On the Sounds of Poetic Language

"O zvukakh stikhotvornogo yazyka." Soborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka [Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language], vol.1 (St. Petersburg, 1916), pp. 6-30.

The manifestations of language must be classified according to our goals in employing the verbal means at our disposal in a given situation. If we employ these means solely for the practical purpose of communication, then we are dealing with the system of practical language (practical verbal thinking), where the linguistic means (sounds, morphological elements, etc.) don't possess independent value. But there are other language systems where practical considerations take a back seat, without completely disappearing, and words and meanings themselves acquire independent value.

Contemporary linguistics focuses almost exclusively on practical language. The study of other language systems, however, is equally relevant. In this essay, I elaborate some of the psycho-phonetic features of the language system at work in the process of poetic creation. I conditionally call this system poetic language (poetic verbal thinking).

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In practical verbal thinking, we don't focus on the sounds of words; we don't consciously pay attention to them, they don't possess independent value, merely serving communication. It is precisely this lack of conscious attention to sounds in practical language that explains why many slips of the tongue go unnoticed, and why we can easily get away with sloppy articulation, slurring endings or entire syllables — something students of acting in particular have to grapple with.

There is yet another, more complex aspect to the phonetics of practical language, which Jan Baudouin de Courtenay calls the non-coincidence of our articulatory intent and its actual execution: it consists in our failure to articulate what we actually set out to articulate — as when, due to physiological conditions affecting our speech organs, we say 'life' instead of 'live' (as in 'live theater') without really noticing the difference between the voiced v and the voiceless f, which is possible only because we don't pay close attention to sounds in ordinary speech. In practical language, then, a word's semantic aspect — its meaning — takes precedence over its phonic aspect — its sound — which is perfectly understandable, since we pay attention to differences in pronunciation in ordinary speech mostly when these differences imply differences in meaning.

When it comes to poetic language, the situation is reversed: we do become consciously aware of the material texture of words, we are enjoined to focus on their sounds above all. On this subject, testimonies provided by poets themselves based on self-observation go a long way. A poetic utterance's rhythmicality, for instance, bespeaks the conscious experiencing of sound in the process of poetic creation (poetic verbal thinking). As has often been remarked, rhythm in verse depends on the syllables' specific phonic make-up, for example on their consonant count. Consequently, our perception of and attention to rhythm in poetry is inseparable from our conscious awareness of its sound patterns.

Phonic correspondences in verse (alliterations, assonances, rhymes, etc.) may or may not be intended by the poet; in the former case, we again witness a conscious focus on sounds in speech: rhyme, for one, would hardly make sense if our relation to sounds in poetic and practical verbal thinking, respectively, were the same.

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In one of his letters, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's speaks precisely to this issue when he addresses Ivan Turgenev's criticism of the presumably "limping rhymes" in his (Tolstoy's) 1859 poem "John of Damascus":

We still have to address Turgenev's accusation of my limping rhymes! Could it be that Turgenev belongs to the French school, which aims to satisfy the eye rather than the ear? ... The vowels at the end of rhymes don't really matter if unstressed, I believe. The consonants count and supply the rhymes ... It seems to me that only an inexperienced ear will demand matching vowels in rhymes; and it will do so only because it makes concessions to the eye. I may be wrong, but it's something I feel deeply — a consequence of my euphonic constitution, and you know how demanding my ear is.

Tolstoy's observations are highly significant: they document the poet's hyperconscious attention to sound in the process of poetic creation. It's perfectly plausible to assume that other poets have the same conscious relation to sound in verse, often aiming to establish phonic equivalences that don't play much of a role in ordinary speech (practical verbal thinking).

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Let me repeat my conclusion: sounds in practical language (practical verbal thinking) don't possess independent value, they don't draw our attention, and we are not consciously aware of them. In poetic language (poetic verbal thinking), conversely, sounds do become the focus of our attention; they acquire independent value, and we become consciously aware of them.

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Closely linked to our heightened attention to sounds is our emotional relation to them. A good number of poets have documented their emotional relation to sounds.

Prince Vyazemsky, for instance, writes in his Autobiography:

Reading the Moscow News, I would often lose myself in wine merchants' price lists, being drawn especially to some of the wines' poetic designations, such as Lacryma-Christi and similarly euphonic names. Perhaps these names awakened and resonated with my inner poetic self ... I also remember that even earlier in life, as a child, I drew immense pleasure from spelling out letters and combining them into distinct sounds, which caressed my musical ear ... It wasn't the poems' meanings so much as their melodious, undulating rhythms that mesmerized me.

Mikhail Lermontov, too, provides compelling evidence on this topic. He frequently writes of the sounds of words, separating them from their meanings. Thus, a variant of his poem "Angel" reads:

The soul settled down amid earthly creation But it felt estranged in this world. Of one thing only it dreamed: sacred sounds, Their meaning it did not remember.

Or take the following early draft of Lermontov's famous 1840 poem "There are words — their meaning dark or insignificant":

There are sounds, their meaning unimportant, Shunned by the masses in their pride, Forgetting them is not an option, One with the soul they are — like life ...

Nikolay Gogol puts it particularly well in his 1846 essay "On the Ultimate Essence and Singularity of Russian Poetry":

Euphony is not as unimportant a matter as those unfamiliar with poetry believe. By the strains of euphony, as if by the beautiful melodies of a mother's lullabies, common folk are rocked to sleep — like infants, even before they have learned the different meanings of the lullabies' words ... Euphony is as necessary as burning incense in church, which primes the soul to hearken to something higher even before mass has begun.

And here's also Innokenty Annensky's poetic reflection on the sounds in the word 'nevozmozhno [impossible]' from his posthumous 1910 collection The Cypress Box:

There are words —...