Rhyme, Rhythm, and the Materiality of Poetry: Response

When we talk about the materiality of poetry, to what are we referring?

Āll thĕ nīght cāme ° nŏt ŭp ōn mŷ

The line is Algernon Charles Swinburne's, the scansion marks Thomas Hardy's.¹ As a young man in the 1860s, Hardy habitually carried in the breast pocket of his coat a well-thumbed and -marked copy of the first Moxon edition of Poems and Ballads (1866), "worn where it should be worn," he told A. E. Housman many years later, " just over the heart" (Housman 277). At some date unknown to us, he marked the meter of the first line of "Sapphics." In one sense the scansion simply confirms what the poem's title announces. This is a Sapphic verse: trochee, spondee, dactyl, trochee, trochee. Yet the form allows for some metrical variation, and Hardy does too, by marking the second and fifth feet as both trochaic and spondaic. He also takes his own small liberties when he divides the verse not into the expected five metrical feet but into thirds, and then adds a caesura at the line's mid-point.

Does his scansion record the way—or ways—Hardy heard the line? Or was it meant to be a score, something to guide him through the transition from silent reading to an accurate, or even just adequate, vocalization? Either way, Hardy's marks might strike us as a mute reminder that poetry reaches us through the ear as well as the eye. It might strike us, too, that over the heart is just the right place to wear a poem, an emblem of the way that poetry's rhythms insinuate themselves into our bodies, working sometimes with, sometimes against, the pulses and rhythms of those bodies. Much excellent recent critical work has emphasized, in Marjorie Perloff's words, how "central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry" (749). As Perloff and many others have argued, poems achieve their completion only once they are spoken aloud—only once, that is, they are materialized in sound and then alter, subtly or dramatically, our material bodies.² Craig Dworkin suggests that the sound of a poem is "at once the antithesis and the very essence of [its] meaning" (755).

Does a poem need to be vocalized, though, in order to be "heard"? Housman didn't think so. In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, he distinguishes between the great and the merely good poem precisely on the grounds of the ease with which the latter lends itself to oral performance. The "melodies" of Swinburne's poems, Housman argues,

address themselves frankly and almost exclusively to what may be called the external ear. This . . . they fill and delight: it is a pleasure to hear them, and a pleasure to read them aloud. But there, in that very fact, you can tell that their music is only of the second order. To read poets aloud whose music is of the first, poets so much unlike one another as Blake and Milton, is not a pleasure but an embarrassment, because no reader can hope to do them justice. Their melody is addressed to the inner chambers of the sense of hearing, to the junction between the ear and the brain; and you should either hire an angel from heaven to read them to you, or let them read themselves in silence.

(282-83)

This is not simply a matter of unheard melodies being sweeter. One can dissent from Housman's assessment of Swinburne while acknowledging the force of his claim that our experience of a poem is never exclusively somatic. Meter is not sound, as both Swinburne and Hardy well knew. For Hardy, whose published work includes examples of more metrical forms (including those of his own devising) than that of any English poet, poems often originated in metrical notation. Abstract patterns of stresses, pauses, and rhythms, rather than words, ideas, or emotions, prompted and to some extent guided his composition. The relation of such patterns to sound is not easy to specify.

In addition, while scansion marks, such as Hardy's of the...