I’ve mentioned already that some rough conclusions can be drawn about a poem’s music merely by looking at the poem from a distance. Held at arm’s length, poems can reveal themselves as compositionally askew in another way: the lack of balance between content and function words. Linguistic biases one way or the other are, unsurprisingly, often symptomatic of a predilection for either the more concrete language of physical description or the more abstract language of function and thought. (Not, I should make clear, ‘a preference for either thinking or description’; plenty of thought can be conducted through descriptive language.) This is neither here nor there in a single poem, and one poet will often demonstrate a strong preference one way or the other (Bishop’s language is generally more ‘contentual’ than Hardy’s, for example); but it is not properly appreciated that a generalised addiction to concrete description and expression can have serious musical consequences. The problem lies with consonants.

The more physically descriptive language becomes in non-Latinate English, the more plosive-heavy and consonantal it becomes. The more functional, abstract and ratiocinative it becomes, the more plosive-light, and the higher the incidence of passages formed from ‘open ended’ words, where one or both ends of the vowel’s envelope will be shaped not by stops, but by another vowel, a nasal stop, a fricative, an affricate, a glide or liquid. These interrupt the breath and voice far less frequently, keep the air flowing from one word to the next, and can give the impression of a single breath moving through the whole line. This is the result of the unusually heavy use of the small part of the English lexis that performs grammatical function – that Anglo-Saxon wordbase of articles, connectives, prepositions, interrogative and relative adverbs, with all their shs and whs and ths and ys and hs and ws and fs – which necessarily forms the bulk of passages concerned primarily with ‘reasoning things out’; and secondly, abstractions drawn from the Anglo-Saxon/Norse (and to a lesser extent Norman) word-pool, which – to a less obvious degree, but none theless a significant one – show a plosive-light bias: life, weight, fulfil, hurt, wrong, thought, death, future, move, anger, high, less. As ever, count erexamples abound, so it’s important to reiterate that these are broad phonosemantic tendencies, and no more. (The more abstract language of reasoning only becomes plosive-heavy when it gets poly syllabic and classical; here, the sense of our intellectual precision, of our clear comparison of abstract forms, is reinforced by an act of lyric reification, the ‘concretisation’ of the music. However, because Latinate and polysyllabic vocabulary is schwa-heavy in English, it is often as carefully avoided in lyric poetry as it is in song.1)

The airiness we find in passages which pursue a thought, and the plosive weight we find in passages of physical description, have iconic functions. They point to a kind of globally diffuse phonestheme, where light stops and air-flow equal insubstantiality, lightness, and abstraction, while heavy stops equal substantiality, weight, and the delineated borders of the physical object. By applying the law of phono semantic reciprocity, we can predict that the ‘de-reification’ of concrete expression might be effected by a shift away from a stop-based music, and it’s easy to find evidence that this is so. In concrete nouns, a move towards physical insubstantiality is often signed by the passage of air: shift, chiffon, space, sheer, fluff, feather, whisper, see-through, mist, haze, fog, haar, diaphanous, ether, veil, flower, thin, negligée, breath, and of course air.

Listen to the relatively breathy and plosive-light music of the following passages, all of which shift towards the abstract consideration of their themes:

[…] Waking at times in the night she found assurance

Due to his regular breathing but wondered whether

It was really worth it and where

The river had flowed away

And where were the white flowers.

(LOUIS MACNEICE, ‘Les Sylphides’)3

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations […]

(ROBERT FROST, ‘Birches’)4

The English speech of summary and descriptive adumbration produces a very similar effect:

Often the balance between the language of thought and that of physical description is most effectively achieved when the two approaches are tightly interwoven, as in these lines from Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Tree House’:

[…] we bemoan

our families, our difficult

chthonic anchorage

in the apple-sweetened earth,

        without whom we might have lived

the long ebb of our mid-decades

alone in sheds and attic rooms,

awake in the moonlit soutterains

       of our own minds; without whom

we might have lived

a hundred other lives […]

At the end of a poem, the move from concrete to abstract or vice versa can form an effective deictic shift, which the change in consonantal music enhances dramatically:

These days, the language of interior reflection requires a little more bravery than it used to. A quick dip into Tennyson’s In Memoriam –

I cannot love thee as I ought,

For love reflects the thing beloved;

My words are only words, and moved

Upon the topmost froth of thought.

