“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).
*
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.
*
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).
*
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.
*
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.
*
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]).
*
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—
*
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 …
*
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.
*
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 (Armenian)—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?
*
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.
*
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.
The emotionally expressive role of the breathing organs and larynx is obvious: a whole range of intonational details—pitch, tonal intensity, expressivity, etc.—is entirely determined by them. The expressive role of the other parts might not be as obvious; however, there is no doubt that they, too, often accompany and contribute to the expression of emotion. “That our articulatory muscles do not in any way fall behind the other muscles is self-evident,” Tadeusz Zelinsky pertinently observes in Wilhelm Wundt and the Psychology of Language (1911). “Think of Gogol’s Akaky Akakyevich [the protagonist of the novella The Overcoat] and how he ‘chuckled, blinked, and moved his lips’ while writing. We all know that our lips can, and often do, express what and how we feel in a given moment: smiling, distorted, pouting, pursed, etc.”
*
The role of the soft palate is mostly negative: certain emotional states are characterized by the fact that the soft palate is not engaged at all and that as a result our speech acquires a ‘nasal’ quality (‘speaking through the nose’).
Turgenev is a rich source of material on the subject of nasal pronunciation as a function of emotion. Commenting on the “disdainful tone of voice” of one of his characters in A Sportman’s Sketches (1852), Turgenev writes: “The stranger was talking incredibly fast, incoherently, and through his nose.” (Speaking through ones nose as a mark of disdain and condescension is sufficiently common.) And in the 1874 novella Punin and Baburin, the voice of the “grandmother” becomes more nasal as her displeasure and irritation grow: “Enough, enough already—interrupted the grandmother, and—having thought for a while—said in a nasal voice that it was always a bad sign … ” Similarly, in Turgenev’s 1860 novel On the Eve we read: “‘You don’t know what Milonov the poet has written about me?’ the old man asked, working himself into a state of agitation. ‘No wedding candles have been lit’—he began in a sing-song voice, breathing all the vowels through his nose and pronouncing the syllables ‘ding’ and ‘can’ à la française as ‘daing’ and ‘cong’ …”
The mandible’s expressive significance is most salient when we clench our teeth. We can hear it because everything we enunciate appears constrained, muted, stifled; open vowels sound choked. Expressions such as ‘speak through one’s teeth’ or ‘mutter between one’s teeth’ neatly capture this phenomenon. This type of muffled speech is due to the expressive movement—or rather its absence—of the mandible; it is often used to great acoustic effect.
The expressive role of the tongue, finally, is yet again pointedly captured by Turgenev: in the novella First Love (1860), the protagonist Vladimir “anxiously mutters his words,” which is the direct result of the tongue’s obstruction of normal articulation. Similarly, On the Eve’s Bersenev “would speak more slowly and fall into a kind of mutter whenever he spoke to a woman …”
*
In practical speech, where our attention is not focused on the sounds themselves and where we aren’t typically conscious of emotionally conditioned sound shifts, we easily tolerate modifications in the phonic texture of speech (which are caused by the expressive movements of our speech organs). It’s different in poetic speech: for here we emphatically focus sounds; here phonic shifts and modifications would not only not go unnoticed, but some of them might actually sound unnatural, if not impossible (and perhaps even ridiculous). That’s why poets endeavor to choose words whose pronunciation will physiologically correspond with their overall expressive goals. When we feel something that makes us smile (distend our lips sideways), we will obviously avoid sounds requiring pointing our lips, such as o or u.
*
A poet’s attunement to the activity of his speech organs can trigger corresponding aural (phonic) ‘ideas’, in which case a poem’s sound structure is tied to the poet’s phonic imagination, and the sequence of speech organ movements or the sequence of phonic imaginings marks the inception of poetic thinking. That’s what poets mean when they say that poetry begins with sound. Schiller, for instance, would often hear “a poem’s music in [his] soul first, before having a clear idea of its content” (cited in Ernest Dupré and Marcel Nathan, Le langage musical: Étude medico-psychologique [1911]).
Let’s hear Gogol once more, this time from his 1834 essay “On Ukranian Songs”:
In these songs, the most colorful and true images are coupled with the most resonant music. These songs are not composed with quill in hand, not on paper, not mathematically, but in a trance, in a state of oblivion, when the soul itself sings and all the members of the body attain a freedom that breaks the shackles of passivity and habit as the arms fly upward and the singer is carried far away on the waves of ecstasy. This can be observed even in the most plangent songs whose despairing sounds painfully touch the heart. They could never emanate from the soul of a person in a normal state, soberly considering the content at hand. Only when the wine has jumbled and destroyed the prosaic order of thought, when our thoughts’ internal dissonance resonates with its inexplicable and strange inner consonance, then—in this majestic, rather than merely joyful, state of intoxication—the soul, enigmatically, overflows with barely bearable lamentations. Gone are reason and awareness! The singer’s entire mysterious being is thirsting for sound, sound alone. That’s why these songs’ poetry cannot be captured, why it mesmerizes, why it is full of grace—like music. The poetry of thought, on the other hand, is far more accessible to everyone than the poetry of sound, or, to put it more aptly, the poetry of poetry. Only the chosen, the true poet himself understands it in his soul; and that’s why the best songs often remain in obscurity, whereas the more common ones win our approval through their content.
*
Even if there happens to occur no movement of the speech organs in the process of poetic creation (poetic verbal thinking), however, the poem’s sound structure will be aligned with and reflect its emotional matrix. For even if no expressive physical movement accompanies a given emotion—as we transition to movement more generally (while the emotion is still lasting), we can only move in ways that don’t run counter to, and indeed approximate, those movements that would have expressed the given emotion in the first place. Thus, while no physical movement may have occurred in the process of experiencing a given emotion—as soon as we feel the need to move (all the while continuing to experience the emotion), we might, for instance, move forward rather than back, or forcefully rather than listlessly. And forward and backward movements certainly mean different things as expressions of emotion. When it comes to our speech organs, this means for example that we move our tongue forward when articulating sounds such as e and i, while moving it back when articulating vowels such as o and ou. Which yet again underscores the difference among vowel groups in emotional range and effect—something poets and theoreticians alike have frequently remarked on.
*
In conclusion, I would like to repeat my main insights concerning the sounds of poetic language: in poetic verbal thinking, we become consciously aware of sounds, which goes hand in hand with our emotional relation to them; this in turn entails the interdependence of content and form in poetry—its sound texture, more specifically—which is supported by the expressive movement of our speech organs.