Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

On Voice in PoetryTurnings of the Breath

On Voice in Poetry: Turnings of the Breath [‘Yes, as I knew you then’ — as we have just seen, Hardy’s mellifluous triple measure and polysyllabic rhymes are unsettled by the syntactical and prosodic weight placed on ‘then’, just after the reanimation of past memory had irrupted into the scene of address with the exclamation ‘yes’. ‘Then’ at once figures the irretrievability of the past and embodies the present moment of discourse. But, we saw, its temporality is radically forward looking, as its attempt to bring this voice into presence becomes it an exploration of its possibilities of voicing as the modalities of a future presencing. On the one hand, this means that the drama of utterance transposes into a drama of prosodic texture; and yet, this prosodic texture is not straightfor-wardly sonorous. Indeed, the demonstrative ‘then’ sounds within, and against, the metre and rhyme scheme only as a barely perceptible tremor, its rising cadence surfacing from the poem’s undersong fleetingly, one detail among many competing, and mutually excluding, demands for voicing. Eric Griffiths gives a characteristically eloquent summary of this predicament: ‘the intonational ambiguity of a written text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative possible voicings, and are led by such vision to reflect on the inter-resonance of those voicings’.1] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

On Voice in PoetryTurnings of the Breath

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
Smith, David Nowell
On Voice in Poetry — Nov 10, 2015
Download PDF
27 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/on-voice-in-poetry-turnings-of-the-breath-XQeKrl4af3

References (6)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
ISBN
978-1-349-45588-1
Pages
77 –104
DOI
10.1057/9781137308238_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[‘Yes, as I knew you then’ — as we have just seen, Hardy’s mellifluous triple measure and polysyllabic rhymes are unsettled by the syntactical and prosodic weight placed on ‘then’, just after the reanimation of past memory had irrupted into the scene of address with the exclamation ‘yes’. ‘Then’ at once figures the irretrievability of the past and embodies the present moment of discourse. But, we saw, its temporality is radically forward looking, as its attempt to bring this voice into presence becomes it an exploration of its possibilities of voicing as the modalities of a future presencing. On the one hand, this means that the drama of utterance transposes into a drama of prosodic texture; and yet, this prosodic texture is not straightfor-wardly sonorous. Indeed, the demonstrative ‘then’ sounds within, and against, the metre and rhyme scheme only as a barely perceptible tremor, its rising cadence surfacing from the poem’s undersong fleetingly, one detail among many competing, and mutually excluding, demands for voicing. Eric Griffiths gives a characteristically eloquent summary of this predicament: ‘the intonational ambiguity of a written text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative possible voicings, and are led by such vision to reflect on the inter-resonance of those voicings’.1]

Published: Nov 10, 2015

Keywords: Previous Chapter; Direct Address; Word Stress; Write Character; Poetic Form

There are no references for this article.