Damn it! That goes home. Why? Mere splendour of rhythm, I expect….
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air….
William Butler Yeats, “The Wind Among the Reeds”
It is proverbially difficult to write usefully about the pure sound of language: the word-music, if you will. We respond to such music, of course; but when we attempt to discuss or explain our response, we often find ourselves at a loss for words:
The total sound experience of a poem is beyond analysis for many reasons, the most obvious being that it embraces too many experiences and experiences for which we have no language whatsoever. The richness and variety of sounds and rhythms heard in reading a poem of the highest order…is and always will remain indescribable. 1
Indescribable, yes; but that has not prevented critics and poets from trying to describe it. Old Alexander Pope – who reminded us, pointedly, of the danger of a little learning – was himself responsible for the following dangerous little bit of cleverness:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow. 2
So did the orderly eighteenth-century mind (we may recall that Pope rewrote Shakespeare – Shakespeare! – in order to “regularize” the meter) establish a hierarchy: sound as servant of sense. (Taking pains to drive the point home, Pope rather ostentatiously demonstrates the technique, contrasting the “smooth stream” with the “hoarse, rough verse” that follows.) For such a mind, the sounds of words are of interest only to the extent that those sounds are directly and demonstrably related to the paraphrasable meaning of the lines in question. (This regrettable viewpoint survives to this day in some quarters: as witness the petulant desire to know what a line about, say, crows, or ruined columns, might “mean” – utterly missing the value of the music inherent in the words.)
That way lie the hothouse species that thrive in the seminar rooms: what one critic has called “those terms which schoolchildren were once burdened with – alliteration, assonance, euphony, rhyme, pararhyme, onomatopoeia, repetition and tone colour.” 3 (Onomatopoeia: a good Greek word meaning “name-making.” It’s an attractive notion: the thing being named creates its own name. The The sound is the word.) Such analysis well serves a poet like Tennyson, who concatenates sounds to conjure a bucolic summer afternoon:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees. 4
John Keats takes the technique an uncomfortable step further: unwilling to leave the matter to the unaided reader, he actually steps melodramatically out of his own ode to comment on the effect produced the word he has just that moment written:
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self…. 5
The melodrama is undercut by the fact that the word “forlorn” resembles only vaguely the sound of a bell. Elsewhere, Edgar Allan Poe did somewhat better. He too wrote of bells, and suited his verb, in each case, to the sound of the bells being described: “clanging” fire bells, “groaning” funeral bells, “chiming” wedding bells, and “tinkling” sleigh bells. 6
Tinkling bells: as we shall see, SMiLE, too, has recourse to the techniques of Tennyson and Poe:
On the warm breeze the little bells tinkle like wind chimes….
Whispering winds send my wind chimes a-tinklin’
We will encounter other bells in SMiLE, along with examples of pure onomatopoeia worthy of any English-class blackboard; but its subtleties go far beyond such contrivances. The true masters of sound in language have always dwelled uneasily among the neat classifications of the classroom. A case in point: Wallace Stevens, insurance executive and poet, and arguably the most accomplished composer of pure word-music among modern American writers.
Stevens had the knack of making even a simple declarative sentence seem like a string of nonsense syllables. This example is from “The Ordinary Women”:
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles. 7
This sounds, for all the world, like a lost couplet from “Jabberwocky”; but the lines mean, simply, that the light of the moon has tricked the wall-sconces, making them look as though they were lit.
Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is set in a world in which the obdurate actualities of life and death rebuke (“let be be finale of seem”) our fragile pretensions. In that world there are no true “emperors”; there is only the ridiculous self-aggrandizement that gives the poem its title. And the poem begins with a decidedly homely reality:
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds…. 8
Reduced to prose, this would amount to little more than a recipe: tell that big stogie-chomping fellow to whip some cream in a bowl.
All well and good, as far as it goes. But what are we to make of that third line? An ear eager to identify onomatopoeia might detect, in the startling word “concupiscent,” a distant echo of the sound of wire whip against mixing bowl. But it is clear that there is something more going on here. The overblown alliteration (the bombastic syllables would fit naturally into the mouth of a P.T. Barnum) seem almost to mock themselves as they make their way, improbably, to the line’s end. And in so doing, they also mock the human vainglory that makes grandiloquence of ordinary speech and an emperor of an ice-cream seller.
Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound. 9
We are struck, of course, by the showy alliteration of the first line. But there is more subtle work here as well: an interplay of musical techniques that unobtrusively sustains the passage and brings it to its close. “Meekly” and “keep,” in line two, are almost mirror-images, in sound, of one another. The “m” of “mortal” echoes the “m” of “meekly,” and the “s” and “t” sounds gather in line three: “eliciting,” “still,” “sustaining.” The initial “s” of “speech” carries the sound into line four, and “seem” does the same for the next line. The “p” of “pomps” (a doubled sound at that) is echoed by “profound”; and the second syllable of that word rhymes with “sound” at the end of line five (and “sound” itself echoes “gowns,” linking itself back to line one). A delicate music indeed, “still sustaining” the passage; and a compelling example of “speech…like music so profound.”
The interaction of sound and sense, again, is mysterious beyond the persnickety imagination of Mr. Pope.
Such artistry is not the sole province of the “serious” poet. Popular lyricists have written word-music to rival Stevens’s best work; Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin come to mind. The rock idiom, too, has had its masters. Here is one of them: the fine lyricist Pete Brown. The first couplet would not be jarringly out of place in “Surf’s Up”; and it’s interesting that both Brown and Parks reach for the word “quicksilver” to evoke a moonlit scene.
When you’re moving in the ballroom moonlight,
Feet quicksilver lace My Lady….
When you tremble at the dragons roaring
at the forest’s door I’ll hold you close My Lady
When your house shakes at the jetplane’s howling
causing mousequakes in your cornflakes, then I’ll
be by your side
When you’re knocking on the doors of death and
rocking wolves in cradles scared of losing
your Secret Rose 10
This is writing of a very high order. The skillful alliterations help to give structure to the verses: “moving” and “moonlight” (and the “l” sounds of “ballroom” and “moonlight” as well); “lace” and “Lady”; “doors of death.” And the internal rhymes and near-rhymes are rich and varied: “roaring” and “forest’s door”; “house shakes,” “mousequakes” (a wonderful coinage) and “cornflakes” (a commonplace touch to contrast the song’s courtly imagery); “knocking” and “rocking.”
Consider, also, this passage by Keith Reid, longtime lyricist for Procol Harum:
Jostle, hassle, elbow bustle
in a swirling rainbow tussle
Caught and frozen, broken sheen
now unites for one brief scene 11
For any writer, the task of describing chaotic sensory experiences in comprehensible morphemes is a challenging one. Unless one emulates a Carroll, Joyce or Beckett, inventing one's own language – a task that imposes fearsome challenges of its own – it must ultimately come down to a set of more-or-less organized syllables, doing their best to evoke a fundamentally disorganized, kaleidoscopic reality.
With these opening lines – the song, fittingly, is titled “Kaleidoscope” – Reid chucks us in at the deep end, beginning in medias res with a torrent of words that instantly destabilizes the listener's viewpoint. Jostle, hassle, bustle: are these nouns or verbs? That doesn't seem to matter very much; they rush breathlessly past, leaving us little time to identify parts of speech.
"Jostle" half-rhymes with "hassle", which in turn half-rhymes with "bustle"; and both of them half-rhyme with “tussle”, which concludes the dizzying first couplet. The doubled plosive "b" sounds of "elbow bustle" seem to suggest the anonymous shoving limbs of a disorderly mob; and the "b" sounds repeat in lines three and four – "broken" and "brief" – continuing the theme. (And "rainbow" shares its second syllable with "elbow": a subtly reinforcing structural detail.)
The harsh "k" sound that begins line three, disrupting the flow of "s" and "l" sounds, announces a change: for an instant, as in a camera flash, the rush of activity is "caught and frozen" (the half-rhyme of "frozen" and "broken" is like a hinge around which line three is built; another unobvious structural detail). In that "brief" instant, the "broken" fragments of reality "unite" – fleetingly – to reveal the scene. Fittingly so, since that is the way a real kaleidoscope works, its circled mirrors making patterns out of loose shards.
