"Driven as in Surges": Texture and Voice in Romantic Poetry

Abstract

This paper seeks to entwine or find subject-rhymes between two topics: arrangement of in some Romantic lyrics and their thematization of poetic voice. For Shelley, Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and of order of those relations, has always been with of order of relations of thoughts. Hence, he writes, the language of poets has ever certain uniform and harmonious of sound, without which it were not (Major Works, 678; initial relation--rather than relations--is reading in Mary Shelley's press copy). poet in his prose, as, for him, were Plato and Bacon, Shelley sandwiches found between and sound as if to verify his idea that relations of are close to being ground and foundation of perception of order of relations of thought. And way recurrence flowers out of near-rhyme between connected and affected mimics similar enactment of sound's relation with thoughts. William Keach has persuasively argued that Shelley poet whose sense of infinite potential meaning of poetry seen to depend upon inability of words ever completely to conduct and therefore to discharge mental energy they signify (Shelley's Style, 28). Shelley's use of shares in his intermittently explicit and possibly pervasive sense that, as Demogorgon famously puts it, a voice / Is wanting (Prometheus Unbound, 2. 4. 115-16). On one hand, does not merely echo sense; it gives sense possibility of entering an order. On other hand, it participates in construction of an artifice obliged at critical moments to depict its own inadequacy or disintegration. On one hand, Verse, in Leigh Hunt's words, alluding to Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful planetting' of poet's creations, which produced of necessity by smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and harmonious dance into which they are attracted round orb of beautiful (Hunt, An Answer to Question 'What Is Poetry?' 32). On other hand, poetry's perpetual Orphic engages always in struggle with a / Of thoughts and forms, which else and shapeless were. This last quotation from Prometheus Unbound (4. 414-16) suggests that rules throng, but enjambed alexandrine ushered in by throng implies that song fights an endless battle with, and yet enabled by, all that senseless and shapeless. Ted Hughes's Skylarks, meta-poetic response to Shelley's To Skylark, apostrophizes and sounds out bird's lyric voice thus: O song, incomprehensibly both ways-- / Joy! Joy! Help! (qtd from Collected Poems). Incomprehensibly both ways captures well Romantic lyric's fusion of self-trust and self-doubt. Indeed, Romantic lyric voice most sensitively registers such equivocality through its attitude towards its own music, its own arrangements of sound. Much Romantic poetry born out of its own despair, word which rhymes with all-sustaining air into which Shelley converts poetic strains of Prometheus Unbound (1. 756, 754). Indeed, very desire for poetic music may admit cultural disharmony. So, Shelley makes his skylark turn poet's answering song into A thing wherein we feel there some want (To Skylark, 1. 70). As though to deny any hidden want, Coleridge strives in Eolian Harp to blur difference between and silence: of Sea / Tells us of (11. 11-12; Coleridge's poems qtd from Ernest Hartley Coleridge ed.), he asserts, short is in stilly and distant enfolding an oxymoronic murmur whose closest neighbour silence into which progression of opening vowels finally ripens. …