‘Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,’

The Spirit of true love replied;

‘Thou canst not move me from thy side,

Nor human frailty do me wrong.’8

– serves to remind us that it was once standard practice to locate the poem largely in the realm of reasoned discussion, and dive into the world of concrete description only to plunder it for illustrative exempla, metaphor and anecdotal evidence. As a result, for all its argumentative strength, In Memoriam sounds light as a feather. ‘Show-not-tell’ is merely the dumb war-cry at the head of a more insidious move ment which appears to be seeking the total concretisation of the poetic line. It is, I think, a neurotic response to the otherwise reasonable observation that no one is listening. We have correctly perceived a bored and dwindling audience, but have instituted a manic and cheap attempt to keep them awake with the brain-candies of image, anecdote and metaphor. (Postmodern poetry mostly avoids this, but its addiction to the language of content is even worse than that of the mainstream.) To get the air flowing through the poem again, we require the bravery of showing ourselves to be engaged in thought while in the act of writing: our abstract consideration of a subject immediately rebalances the function-to-content ratio in favour of the former. A poem is a lyric process through which we work out what we think. If our arguments are worked out before we write the poem, it’s too easy to make the poem a mere receptacle for their concrete evidence. Indeed, an over-concrete poem can often tell us that its composition involved little intellectual struggle, all sign of it being suspiciously absent. (One must respect those poets whose stylistic preference is to remove it, of course, and let thing stand for thought.)

This approach might be a little controversial among those of our number who still claim that poetry is no place for notions, and effortlessly succeed in their attempts to write poetry entirely free of them. William Carlos Williams’s ‘No ideas but in things’ was bad enough, but at least it was clearly articulated so you could scream at it. (The phrase, of course, is its own refutation, being an idea so patently false it could only have taken root through its own elegant, musical, abstract expression.) The weirdly persistent assumption that poetic speech is more effective when it is concrete and direct has been a musical disaster for the art form; worse, it has infantilised poetry by legislating against intelligent speech. ‘Keep it direct’ is often interpreted as an instruction to keep the syntax paratactic and straight forward. This advice would not have sat well with Yeats, Donne or Shakespeare, and the best poems of a contemporary poet like C. K. Williams show it up for the nonsense it is. (Indeed Williams’s signature long line affords him the space to indulge all sorts of discursive and indirect strategies – in particular exquisitely long delays in the arrival of the main verb.) The subtlety and sophistication of a poet’s thought is most often evidenced by its complex, qualified, nuanced and dynamic unfolding, something which must be bodied forth in a varied, hypotactic syntax; but this needn’t mean ‘a lack of clarity’ or anything like it. A complex, nuanced thought forced to express itself too simply will betray itself. I sense intelligent readers are becoming bored senseless with poem after poem full of expository, paratactic syntax: I saw this / then I saw that / and I had a think about this / and I felt this about that / and then this happened. It patronises readers, and all but accuses them of being unable to follow the kind of mature argument only sophisticated hypotaxis can honour. Moreover, it declares that the poet has little interest in the kind of reasoning by which we make sense of the world and of our own experience: the poet becomes a mere camera, or at best (as in, say, the scrupulously idea-free poetry of the so-called ‘Martian school’) a camera with some trick filters. To put it in Piagetian terms, the results sound like the work of a mind stuck in the ‘concrete operational’ stage, as it appears to demonstrate no capacity for the abstract thought we associate with the later, ‘functional operational’ stage of development. In short, too many con tem porary poems read as if they were written by unusually bright seven-year-olds.

All this may offer us another way to approach the issue of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ texts, an apparently inexhaustible source of tribal conflict, one largely preoccupied with closural strategy and ideological grand standing. The perceptible flow of air is a phonetic artefact of our having thought aloud. It’s here we see another aspect of poetry’s weirdly reflexive nature: just as the memory of the poem is the poem, so poems are the epiphany, not its documentary evidence. (Robert Lowell: ‘Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.’) They show the writer in the process of making their discovery, so that the reader can re-enact and reactivate it – not merely feel its after-effects, or learn the poet’s wise conclusions. The poem is open for the reader to extend its meaning. The absence of all language which indicates argument, reflection, meditation, interrogation, conditionality, consideration and equivocation is often a sign that the poem is being written ‘after the event’ – and out of what the poet already knows. This is usually identical to what the reader already knows; the poem is closed to them, because they have nothing to contribute. An increase in air-flow is a sign that the poet, in the act of writing, has been detained in figuring out the how, the who, the where, the what, the when and the why of it all. Through this mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the reader’s own mind is revived – and they can then share in the living surprise of the poem’s own arrival.

1 Latinate English tends to be used for ‘the language of authority’, in all its dialects – but even when it isn’t, it still connotes ‘authority’ and ‘officialdom’. Predictably, the democratisation of poetic speech saw its use even further diminished. Greek-derived words are mainly used for the scientific register, and even where they are not, carry the connotation of ‘dispassionate intellectual precision’; its word-base seems therefore less inimical to contemporary practice. (Greek music in English is heavily rhotic and guttural, and reminds me strongly of Scots.)

2 Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1988–2013 (London: Faber & Faber, 2014).

3 Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Macdonald (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).

4 Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).

5 C. K. Williams, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 160–61.

6 Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

7 Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004), 41–2.

8 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Eric Irving Gray (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).