poem which are so
inviting and delightful to a musician.
Now that the basis of the rhythm in
poetry has been laid bare, and some illustrating and specifying have
been done, we propose to inquire into the basis of melody in poetry.
No word seems to be as widely misunderstood and misused as melody or
melodious. No concept seems to be as grossly neglected in the field
of literary criticism as that of melody in poetry. It is quite
depressing to see unintelligent practice of literary criticism debase
its currency, and change it into a mere label of vaguely pleasing
sense of approbation. It is really deplorable when we come to know
that this word possesses a precise significance and a well defined
field of application in the science of linguistics and musicology. We
feel that the use of this word should be made as precise as in music
or linguistics, that is to say, it would not be allowed to lead two
different lives in two such intimately related disciplines as poetry
and music. The literary critic will gain much from disciplining the
use of the word in a securely delimited and defined field of its
validity. In this context I. A. Richards’s view of the problem
should be given serious attention and sincere efforts should be made
to remedy the situation. He writes: “A more serious omission is the
neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of
syllables. The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and
subdued form of singing. There is no question of definite pitches at
which the syllables must be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic
relations between different sounds. But that a rise and fall of pitch
is involved in metre and is as much part of the poet’s technique as
any other feature of verse, as much under his control also, is
indisputable.” This is a very precise and forward-looking
statement of the case; it does not need any commentary. It simply
demands that this serious omission, this gross neglect of the pitch
relations of syllables should be replaced in literary criticism by an
understanding of its significance and its indispensability.
Rhythm and melody are intimately
related. Rhythm without melody is possible, indeed, all the simple
rhythmic forms like the oscillation of a pendulum etc. are without
melody. But melody without rhythm is unthinkable. We have seen that
the basis of rhythm in poetry is the duration of sounds and silence
in time. We should now know that the basis of melody in poetry is the
pitch value of vowels, consonants, syllables and words. In music,
melody consists of tones, differing in pitch; struck successively in
poetry, it lies in the sequential arrangement of syllables or words
uttered at different pitches. The pitch value of every note is fixed
in music, and, therefore, the relations between different notes is
mathematically determinable. But the pitch value of vowels or
consonants, or syllables and words, are not fixed; they can be
uttered at any pitch for any length of time. But it does never mean
that there is complete absence of order and degree of pitch among the
vowels of any language. Every language has its own scale of vowels,
that is to say, vowels are graded along a scale with reference to
their pitch value. Generally, the high front or back vowels are
higher in pitch than the mid or low vowels, both front and back. The
inherent pitch of [i] in ‘hit’ is higher (and shorter) than the
inherent pitch of [a] in ‘father’. The tonic pitch of every vowel
has maximal as well as minimal limits, but within these limits, they
are far more supple and variable than the pitch of the musical notes.
In fact, melodies, distinctly formulated patterns of tones varying in
pitch, exist not only in poetry and music, but in all kinds of human
communication by means of words. Rather dogmatically Lanier asserts
that “every affirmation, every question, has its own peculiar tune;
and such tunes are not mere accidents but are absolutely essential
elements in fixing the precise signification of words and phrases.”
Every shade of emotion may not have its tune, at any rate, may not be
easily detectable and workable by all the members of a linguistic
community. But the general import of his statement is worth exploring
and elaborating. Every language has its peculiar scheme of intonation
patterns or melodic lines appropriately correlated with meanings and
intentions, emotions and feelings and such other metalingustic
entities. In English, the constituent elements are the four pitches
and the three clause terminals of final pauses mentioned above. The
four pitches are numbered / 1 2 3 4 / and may be roughly outlined as
follows:
4
|
||||||||||
Extra High
|
||||||||||
3
|
||||||||||
High
|
||||||||||
Mid
|
||||||||||
2
|
||||||||||
Low
|
||||||||||
1
|
The commonest intonation patterns,
that is, the permitted combinations of pitches and clause terminals,
for every day linguistic communication are limited in number. And
although a creative poet does, to a large extent, succeed in
overcoming these limitations, and turn them to good account, his
ultimate frame of reference may not shift and change, but remain
unalterable. The intensity of his creative power will be judged and
evaluated by the measure of expressiveness he achieves within these
limits, by the degree of freedom he exhibits in felicitous,
surprising juxtapositions of contrasting melodies, and above all, by
the pervasive melodic tension which thrills the whole being of the
poem, and which results from the opposite and contrasting pulls and
pressures between the norm and the actual durations.
References
- The Science of Verse - S. Lanier
- The Principles of Literary Criticism - I.A. Richards
- Poetry and the Physical Voice - F. Berry
- Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
- Literary Essays - Ezra Pound
- “Paradise Lost”, ‘Ode on Nativity” – Milton
- “Stanzas for Music” – Byron
- “Ode to the West Wind” – Shelly
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