The Structure and Delivery Style of Milton’s Verse: An Electronic Exercise in Vocal Performance

Abstract

[True musical delight] consists onely apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and sense variously drawn out from one into another, not jingling sound of like endings. John Milton, Verse THIS PAPER EXPLORES THE DYNAMICS of rhythmical of poetry. It is about rhythmic structure of first six lines of Paradise Lost, their vocal performance, and Milton's underlying aesthetic conception. I will compare two commercially available recordings and also compare each of them to electronically manipulated versions of these lines. Psychologically, rhythmical performance of a poem is a perceptual solution to a perceptual problem: when linguistic and versification patterns conflict, they are accommodated a pattern of performance, such both are perceptible simultaneously. Before turning, however, to Milton, I will scrutinize two recordings by Sir John Gielgud, sixteen years apart, of last line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129: (1) leads men to this hell. w s w s w s w s w s I am going to reproduce a few issues concerning segmentation from a full-length paper of mine devoted to four readings of this single verse line. (1) Then I will present my categories of convergent and divergent delivery styles. When I first listened to these two performances by Gielgud, I tried to get an over all intuitive impression of difference between them. I had an unexplained impression Gielgud 2 (see CD #00) is much more complex, artistically more sophisticated, rhythmically more satisfying. The best way to characterize my impression of Gielgud 1 (see CD #00) was, perhaps, by punning on English idioms flat-out and flat out. The former is usually used as an intensive, is, a modifier has little meaning except to intensify meaning it modifies; latter suggests in a blunt and direct manner. Later, when I analytically compared two readings' handling of complexities of verse line, this intuitive contrast was am ply ac counted for. you encounter stretch of language To leads men to this hell a prose utterance, it may be uttered as a single unit or will at most be divided into two segments, relative clause and what precedes it. But both Gielgud readings parse Shake speare's verse line into more segments than Now, when you look at wave plots and pitch plots extracted from two readings, an immediately perceived difference becomes conspicuous. In Gielgud 1 there is a huge 413-msec pause between shun and the and an even longer, 503-msec pause between heaven and that. In wave plot extracted from Gielgud 2, by contrast, no such pauses are visible. Discontinuation is achieved here by means other than straightforward pauses. Notwithstanding this, one of my associates could hardly believe there are no pauses Gielgud 2. What is more, as Figure 2 shows, Gielgud 2 words heaven and that are uttered on one falling intonation contour, effectively grouping that effectively grouping that contour backward rather than forward. It is prolongation and overarticulation of word-final /n/ bears all bur den of generating discontinuity at caesura. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Perceptually, what happens here is quite sophisticated. We have conflicting cues for continuity and discontinuity. The shared intonation contour, and lack of pause, group word that backward, but, at same time, listener's syntactic knowledge and sustained /n/ indicating a rest suggest a new start after heaven. Consequently, both a caesura after heaven and a across caesura are perceived at same time. Levin regards caesura as a metrical not a linguistic fact. The line exerts pressure for completion upon which caesura obtrudes: If caesura is regarded as syntactic pause or break, nothing is left to explain required sense of metrical impulsion across break (Levin 185). …