Herbert's Poetic Voice

Abstract

IMDOiTS rOeilC V0IC8 by John B. Lord The phonological structure of Herbert's poetry can be understood properly if two conditions are observed: the poems must be transcribed into the spoken language which he used; and this transcription must then be expanded into its matrix of acoustic features. Poets work with sound effects, not the juggling of letters of the alphabet. When such an expansion ismade.twoconclusions maybe drawn. First, typical means by which the sound structure supports the semantic function of many poems become evident, and especially clear is the climactic moment when a given conceit is brought to its resolution. Second, a "voice" of the poet — that is, the regularly repeated selection of a particular combination of acoustic features to dominate the sound of his poems — becomes clearly evident in a phonological model. Herbert's poems were composed to be listened to. He understood very well the control of the sounds of his lines to make them support their semantic content and hold it up for clearest display, as a Tiffany setting holds a diamond. The poems "The Windows," "Church-monuments," "The Quip," and "The Forerunners" illustrate mostclearly hisextraordinary craftsmanship. I have first (by means of a computer program, which saves very much time in such mechanical matters) expanded each line of each poem into its matrix of acoustic features. It will become obvious at once how great is my debt to the work of Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, C. G. M. Fant, and Noam Chomsky, but I have adapted their work to my own needs. To begin with, my chart does not show abstract underlying representations of the sounds of English, but instead is acoustic and phonetic, and shows the concrete sounds as they are heard, redundanciesandall. Second, I have included as consequence of being phonetic rather than phonemic, both voiced and voiceless variants of m, n, I, r, and w, as such sounds do indeed occur in the language. Third, I have not called the nasals "stops" as is usually done. Whatever they may be in the 25 John B. Lord abstract and as a result of definingthe word "stop" as involving a complete closure at some point in the oral chamber, I am persuaded that a poet thinks of themascontinuant.andsoemploys them; and acoustically, they certainly are continuant. The complete matrix is shown in footnote 1 . ' Besides expanding any text which I transcribed for it into this matrix, my computer program also determined for each line the proportion of that line which was either plus or minus each feature. Thus, the sequence "fat cats' fur" would show in the graph that it consisted of seventy percent consonants, thirty percent vowels, and one percent sonorants. Similarly, it would show the corresponding percentages for high, low, back, and the rest. Before I began to analyze Herbert's poetry, I asked my program to compute for me the normal range of ordinary speech, such as Herbert would have heard since his youth, and would have thought of as being normal and also analagous to what isnowcalled Received Standard English. Of course, there was a wide variety of dialects which, when spoken by an educated, cultivated person, would not seem lacking in prestige (though Elizabeth was not above teasing Sir Walter Raleigh for his Devonshire accent). Nevertheless, the version of East Midland which Shakespeare wrote for the speeches of ladies and gentlemen in his plays seems to me to be a reasonable approach to what was becoming Received Standard . Herbert's productive years, it is true, did not begin until perhaps 1615. but he learnedtospeakand formed his linguistic ear at a very much earlier date. I shall demonstrate shortly that the poetic voice is one which departs measurably from the sounds of normal, utilitarian, expository prose. The question of courseis just how much does it depart, and to answer the question, the norm must be known. I have used some 7500 phones of the prose of Sir Thomas Gresham, Angelí Day's Complete Engllth Secretorio, treatises on the selection of a pack of hunting hounds, and the like ?These figures became the norm against which a poem was measured, and its departures from the norm were measured in terms...