And then – always – there is Dylan. One is tempted to cite the extravagances of a song like “Visions of Johanna” or “Desolation Row”; but in terms of pure word-music, one would be hard-pressed to improve on the much-quoted bridge of “Just Like a Woman”:
It was raining from the first
And I was dying there from thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse
Is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here
Ain’t it clear…. 12
The triple near-rhymes (“came in here,” “pain in here,” “stay in here” and “ain’t it clear”) are noteworthy; but the greatest musical triumph here is the interweaving of the other near-rhymes throughout the passage: “first,” “thirst,” “curse,” “hurts,” and “worse.” They at first follow, and then work against, the metrical scheme; the listener almost feels that he is losing his way in a maze of like-sounding syllables. In point of fact, the literal narrative content of the passage is relatively uninteresting, particularly in comparison with many other Dylan lyrics of comparable vintage. If we are moved by these lines, then we are moved as much by sound as by sense.
Michael Gray, who has written so insightfully about Dylan’s body of work, has commented eloquently on this passage:
Exactly what, in [the bridge], is “beautifully done” can be…described only in the vaguest of ways – as a kind of three-dimensional achievement. Singing these words, those unit-construct lines, Dylan somehow moulds and holds out to us a hand-made object, a sort of clever toy with a lot of tactile appeal. In particular, you need the recording for the indescribably plaintive resonance the voice yields up…. 13
And so we encounter, once again, the fundamental “indescribability” of the emotional power of such word-music. Luckily, Gray is not alone, among critics, in his willingness to confront such “three-dimensional” mysteries:
[L]iterary theorists have rather neglected sound effects, often quoting [the] view that the sounds of words are arbitrary. But they’re not. Of course we’ve always known that chickens cluck and cows moo, but the influence of sound goes wider and deeper than that…. If isolated sounds aren’t arbitrary, still less are the sounds of sentences and poetry whose patterns produce effects that isolated words can’t…. We lack the vocabulary to describe them well, and I suspect they often go unnoticed (at least consciously) by readers…. If music can be profound, why not the sound of words? It too uses repetition combined with variation. It too has incantatory power. The semantics can modulate sound’s meaning much as the choice of instrument can affect music’s meaning. A violin’s C isn’t the same as a trumpet’s, just as oo is recognisable [sic] but differently received in moon and spoon…. [W]e might hope for more tolerance of poets like Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. When they stop making sense perhaps they’re not lapsing into non-sense but instead bringing out the tonality of words, an alternative mode of meaning making sense an echo to the sound. 14
SMiLE, of course, has clucking chickens and mooing cows of its own. And beyond the barnyard, plumbing the mysteries of SMiLE’s “incantatory power”? Perhaps the critical notion of sense as echo of sound – Pope’s Augustan symmetry rolled over onto its head, Plymouth Rock fashion – offers a place to start.
A place to start: SMiLE begins, as the alphabet begins, with the sound of the letter “a.” And not the English alphabet only, but the old alphabets as well. A; alpha; aleph, in this instance voiced as “ah.” The first sound.
A: an aside: Louis Zukofsky, the great Objectivist poet, gave the name A to his masterpiece, a long-form work in twenty-four “movements.” “A” – the poem’s first word – appears in many guises and forms: as a letter, as a part of speech, as a musical note, as a vitamin, and as a sawhorse: a literal “A” fashioned of wood.
A: the first sound: as voiced in “Our Prayer,” it approximates the primal sound of natural human exhalation. A lovely irony: SMiLE – a work whose words have provoked decades of controversy and (sometimes) acrimony – begins wordlessly. We are invited, from the very beginning, to consider those words not only in terms of sense, but also in terms of pure sound. Between speech and breath: scope enough for the music of language.
Speech and breath: “Heroes and Villains” begins with a headlong rush of syllables, delivered as in a single breath (the lines are broken, here, to reflect natural line breaks):
I been in this town so long
that back in the city
I been taken for lost
and gone and unknown for a long, long time
The momentum of the opening is sustained, in part, by a subtle pattern of sound repetitions: the alternation of “b” sounds (“been,” “back,” and “been” again) with paired “t” and “s” sounds (“this town,” “city,” and “taken for lost”). The “o” sound of “long” is echoed by “lost” and “gone”; “long,” in line one, is an unstressed syllable, but it reappears, at the end of line four, doubled, as one of the three strong, stressed syllables at the close. And the last of these syllables (“time”) begins with a “t” sound, linking it back to the “t” sounds of the preceding lines. (And “long time” is a sort of sonic mirror image of “town so long,” connecting the ending of the last line to the ending of the first.)
