On the Sounds of Poetic Language

"O zvukakh stikhotvornogo yazyka." Soborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka [Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language], vol.1 (St. Petersburg, 1916), pp. 6-30.

The manifestations of language must be classified according to our goals in employing the verbal means at our disposal in a given situation. If we employ these means solely for the practical purpose of communication, then we are dealing with the system of practical language (practical verbal thinking), where the linguistic means (sounds, morphological elements, etc.) don't possess independent value. But there are other language systems where practical considerations take a back seat, without completely disappearing, and words and meanings themselves acquire independent value.

Contemporary linguistics focuses almost exclusively on practical language. The study of other language systems, however, is equally relevant. In this essay, I elaborate some of the psycho-phonetic features of the language system at work in the process of poetic creation. I conditionally call this system poetic language (poetic verbal thinking).

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In practical verbal thinking, we don't focus on the sounds of words; we don't consciously pay attention to them, they don't possess independent value, merely serving communication. It is precisely this lack of conscious attention to sounds in practical language that explains why many slips of the tongue go unnoticed, and why we can easily get away with sloppy articulation, slurring endings or entire syllables — something students of acting in particular have to grapple with.

There is yet another, more complex aspect to the phonetics of practical language, which Jan Baudouin de Courtenay calls the non-coincidence of our articulatory intent and its actual execution: it consists in our failure to articulate what we actually set out to articulate — as when, due to physiological conditions affecting our speech organs, we say 'life' instead of 'live' (as in 'live theater') without really noticing the difference between the voiced v and the voiceless f, which is possible only because we don't pay close attention to sounds in ordinary speech. In practical language, then, a word's semantic aspect — its meaning — takes precedence over its phonic aspect — its sound — which is perfectly understandable, since we pay attention to differences in pronunciation in ordinary speech mostly when these differences imply differences in meaning.

When it comes to poetic language, the situation is reversed: we do become consciously aware of the material texture of words, we are enjoined to focus on their sounds above all. On this subject, testimonies provided by poets themselves based on self-observation go a long way. A poetic utterance's rhythmicality, for instance, bespeaks the conscious experiencing of sound in the process of poetic creation (poetic verbal thinking). As has often been remarked, rhythm in verse depends on the syllables' specific phonic make-up, for example on their consonant count. Consequently, our perception of and attention to rhythm in poetry is inseparable from our conscious awareness of its sound patterns.

Phonic correspondences in verse (alliterations, assonances, rhymes, etc.) may or may not be intended by the poet; in the former case, we again witness a conscious focus on sounds in speech: rhyme, for one, would hardly make sense if our relation to sounds in poetic and practical verbal thinking, respectively, were the same.

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In one of his letters, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's speaks precisely to this issue when he addresses Ivan Turgenev's criticism of the presumably "limping rhymes" in his (Tolstoy's) 1859 poem "John of Damascus":

We still have to address Turgenev's accusation of my limping rhymes! Could it be that Turgenev belongs to the French school, which aims to satisfy the eye rather than the ear? ... The vowels at the end of rhymes don't really matter if unstressed, I believe. The consonants count and supply the rhymes ... It seems to me that only an inexperienced ear will demand matching vowels in rhymes; and it will do so only because it makes concessions to the eye. I may be wrong, but it's something I feel deeply — a consequence of my euphonic constitution, and you know how demanding my ear is.

Tolstoy's observations are highly significant: they document the poet's hyperconscious attention to sound in the process of poetic creation. It's perfectly plausible to assume that other poets have the same conscious relation to sound in verse, often aiming to establish phonic equivalences that don't play much of a role in ordinary speech (practical verbal thinking).

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Let me repeat my conclusion: sounds in practical language (practical verbal thinking) don't possess independent value, they don't draw our attention, and we are not consciously aware of them. In poetic language (poetic verbal thinking), conversely, sounds do become the focus of our attention; they acquire independent value, and we become consciously aware of them.

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Closely linked to our heightened attention to sounds is our emotional relation to them. A good number of poets have documented their emotional relation to sounds.

