A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

6. Specific Tone-Color

It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of that word, there is undeniably such a thing as “tone-color.” A piano and a violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of “bright” and “dark” vowels, smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman: [Footnote: “The Symbolic Value of Sounds,” in Hamlet and Other Essays, by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]

“Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:

[short i] (little) [long i] (I) [short oo] (wood)

[short e] (met) [long u] (due) [long ow] (cow)

[short a] (mat) [short ah] (what) [long o] (gold)

[long e] (mete) [long ah] (father) [long oo] (gloom)

[ai] (fair) [oi] (boil) [aw] (awe)

[long a] (mate) [short u] (but)

“The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to

express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid

movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds

at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe,

deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive

greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the

large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror,

and from the trivial to the solemn and awful.”

Robert Louis Stevenson in his Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying “tone-qualities.” Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind experiences. Lines like Tennyson’s famous

“The moan of doves in immemorial elms

And murmuring of innumerable bees”

thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable individuals, and it is to this fact that the “transmission value” of the lines is due.

Imitative effects are easily recognized, and need no comment:

“Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings”

“The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm”

“The wind that’ll wail like a child

and the sea that’ll moan like a man.”

Suggestive effects are more subtle. Sometimes they are due primarily to those rhythmical arrangements of words which we shall discuss in the next chapter, but poetry often employs the sound of single words to awaken dim or bright associations. Robert Bridges’s catalogue of the Greek nymphs in “Eros and Psyche” is an extreme example of risking the total effect of a stanza upon the mere beautiful sounds of proper names.

“Swift to her wish came swimming on the waves

His lovely ocean nymphs, her guides to be,

The Nereids all, who live among the caves

And valleys of the deep, Cymodoc�,

Agav�, blue-eyed Hallia and Nesaea,

Speio, and Tho�, Glauc� and Actaea,

Iaira, Melit� and Amphinom�,

Apseud�s and Nemert�s, Callianassa,

Cymotho�, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,

Clymen�, Ianeira and Ianassa,

Doris and Panop� and Galatea,

Dynamen�, Dexamen� and Maira,

Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,

Amphitho�, Oreithuia and Amathea.”

Names of objects like “bobolink” and “raven” may affect us emotionally by the quality of their tone. Through association with the sounds of the human voice, heard under stress of various emotions, we attribute joyous or foreboding qualities to the bird’s tone, and then transfer these associations to the bare name of the bird.

Names of places are notoriously rich in their evocation of emotion.

“He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,

And died in Padua.”

Here the fact of illness and death may be prosaic enough, but the very names of “Venice” and “Padua” are poetry—like “Rome,” “Ireland,” “Arabia,” “California.”

“Where the great Vision of the guarded mount

Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold.”

Who knows precisely where that “guarded mount” is upon the map? And who cares? “The sailor’s heart,” confesses Lincoln Colcord, [Footnote: The New Republic, September 16, 1916.] “refutes the prose of knowledge, and still believes in delectable and sounding names. He dreams of capes and islands whose appellations are music and a song…. The first big land sighted on the outward passage is Java Head; beside it stands Cape Sangian Sira, with its name like a battle-cry. We are in the Straits of Sunda: name charged with the heady languor of the Orient, bringing to mind pictures of palm-fringed shores and native villages, of the dark-skinned men of Java clad in bright sarongs, clamoring from their black-painted dugouts, selling fruit and brilliant birds. These waters are rich in names that stir the blood, like Krakatoa, Gunong Delam, or Lambuan; or finer, more sounding than all the rest, Telok Betong and Rajah Bassa, a town and a mountain—Telok Betong at the head of Lampong Bay and Rajah Bassa, grand old bulwark on the Sumatra shore, the cradle of fierce and sudden squalls.”

It may be urged, of course, that in lines of true poetry the sense carries the sound with it, and that nothing is gained by trying to analyse the sounds apart from the sense. Professor C. M. Lewis [Footnote: Principles of English Verse. New York, 1906.] asserts bluntly: “When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified; but whether the words are ‘a team of little atomies’ or ‘a triumphant terrible Titan,’ it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the significance. When Tennyson speaks of the shrill-edged shriek of a mother, his words suggest with peculiar vividness the idea of a shriek; but when you speak of stars that shyly shimmer, the same sounds only intensify the idea of shy shimmering.” This is refreshing, and yet it is to be noted that “Titan” and “tittle” and “shrill-edged shriek” and “shyly shimmer” are by no means identical in sound: they have merely certain consonants in common. A fairer test of tone-color may be found if we turn to frank nonsense-verse, where the formal elements of poetry surely exist without any control of meaning or “sense”:

“The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

“‘T was brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.”

“It seems rather pretty,” commented the wise Alice, “but it’s rather

hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only

I don’t exactly know what they are!”

This is precisely what one feels when one listens to a poem recited in a language of which one happens to be ignorant. The wonderful colored words are there, and they seem somehow to fill our heads with ideas, only we do not know what they are. Many readers who know a little Italian or German will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the predominant mood—as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which we are wholly ignorant—we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas. For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of emotional association due to the sound alone. Garrick ridiculed—and doubtless at the same time envied—George Whitefield’s power to make women weep by the rich overtones with which he pronounced “that blessed word Mesopotamia.”

The capacities and the limitations of tone-quality in itself may be seen no less clearly in parodies. Swinburne, a master technician in words and rhythm, occasionally delighted, as in “Nephelidia,” [Footnote: Quoted in Carolyn Wells, A Parody Anthology. New York, 1904.] to make fun of himself as well as of his poetic contemporaries:

“Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft

to the spirit and soul of our senses

Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that

sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;

Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical

moods and triangular tenses,—

‘Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is

dark till the dawn of the day when we die.’”

Or, take Calverley’s parody of Robert Browning:

“You see this pebble-stone? It’s a thing I bought

Of a bit of a chit of a boy i’ the mid o’ the day.

I like to dock the smaller parts o’ speech,

As we curtail the already curtail’d cur—”

The characteristic tone-quality of the vocabulary of each of these poets—whether it be

“A soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses”

or

“A bit of a chit of a boy i’ the mid o’ the day”—

is as perfectly conveyed by the parodist as if the lines had been written in dead earnest. Poe’s “Ulalume” is a masterly display of tone-color technique, but exactly what it means, or whether it means anything at all, is a matter upon which critics have never been able to agree. It is certain, however, that a poet’s words possess a kind of physical suggestiveness, more or less closely related to their mental significance. In nonsense-verse and parodies we have a glimpse, as it were, at the body of poetry stripped of its soul.

7. “Figures of Speech”

To understand why poets habitually use figurative language, we must recall what has been said in Chapter III about verbal images. Under the heat and pressure of emotion, things alter their shape and size and quality, ideas are transformed into concrete images, diction becomes impassioned, plain speech tends to become metaphorical. The language of any excited person,