A crucial part of close reading poetry is developing your ear for verse, for the marriage of sound and meaning. The great critic of this, both in practical and theoretical terms, is Robert Frost, perhaps my favourite poet. In a letter of 1915 to his friend Sidney Cox (professor and critic), Frost wrote:
The sentence is everything—the sentence well imagined. See the beautiful sentences in a thing like Wordsworth’s To Sleep or Herrick’s To Daffodils.
Remember, a certain fixed number of sentences (sentence sounds) belong to the human throat just as a certain fixed number of vocal runs belong to the throat of a given kind of bird. They are fixed, I say. Imagination cannot create them. It can only call them up. It can only call them up for those who write with their ear on the speaking voice. We will prove it out of the Golden Treasury someday.
Who knows which of the three poems Wordsworth wrote called ‘To Sleep’ Frost could have meant. If we take the Golden Treasury as our guide (and Frost loved the Golden Treasury, as well as the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse) then this is the version he meant.
A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky:I've thought of all by turns, and yet do lie
Sleepless; and soon the small birds' melodies
Must hear, first utter'd from my orchard trees,
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry.Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away:Without Thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blesséd barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
I will come to Frost’s “sentence sounds” in this poem shortly. First, let’s look at some of the features of this poem.
To begin with, it is a sonnet. Fourteen lines. Octet (eight lines) then sestet (six lines) with a volta or turn in between. If you want to know more about sonnets, I did a close reading of Robert Hayden, where I look briefly, at the history of the form. You might think sonnets are for love poems, and they are, but they became a hugely flexible form that were used for religion, death, and many other topics, including sleep. In another sleep sonnet Wordsworth begins: “Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!” The most well-known is Sidney’s sonnet “Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace.” Perhaps that will be a future subject for close reading.
Second, what stands out to me are Wordsworth’s three-part lines.
The line is the basic unit of verse. So many of the famous lines of poetry that you know—to be or not to be, come live with me and be my love, do not go gentle into that good night—are exactly that: lines, self-contained lines. Many other lines in English verse have a caesura, or break. (Kipling is very good at these.) Think of how Herrick uses a break in the first and fifth lines here,
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
My favourite two part line (today, at any rate) is this, from ‘Burnt Norton’: “Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker” which reminds me of this from ‘Prufrock’, which ends on a wonderful caesura.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And then there is the three-part line, a wonderful device that allows poets to make all sorts nuanced, descriptive, choking, plangent, subtle, gentle effects. I wrote about this once, before most of you were reading me, so I shall only reiterate briefly. Also here, about King Lear.
Herbert writes: How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clear. And so we hear three clean parts, two individual iambs, and then a pair, so we recite it in three clear sections: the adverbial fragment, the vocative, and the noun phrase (which is a hendiadys). Keats was good at these: The owl, for all his feathers, was-a-cold. The three-part line also explains why so many modern poets break up what ought to be one line into three short lines
bumblebees creep
inside foxgloves
and evening commences
The English haiku tradition is like this too. Anyway, there’s plenty more at the link. In his first stanza, Wordsworth uses three of these three-part lines.
A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky:
You might read Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, as caesura line in two parts. I hear it differently: verb, noun phrase, noun phrase. See how the sound of rain and the fall of rivers echo each other, follow the same structure, and the same for and bees and and seas, and notice how, as the stanza goes on, the descriptions condense. One line and a bit for the sheep; half lines, or less, for the rain and bees, and then briefer and briefer phrases. Wordsworth breaks the lines in the manner in which consciousness is broken by the state of not-quite-sleeping.
I was once taught acting (in stints, not at drama school) by a splendid lady called Margo Annett (she still teaches and she wrote a book about acting) and she taught me a trick. Recite your lines but only the vowels. This is best for Shakespeare but works for others too. The vowels structure the sound patterns. Do this and you will hear some natural progressions, such as the movement from long-ay to long-ee in rain, and bees with a short “ah” in-between. This is, to my uncalculating ear, a fairly frequent pattern, with the dropping to “ah” giving it the lilt. The whole line is built towards this.
oh-ah-uh-oh; uh-ow-oh-ay, ah-ee
See those repetitions. See how oh and ow interact. I cannot tell you a science of vowels the way a musician could tell you the relationships of fifths and tonics, but I think you can become familiar with some important sound patterns in poetry by doing this. Perhaps you have all stopped reading by now, because I sound crazy, or perhaps you are all going oh-ah-uh-oh… oh-ay, ah-ee. Perhaps someone in the comments can bring some science to my ramblings. And if I used phonetic symbols it might be better, but you get the idea.
Is this what Frost means by “sentence sounds”? Well, yes. In a letter of 1913 to John Bartlett, he explained himself by telling Bartlett to imagine these sentences heard from behind a door, sounds with their sense.
You mean to tell me you can’t read?
I said no such thing
Well read then
You’re not my teacher
What you would mostly hear, I submit, are vowel sounds. Although Frost is clear that a sentence is one sound. The sequence is all heard together, a sound unit as well as a syntactic unit. Frost uses other phrases—abstract vitality, pure sound, pure form—but I think they aren’t as helpful as what I already outlined. Frost thinks that having an ear for the sound of sense is what makes a writer, of prose or verse. Words forced into metre without the sound of sense is doggerel, and the sound alone is nonsense. He rates, he says, only one or two metres: what matters is how they are married to sound.
The high possibility of emotional expression all lies in this mingling of sense sound and word accent.
It for all these reasons that Wordsworth writes the entire Octet as one sentence.
A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky:I've thought of all by turns, and yet do lie
Sleepless; and soon the small birds’ melodies
Must hear, first utter'd from my orchard trees,
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry.
What a turn he achieves, out of nowhere, building so gently towards it, in that final line, from the small birds’ melodies to the cuckoo’s melancholy cry. Ah! Notice that although the rhyme scheme is abba, abba, (by, sky, lie, cry; bees, seas, melodies, tree) there is a rhyme with melodies/melancholy (in the “oh” “ee” progression at the end of each word) so the sound of cry, which almost rhymes (we go from “ee” to “eye”), brings the empty sense of melancholy that comes from sleeplessness as the morning creeps awake, even though it closes the rhyme with “lie”. A clever way to make a strong rhyme ring a little hollow. Similarly, sleep catches an assonance with trees and melodies and melancholy. All these echoes contribute to the sense of growing despair, the repetitious feeling of insomnia. (It is worth comparing this poem to Frost’s ‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’)
The Sestet is two sentences, each arranged with the sound of sense.
Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away:Without Thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blesséd barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
I shall leave you to recite it yourself, speaking the vowels, following the whole sentence together as one long sequence of sounds.