Prince Vyazemsky, for instance, writes in his Autobiography:

Reading the Moscow News, I would often lose myself in wine merchants' price lists, being drawn especially to some of the wines' poetic designations, such as Lacryma-Christi and similarly euphonic names. Perhaps these names awakened and resonated with my inner poetic self ... I also remember that even earlier in life, as a child, I drew immense pleasure from spelling out letters and combining them into distinct sounds, which caressed my musical ear ... It wasn't the poems' meanings so much as their melodious, undulating rhythms that mesmerized me.

Mikhail Lermontov, too, provides compelling evidence on this topic. He frequently writes of the sounds of words, separating them from their meanings. Thus, a variant of his poem "Angel" reads:

The soul settled down amid earthly creation But it felt estranged in this world. Of one thing only it dreamed: sacred sounds, Their meaning it did not remember.

Or take the following early draft of Lermontov's famous 1840 poem "There are words — their meaning dark or insignificant":

There are sounds, their meaning unimportant, Shunned by the masses in their pride, Forgetting them is not an option, One with the soul they are — like life ...

Nikolay Gogol puts it particularly well in his 1846 essay "On the Ultimate Essence and Singularity of Russian Poetry":

Euphony is not as unimportant a matter as those unfamiliar with poetry believe. By the strains of euphony, as if by the beautiful melodies of a mother's lullabies, common folk are rocked to sleep — like infants, even before they have learned the different meanings of the lullabies' words ... Euphony is as necessary as burning incense in church, which primes the soul to hearken to something higher even before mass has begun.

And here's also Innokenty Annensky's poetic reflection on the sounds in the word 'nevozmozhno [impossible]' from his posthumous 1910 collection The Cypress Box:

There are words — their scent, like a flower's,
Is tender and stirringly white,
But there's none among them that's as sad
And as tender as you: nevozmozhno.

Ere I knew it, I already loved
Your velvet-enveloppèd sounds:
The graves' distant flicker I saw
And the whiteness of hands in the dusk.

In the white Chrysanthemums' wreath, though,
Before oblivion's first onset, I learned
To discern the fragrances wafting
From your ve, and your ze, and your em.

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Focusing on the sounds of speech goes hand in hand with a specific emotional relation to them: "The most familiar, common phenomena and sounds," Ivan Konevskoy observes, "reveal secret passages and unsuspected depths once we allow ourselves to delve deeper into them, and for a little longer, rather than merely skating along their surfaces" (Poems and Prose [1904]).

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We can often observe an emotional relation to the sounds of unfamiliar words — from another language, for example, or nonsense words — where our attention is willy-nilly directed toward their phonic texture.

Let me quote a passage from William James' Principles of Psychology (1890), which deals with the question of our apprehension of the sounds of a foreign language:

Our own language would sound very different to us if we heard it without understanding, as we hear a foreign tongue. Rises and falls of voice, odd sibilants and other consonants, would fall on our ear in a way of which we can now form no notion. Frenchmen say that English sounds to them like the gazouillement des oiseaux — an impression which it certainly makes on no native ear. Many of us English would describe the sound of Russian in similar terms. All of us are conscious of the strong inflections of voice and explosives and gutturals of German speech in a way in which no German can be conscious of them.

But even when we have mastered a foreign language to a greater or lesser degree, its sounds continue to exert an emotional influence.

In his Treatise on French Stylistics (1909), French linguist Charles Bally also comments on this phenomenon, noting that the impact of a word's sound is independent of its meaning even if we know the latter:

Of course, when we hear a foreign language, where our associations between the meaning of a word and the word itself have not yet solidified, our mind involuntarily enhances the musical effects where they actually exist, and perceives them even where they don't exist. Associations that we can barely capture emerge, in which individual impressions reminiscent of 'folk etymology' play a significant role. The sound of the verb zwitschern, for instance, is certainly more striking to me than to a German — an illusion which is at least a little bit rooted in the word's meaning. But what about a word like erklecklich [Germ.: considerable], which to me sounds peculiar, almost ridiculous — an impression not borne out by the word's meaning at all!

