Backgrounded consonantal patterning can be considered a more diffuse version of the procedure of rhyme; it’s way of burdening the language with more formal resistance than it would otherwise present. And just like rhyme, this lyric workflow – the dovetailing of sound and sense – is the humming engine of a heuristic method: the modification of one’s intended sense in pursuit of a deeper truth or revelation.
To demonstrate how easily a natural consonantal patterning can be achieved, here’s a little exercise. Take a noun and a random qualifier with different consonantal sounds in them, list those sounds separately, then try to compose a long sentence of words based on their permutations, with a few function words thrown in. Thus the words ‘leaf mould’ might produce something like:
O deaf fellow, mellifluous loaf, my fallow muffin,
dead failed mode of my dumb foal …
deal me the foam, the old model of the fall,
the leaf mould, the marvellous flume
of my love’s famed and larval veal!
Instant Hopkins. Absolute rubbish, of course, because the strictures are way too severe to admit much sensible possibility, but you get the idea. Left to its own devices, the ear will naturally permit other close consonants, as mine had instinctively started to do by the end. (Here, this would mean ‘t’ for ‘d’, ‘v’ for ‘f’, the ‘n’ and ‘ng’ for ‘m’, and the liquid ‘r’ for ‘l’, and so on.) By doing so, we immediately win ourselves more musical latitude, and vastly increase our chances of writing an unforced, natural and non-crazy line; note, though, that this procedure is still likely to leave the line a little crazy. Which is, I suppose, what we want – and with any luck, it will at least be registered as ‘originality’. (We should not forget the little function words in our musical calculations, however; schwa or no schwa, they also serve.)
When used instinctively, this method of free anagrammatising is not only an effective way of uniting the line’s music, but also a local problem-solving tool. Later in the poem’s composition, when we’re so often left with blank spaces to fill, it’s a useful trick just to take your musical bearings from the words two or three seconds either side of the gap, and see if their sounds alone will lead you to the answer. This is putting absolute trust in the phonosemantic principle. What’s strange is how often it works; even when – and perhaps especially when – the sense is very different from that which you intended. Another instructive little game is to have someone remove a word from a lesser-known poem, and try to figure out what should go there from the sound-cues in the immediate vicinity. Take these lines of Emily Dickinson’s:
If we try to generate a bunch of trochaic words, taking our cue from the local consonantal music and allowing our choices to be lightly constrained by semantic context, we might get something like lovely, soulful, daily, lighted, shallow, wakeful, shifting, coastal, kindled – via what’s essentially a diffuse version of the same process by which one might find a terminal rhyme. The key point is that all of these words would more or less be ‘allowed through’ on the strength of their sound-fit, despite the sense being not quite right; whereas their non-lyric near-synonyms – pretty, heartful, routine, radiant, surface, watchful, changing, shingly, burning are clearly bad fits, whose clanging sounds would prompt the ear to alert the brain to their slightly alien or inappropriate sense, barring them at the gate. (The difference can be heard more starkly when we take two rough synonyms of a nonsensical replacement, one contextually euphonious, the other grating. Choosing between ‘And when his knock-kneed walk is done’ and ‘And when his lurching walk is done’ will be as easy for most readers as deciding whether to throw in their lot with the Lamonians or the Grataks; the knock-knees have it, surely.)
Tricking the reader into entertaining strange sense is precisely poetry’s business. Even though the brain places roadblocks and armed guards along the border, lyric allows strangers to pass unchallenged, just in the way that Orpheus slipped into Hades past the lullabied Cerberus. By the time the strangeness has been registered, it’s too late: the alien idea has been indulged, and the subversive work has been done. (The word Dickinson actually uses here is the relatively straight forward ‘golden’: the guttural ‘g’ picks up on the hard ‘k’ in ‘walk’, and ‘-den’ echoes the consonants of ‘done’; ‘kindled’ uses more or less identical consonants. The stressed first vowel in ‘golden’ also forms a fairly salient half-assonance with ‘walked’, and provides a lovely oh – aw – uh backwards progression of vowels in the three content words.)
Here’s another fine example of consonantal weaving, from Douglas Dunn’s Elegies:
And fastened to a mourning blink
Brought there by melanoma’s
Sun-coaxed horrific oncos,
What mysteries you knew
Foretold by love or creatures.
(‘The Sundial’)2
Look at that terrible, stunned line, ‘Sun-coaxed horrific oncos’. ‘Sun-coaxed’ and ‘oncos’ are almost phonetic anagrams, and the assonantal Os stand in shocking, stark relief against Dunn’s lovely variable-vowel default.
The road to the burn
is pails, gossip, grey linen.
The road to the shore
is salt and tar.
We call the track to the peats
the kestrel road.
The reader knows it sounds beautiful, but doesn’t know why. Nor, ideally, should they. Though it’s easily explained: in the first couplet, we find a salient alliteration in ‘gossip, grey’, but also the play of the l / r liquids, the p / b stops, and the nasal n; in the second, the sibilants s and sh, the plosive dentals d / t, and the liquids l / r again; in the third, the hard guttural k, the l / r pair and the d / t pair; and in the fourth, the exquisite, self-descriptive sibilant singularity of ‘silences’, hushed even further in its plural, and its terminal position. All this is virtuosic, and I don’t doubt largely written by instinct – but, again, it’s an instinct trained by much practice. Ear-training can provide poets with the tools to correct bad lines: they can then say why they sound bad. Often the diagnosis is simply that the consonants are too disparate, and the vowels wholly unconsidered – which is to say they feel neither differentiated nor echoed. (A common error is to assume that vowels must inevitably be one or the other, even when left to their own devices; but what we get instead is a kind of soupy mess – lines full of whiney, moany, muttering or needling strings of vague half-assonance, echoing little sense; and worse, no strong contrast between the strategies of variation and repetition, without which assonance cannot function.) The path to the stream / is buckets, conversation, filthy laundry. / The way to the beach … Alas, the bulk of poetry written sounds like this. A poem might be striking in its imagery and intelligently argued, but still sound like a bag of spanners thrown down a garbage chute. As predicted by our phonosemantic rule, such a poem has its poetic sense dismantled by its own incoherent music.
Poets should also be aware of articulatory gaps between words. For example, words where the coda and onset share an identical or close phone will blur on the ear, and are heard as forming a more tightly bound pair: black cat, loose shirt, stiff feather, lost dime, hollow orb, etc. Words which require more of an articulatory leap are, conversely, perceived to be less tightly bound: black feather, lost cat, white shirt, and so on. While the actual experience and importance of this kind of effect are also easy to overstate, it’s nonetheless interesting to register the effect on the ear of delineating or daisy-chaining codas and onsets in this way. We might think of it as a kind of lexical staccato or legato, one that becomes more pronounced when it’s sustained as a lineal strategy: contrast The black cat tiptoed down the stairs so lightly … with the big dog barked and whined right through the night.
Let me finish by proposing an analogy: consonant is to vowel as noun is to verb. Consonant is all bounded form, atemporality, instantaneity and instantiation, like the static object. Vowel is spatially free, durational, temporal and relational, like the dynamic process. Consonant makes clean divisions of form, as do instance and boundary. (As I’ll show in a moment, consonants which let the air pass blur border and boundary.) Vowel associates or contrasts one form with another, as do space and time. Somewhere in the mind, echoed consonants imply similarities of form, whereas singular arrangements of consonants imply singularity of form. Varied vowels imply spatial and temporal separation and discrete relation, while echoed vowels imply simultaneity, parallelism, proximity and similarities of interior spirit.