There Must Be Something to Say

Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature, by Angela Leighton
Harvard University Press. $35.00.

The trouble, or perhaps the beauty, of talking about the sounds of verse is that you end up discussing other things as well; or you worry that your noticings are idiosyncratic fixations (if a reader will have spotted them before you, or will agree to, after); and then we may feel that stylistic appreciation has to in some way be bolted to an overall interpretation of the poem. The approach remains that in which, to apply Alexander Pope, we find the sound an echo to the sense: generations, now, of schoolchildren and university students have observed that in Wilfred Owen’s line, “the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle,” the r and t sounds conventionally emulate (they don’t reproduce) the noise of gunfire. How do we move beyond this?

Angela Leighton finds a way, always suggestively, though not always—to my mind—with the power to convince. She examines a range of poets—Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray, Alice Oswald, and two Grahams rarely considered together: Jorie and W.S.—as well as prose writers (she continues, for instance, her rivetingly up-close analysis of  Walter Pater’s prose, a feature of  her previous book, On Form). She analyzes syntax (Pater’s dashes, for example) and scans verse compellingly (a hypermetrical line in Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”). I don’t always agree with her—the idea, for instance, that in Rossetti’s line “my heart is like a singing bird,” one might highlight the adjective rather than the noun—but it’s good to know of her hearing things differently. This is subjective literary criticism, which mentions the author’s uninterest in pursuing a “logically deductive argument” (though the suggestion that de la Mare is as strong an influence on Thomas as Frost is persuasive); Leighton is intrepidly associative, wayfaring from text to text. She appears to defend the “self-justifying mystique of literary writing” against criticism which has deconstructed aesthetic pleasure into cultural capital, disguises for the operation of hegemonic power, and so on. While this is valuable (we need to read poems as poems, to respect the cognitions of form), it leaves much out. To eliminate content altogether seems misguided, and in fact reductive, of the work sound does.

For this reason—to pick one example, from a poet about whom I must confess to feeling possessive—I was disappointed by her reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will.” In it, Leighton finds echoes of Frost, Eliot, Bishop’s own “Sandpiper,” and possible leaps to Woolf, and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, but not very much of Brazil, where the poem is set. Content is treated summarily—the poem “describes the banal ordinariness of a backstreet scene in a seaside town”—and
 Leighton lingers on the third and fourth stanzas (I quote the first five):

Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet,
the thin gray mist lets everything show through:
the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse,
     a foundered house,

—cement and rafters sticking from a dune.
(The Company passes off these white but shopworn
dunes as lawns.) “Shipwreck,” we say; perhaps
     this is a housewreck.

The sea’s off somewhere, doing nothing. Listen.
An expelled breath. And faint, faint, faint
(or are you hearing things), the sandpipers’
     heart-broken cries.

The fence, three-strand, barbed-wire, all pure rust,
three dotted lines, comes forward hopefully
across the lots; thinks better of it; turns
     a sort of corner ...

Don’t ask the big white horse, Are you supposed
to be inside the fence or out? He’s still
asleep. Even awake, he probably
     remains in doubt.

“Hearing things,” a phrase which appears here, is Leighton’s title, which finely apprehends the experience of reading; the feeling of a poem as a “thing” which itself hears, as well as things and people in the world, other texts it may echo; and then the idea of the critic accused of “hearing things” that aren’t really there, of fantasizing ghosts in the machines that poems have been said to be.

Leighton worries less about this than I do. In fact, I’m glad she doesn’t, and that she wrote this continually nuanced book. But the danger lies, of course, in not really listening to the poem, the person, right in front of you. Or of not seeing the forest for the trees. Leighton zooms in, for instance, on Bishop’s ellipsis, the three dots, glides into talk of the three-strand fence, its dotted lines, and then—it’s wonderful, to listen in on a deep reader of verse, thinking her way forward, or (a favorite word of Bishop’s) sidewise—she finds triads, like “faint, faint, faint,” in the poet’s other poems. This seems to me unconnected to sound, except in a figurative way, and it leaves much of the poem undiscussed.

Concentrating on sound, there’s the three-stress sequence, or molossus, which rearrives throughout: “thin gray mist,” “black boy Balthazár,” “all pure rust,” “big white horse.” It’s typical of Bishop to turn careful detailing of a place—see the slant-rhyme too, on “horse” and “house”; and the internal rhyme of “doubt” and “out”—into cultural exploration. The threes could be Trinitarian, given the dating of the poem to the Feast of Epiphany, and the ending, where the

                                      four-gallon can
approaching on the head of Balthazár
keeps flashing that the world’s a pearl, and I,
        I am

its highlight!............................
 ...............................................
“Today’s my Anniversary,” he sings,
      “the Day of Kings.”