Similar intricacies of sound occur in the song’s second verse (here again, liberties have been taken with the line breaks):
Fell in love years ago
with an innocent girl
from the Spanish and Indian home
of the heroes and villains
Here, the alternation of “l” and “n” sounds with the “g” sound of “ago” and “girl” functions in much the same way as the earlier pattern of “b,” “t” and “s” sounds. The “n” sounds (“Spanish and Indian” continue into line three, while the “h” of “home” is a new sound – it seems to operate almost as a pause for breath – and the long “o” of “home” echoes the long “o” of “ago” (the “m” of “home” is also distantly linked to the “m” sound of the earlier “time”). The “h” and “o” sounds recur in line four (“heroes”), and the last word of this line – “villains” – returns us to the paired “l” and “n” sounds: in fact, the letter-sounds of “villains” very nearly replicate the sounds of “fell in” (“v” and “f” are kindred consonants), closing this verse, like the first, with unobtrusive formal symmetry.
Having acknowledged the artistry of the technique, however, we may find ourselves struggling to say something meaningful about it. We might point out that the alternation of consonant sounds in the earlier lines of the verses gives them a certain pace, a certain force of movement; and that the transitions to other sounds, in the later lines, seem to suggest a slowing down, a shift of attention. In the first verse that shift mirrors a change from “town” to “city”; in the second verse, the shift mimics a change from remembered private emotion (“fell in love”) to social observation (“the Spanish and Indian home”).
Skillful shifts. But there are more interesting shifts elsewhere, each one acting as a kind of “turn” or pivot linking neighboring phrases: a sort of jeweled bearing on which the passage may be revolved and examined:
In the cantina, Margarita keeps the spirits high.
There I watched her. She spun around and wound in
the warmth. Her body fanned the flame of the dance.
The alliterations (“watched,” “wound,” “warmth”; “fanned,” “flame”) are masterful; but the most important phrase here – the “turn” – is “around and wound in the warmth.” In terms of pure sound, the word “wound” serves as a bridge from “around” to “warmth.” It retains the “–ound” component of “around,” substituting an initial “w” for the initial “ar”; and “warmth” retains the “w” while dispensing with the “–ound.”
It is a brilliant transition; but there is more going on here. What part of speech is the word “wound”? Is it a verb, linked to “spun” (she spun and she wound)? Or is it an adjective, part of a phrase modifying “body” (wound in the warmth, her body…)? Either interpretation is perfectly valid, and the tension between them gives added emphasis to “wound” as the focus of the “turn.” “Wound” is also a sort of Looney Tunes joke: the phrase “around and” sets us up to expect a repeated “round” (as in “round and round we go”). Instead, the next word substitutes a “w” for the initial “r,” giving us what sounds, for all the world, like a skewed Elmer Fudd mispronunciation. Silly? Certainly. SMiLE, with its hammers, saws and chomped-celery percussion, joyfully encompasses such frivolities.
A later “turn” offers a more sustained display of lyrical virtuosity:
My children were raised, you know they suddenly rise.
They started slow long ago, head to toe; healthy, wealthy and wise.
The technique here is stunning: a deft series of sound substitutions that links key words together and gives a powerful forward impetus to the lines. In the first sequence, the word “raised” gives way to “rise”: the “r” and “s” sounds are retained, but the long “i” is substituted for the long “a.” The next word-cluster begins with “slow”: this time it is the vowel sound – the long “o” – that is retained, while the consonants change around it. “Slow” leads to “ago,” which leads in turn to “toe.” In the third grouping, “healthy” is linked to “wealthy,” which substitutes a new initial consonant but retains everything else; and “wealthy” is linked to “wise,” which works the trick in reverse: it retains the initial “w,” and changes the rest. And the final word “wise” connects back to the sounds of the initial “raise”/”rise” pairing, bringing the entire passage – a miracle of sonic equipoise as delicate as the most refined Baroque counterpoint – to symmetrical closure.
to be continued...
Footnotes
1 Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading
2 Alexander Pope, "Sound and Sense"
3 https://web.archive.org/web/20050206202314/http://www.poetrymagic.co.uk/advanced/sound.html
4 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Princess"
5 John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
6 Edgar Allen Poe, "The Bells"
7 Wallace Stevens, "The Ordinary Women"
8 Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream"
9 Wallace Stevens, "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"
10Peter Brown & Jack Bruce, "Escape to the Royal Woods (On Ice)"
11Keith Reid & Gary Brooker, "Kaleidoscope"
12Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"
13Michael Gray, Song & Dance Man
14https://web.archive.org/web/20040528161654/http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/sounds.html
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