That we experience sounds emotionally is also aptly captured in Edgar Allen Poe's "To Marie Louise" (1848):

Two words — two foreign, soft dissyllables —
Two gentle sounds made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moon-lit "dew
That hands like chains of pearl on Hermon hill"
Have stirred from out of the abysses of his heart
Unthought-like thoughts — scarcely the shades of thought —

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The phenomenon of exposing the phonetic aspects of words is also often accompanied by an emotional experience of their sounds, which draw our attention. Here's how William James describes this phenomenon:

This is probably the reason why, if we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but its soul has fled. It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it, to its essential nudity. We never before attended to it in this way, but habitually got it clad with its meaning the moment we caught sight of it, and rapidly passed from it to the other words in the phrase. We apprehended it, in short, with a cloud of associates, and thus perceiving it, we felt it quite otherwise than as we feel it now divested and alone.

This phenomenon of 'exposing' a word is fairly widespread, and probably all of us have had the opportunity to witness it at one time or another.

Let me provide two examples of this type of exposure (both from Mikhail Kuzmin's 1910 novel Gentle Joseph):

'Rome'? How beautiful: rounded, dome-like ... Joseph walked over to the window, and looking at the vanishing line of roofs and buildings, at the crosses of churches far-away and close-by, at the wide-open sky, he began repeating: 'Rome, Rome, Rome ...' until the sounds had lost their meaning and his soul was filled with a vastness resembling the sky or the dome of a cathedral ...

How wondrous: you will understand everything in a word once you start repeating it, once it enters your soul. Look at the flower ... and repeat its name a hundred times, and continue looking at it with all your being, and you will understand what the flower means, and you will see how it lives, as if you had read all the books that have been written about it, but you won't be able tell us about it ...

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The ancients, too, knew about our emotional relation to sounds: the letter Sigma, for example, was considered unpleasant and far from beautiful, producing a feeling of annoyance if used repeatedly, which is why it was employed rarely and with caution by some, and why there are classical fables that are entirely devoid of this letter.

Poetic language, then, reveals our emotional relation to its sounds by dint of its ability to draw our attention to its phonic texture — a crucial fact if we wish to grasp the connection between sound and sense in poetry.

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In practical language, we have no reason at all to assume that there is an internal connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. This connection is determined through association by contiguity, and it is merely factual, rather than natural, as Antoine Meillet has rightly pointed out. For if there were a necessary, internal connection between a word's sound and its meaning, phonic shifts and variations in words that don't in any way affect or alter their meaning would be incomprehensible. In his Introduction to the Comparative Study of Indo-European Languages (1903), Meillet gives the following example: "Horse (English); loshad' (Russian); cheval (French); Pferd (German); asp (Persian); ji (Arm enian) — whoever doesn't already understand that these different terms mean the same animal will certainly not be convinced otherwise." Meillet's insight, which expresses the common view of contemporary linguistics, necessarily applies to practical language. But what about poetic language?

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As noted earlier, poetic language is characterized by our emotional relation to its sound texture. According to Wilhelm Wundt's Foundations of Psychology (1896), the emotions thus triggered by individual sounds and sound sequences may vary in quality and kind on the "pleasure/displeasure," "calm/agitation" "relaxation/tension" spectra. Whereby emotions triggered by the sounds of poetry ought not to run counter to the emotions triggered by its content, and vice versa. And if that's the case, then this means that poetry's content and sound texture are emotionally interdependent. Consequently, poets select sounds and sound sequences based on their perceived emotional suitedness to the imagery at hand, and vice versa.

It seems to me that these fairly elementary observations on the interdependence of sound and sense in poetry provide a certain theoretical foundation for many a poet's testimony (especially in our time) on the unity of form and content in poetry.

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The link between a poem's content and its sound texture is not exclusively based on our emotional relation to sounds but also on the fact that our speech organs are capable of expressive movement.

As far as the expressive involvement or our speech physiology is concerned, we need to consider the breathing organs and larynx (vocal cords, etc.) on the one hand, and elements such as the soft palate, mandible, lips, and tongue on the other.