It’s a poem which wants to be religious, and whose ending echoes one of Bishop’s favorites, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and/This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.” Balthazar’s “I am” emerges out of Hopkins’s ingenious rhyme, but his act of lyrical transubstantiation isn’t possible for Bishop. This has to do with unbelief, but also that she’s writing about Brazil from the perspective of an outsider. Hence the uncertainty, the talk of boundaries, the unease with which description approaches symbol, and then retreats; the desire to ennoble, sans sentimentality; and, indeed, the effort to understand race through a painterly or aestheticizing treatment of color (“Florida,” “Cootchie,” “In the Waiting Room,” “Memories of Uncle Neddy,” and her Time-Life book Brazil also have this in them).

Listening carefully to a poem, and its sounds, may take us back toward the world: “the agonies, the strife,” said Keats, “of human hearts.” Leighton prefers the involutions of the act of listening itself, and is more religious, in a way, than Bishop: one chapter begins, anecdotally, with her trekking in the rain to Lindisfarne, and she moves beyond tangible sounds, to consider the “inner ear” which may “hear beyond hearing, or even hear innerly an absent sound that shapes itself as a presence.” She claims “it is not ‘news’ that matters in poetry, good news or bad, but the sound of riding to bring it”:

Poetry is predominantly something heard, and what we want from a poem is not ultimately a message, a story, a graspable or paraphrasable content of some kind, but rather an invitation to listen, and to listen again. It is the curious self-sufficiency of the act of listening which seems to say something about the arts of sound.

Leighton’s focus isn’t on actually sounded verse, in the sense of performance. She explains that this leaves out much black writing, for one. A scholar must be free to examine what interests them, without including minorities tokenistically. Yet—given her emphasis on a community of writers tuned in, primarily, to each other—one can’t help but notice that, with the exception of a brief, sensitive reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, all those Leighton examines are white and canonical (I suppose even W.S. Graham, the working-class Scot turned Cornish isolato, is published by Faber). To reaffirm the exquisiteness of their verse, its tapestry of echoes and self-echoes, might then appear a defense of privilege for privilege’s sake: a closed world.

“Art for art’s sake” is the phrase on the tip of my tongue, for, as in On Form, Leighton is concerned with the legacies of aestheticism, which she now 
spiritualizes. Her lingering over the phrase, and concept, “je ne sais quoi” had me—and I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of an aesthete—craving some Pierre Bourdieu, or an equivalent citation, just to make the point that rich people (it’s true) deploy standards of gentility to keep the less rich at bay, to deny others serious consideration; that social mystifications may parade as art-talk. And I began to doubt Leighton on Tennyson. Examining “The Lover’s Tale,” she writes brilliantly of how “incremental repetition, which presses words into slightly altered variations of themselves, thus turns them into events, into dramatic actors rather than motionless disclosers of the story.” But her riffing on Penelope Fitzgerald’s suggestion that in Tennyson we hear “the sound of the language talking to itself” is too unbridled:

The ear, as so often in Tennyson, tells its own love tale, one which may be at cross-purposes with the plot, but runs its sweetly melodious course, not only within the poem but also from poem to poem, as if telling of sadness and strangeness beyond any mere local interest.... Indeed, the sound of the language talking to itself, across line breaks, paragraph breaks, even breaks between poems, becomes what we also start to want to hear. What may sound like laziness, like the “sad sweet oversweet Alfred” pursuing his verbal fetishes, becomes a noise-haunting which in fact accounts for something always going on elsewhere—even if nothing more than a “lovetale” for the sounds of words, or for the memory of those other voices: Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Wordsworth’s, Shelley’s, telling their own tales in the buzzing hold of a poetic tradition.

“Sad sweet oversweet Alfred” is Stevie Smith’s narrator Pompey in her Novel on Yellow Paper, and Leighton also softens and reverses Woolf’s critique of Tennyson’s sonorousness, aligned with the robotic masculinity of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. But these writers had a point to make about Victorian verse: in acknowledging Tennyson’s continuing allure, they wished to draw attention to a sentimentality which, crystallized and preserved within so many gem-perfect lyrics, in fact gave voice disguisedly to a twisted bullishness, a vast emotional displacement connected to a jingoistic solipsism, and the pluriform repressions of that era.

Tennyson has been thought of as two poets: the tediously patriarchal bore (“Alfred Lawn Tennyson,” Joyce called him), and a measurelessly sensitive sufferer wishing to lose himself in dreamscapes of sound. But these roles are connected, as in the narrative of his monodrama, Maud (whose lovelorn narrator finds his purpose, at last, in going to war), and Leighton’s validation of failed communicativeness, and self-enclosure, brought to mind John Addington Symonds’s account of Tennyson’s meeting with William Ewart Gladstone, with whom he argued over the rebellion of plantation workers in Jamaica:

Tennyson did not argue. He kept asserting various prejudices and convictions. “We are too tender to savages; we are more tender to a black than to ourselves.” “Niggers are tigers; niggers are tigers,” in obbligato, sotto voce, to Gladstone’s declamation. “But the Englishman is a cruel man—he is a strong man,” put in Gladstone. My father illustrated this by stories of the Indian Mutiny. “That’s not like Oriental cruelty,” said Tennyson.

