On "the hearing ear": Some Sonnets of the Rossettis

Without, within me, music seemed to be;  Something not music, yet most musical.¹

These two lines from Christina Rossetti's "An Old-World Thicket" seem to touch on something peculiar to her work, something roundabout, snatching, teasing. There's "music," but it's "not music"; it's "Without" yet "within"; "not music," "yet most musical." The lines disclose as much as they withold, so that reading them is a bit like watching a magician's trick: now you see it (the white rabbit, music), now you don't. We're not sure where the music is, or whether it is music at all. By the time we've finished, our minds are empty—empty, at least, of any object to be named or known. But our ears are full. "Something," whatever it is, suggests a hearing, and makes us listen. Although the grammar scrambles this thing (it is "not" and "yet"), the repetition insists on it: "music," "not music," "most musical." I am reminded of Marianne Moore's comment about poetry in general: "there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle,"² where "fiddle" puns on three different senses: a cheat, a fidgetting, and the sound of music. "Without, within me, music seemed to be; / Something not music, yet most musical."

Such verbal constructions are common in Rossetti. In Sonnet Six from Later Life, for instance, she writes: "Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly" (l. 2), where "somewhat," whatever it is, hovers in the distinctly uncertain twilight between "this" and "that." In "Somewhere or Other," the verbal game of "may be near or far," "may be far or near" (ll. 5, 9), bats its desired object elusively between contrary perspectives. Such playing fast and loose, missing the poetic object by an inch or a mile, is one of this poet's favorite tactics. Christina Rossetti is a master magician, as well as, of course, a master musician.

Although this essay is focused on some sonnets of the Rossettis, sonnet form as such is not its object. Instead of looking at the technical formalities of the sonnet, its lines, rhyme scheme, and meter, I want to try listening, to the way the sonnet becomes a shape in the ear, a sound-work or rhythm. "We value the seeing eye already," Robert Frost once pointed out: "Time we said something about the hearing ear."³ The "hearing ear" nicely emphasizes what it might sound like: tautological and self-echoing. Gerard Manley Hopkins once expostulated of his own poetry: "but take breath and read it with the ears."⁴ Not only the reader, but the writer too, depends on ears. As Ezra Pound put it: "the true economy lies in making the tune first. We all of us compose verse to some sort of a tune."⁵ When Hall Caine reported to Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Watts-Dunton had proposed strict criteria of rhyme and meter in his choice of poems for Sonnets of Three Centuries, Rossetti answered briskly: "I would not be too anxious were I you about anything in choice of sonnets except the brains and the music."⁶ Again, the music.

So what do we mean by music in poetry, and is it interpretable? Too often music has seemed a merely singable extra to content and thought, a pleasing sonorousness, added like a gloss. Yet, wherever we look, we find poets themselves invoking sound as the origin of what they do. Not only does "the music of poetry" not exist "apart from the meaning," as T. S. Eliot asserts, but "a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm . . . and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image."⁷ Music may come first and create the meaning. There is a nice definition in James Longenbach's The Resistance to Poetry (2004), which suggests how we might shift the traditionally oppositional terms of music and meaning, form and content. He writes that we should attend to "the sound of thinking in poetry—not the sound of finished thought."^8...