“Obbligato” is key, for, recalling Leighton’s characterization of verse as music, it shows that Tennyson is uninterested in conversation. He takes refuge in the sound of his own voice, with a defensiveness passing into hatred of what’s foreign, and therefore felt to be potentially intrusive, if it isn’t firmly excluded, from the outset, from one’s sympathies.

Although John Stuart Mill doesn’t appear in Leighton’s index, her stance is of the nineteenth century, and extends his contention “that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.” In Symonds’s ugly tableaux, Gladstone, the politician, is an exemplar of 
eloquence, which is (in Mill’s words) “feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action”; Tennyson’s withdrawal into a bigoted refrain provides a caricature of poetry, which is (says Mill) “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” He’s there in the room, but not really listening to anyone else—these surly outbursts are really a form of self-talk.

I don’t mean by this to suggest that Leighton is wrong to examine poetry formally, insisting on qualities in it which elude crude forms of ideological critique. It’s more that I wonder: what would it mean for us to maintain the aesthetic dimension, while also redefining poetry as a type of communication? Not browbeatingly straightforward, or rhetorically manipulative, or socially chameleonic (it’s not about fitting in, or flattering), but an attempt nevertheless at getting something across, while respecting the challenges and opportunities both, that exist within a shifting language? What Leighton offers instead is a finely-modulated self-consciousness which may amount to gussied-up self-regard.

This approach undersells, for one, the verse of W.S. Graham, for he is one of those who—I quote Kierkegaard—“has an individual conception of what communication is ... perhaps the distinctive characteristic, the reality of his historical importance is concentrated in precisely that”:

Meanwhile surely there must be something to say,
Maybe not suitable but at least happy
In a sense here between us two whoever
We are. Anyhow here we are and never
Before have we two faced each other who face
Each other now across this abstract scene
Stretching between us. This is a public place
Achieved against subjective odds and then
Mainly an obstacle to what I mean.
—From The Constructed Space

Leighton says this poem “raises expectations of matter and purpose which are soon quashed”; she grants that its “space” contains “human presences, between which there is a kind of communication, transaction, or exchange,” but her phrasing reveals a reluctance to take seriously these verse possibilities, and she reverses toward the aestheticist position:

Finally, the poetic space is constructed, like a formal box or design of language, in order that “somehow something,” whatever it is (perhaps just another je ne sais quoi or sense of beauty?) might ride the “habits of  language to you and me” and make it stranger than we think.

I don’t buy that “finally,” or the “perhaps”-initiated dismissiveness of the parenthesis, and “it” is hollowed out by the end of the sentence.

In fact, Graham’s masterpiece (one of them)—first published in this magazine, in 1958—argues an aesthetic of communication, conceding as it goes impediments which are essential to that process, not overthrowers of it. Whenever people meet, it is in a (socially, politically, technologically) “constructed space”: this phrase also, as Leighton explains, applies to the poem itself, envisioned as an encounter between writer and reader. Why are the rhymes touching? Because they outline a river of talk desirous of an audience, which wonders out loud if there’s “something to say,” throws its hands up in resignation—“anyhow here we are”—and yet, with each coincidence of sound, suggests an impending confidence (in both senses), ghosting the desired connection, of speaker and auditor, which Graham can’t assume. This poem isn’t a formal box: it’s siphonophoric (see-through and cloudy in volatile portions, fluidly shape-seeking) in how it connives an aphoristic sensibility, 
capable of lifting an empowering précis—“This is a public place/Achieved against subjective odds”—out of the nervous noise of onstreaming speech.

When those insights surface, the temptation to frame them on the wall is undone, always, by another thought, a courageously concessionary rather than acquiescently deflationary coda: “and then/Mainly an obstacle to what I mean.” Graham likes the word “obstacle”—“Have I not been trying to use the obstacle/Of language well?”—whose sticky sound has a mimetic stopping-power, or slowing-power. This caution relates, however, not only to the crosscurrents and undercurrents of language, which may either stymie or enable, but also the emotional risks involved in reaching toward another person:

It is like that, remember. It is like that
Very often at the beginning till we are met
By some intention risen up out of nothing.
And even then we know what we are saying
Only when it is said and fixed and dead.
Or maybe, surely, of course we never know
What we have said, what lonely meanings are read
Into the space we make. And yet I say
This silence here for in it I might hear you.

The second stanza can’t assume a reader, or listener, in agreement with what came before. It aims to persuade, but with qualifications—“it is like that/Very often at the beginning”—and only out of the effort to get its meaning across is the slant-rhyme, “met,” produced; under the pressure, that is, not only to speak but also to be heard and (however dilutedly) understood. “Met” turns out, over the line-break, to concern not an interpersonal but an intrapersonal meeting, with an “intention” arising from within; although we could also see those intentions as coming from outside ourselves (that division, of inside/outside, is breaking down), encoded within the language we inherit.

Graham suggests that a sort of mutual unknowing, a shared negative capability, a determination to be susceptible and a willingness to be surprised, is essential; the danger is always that one will be misunderstood, either in the moment or after it. We all become literary critics, concerning our experiences of insecurity, cussedly sifting what we or others have said, for reassurance that we won’t be unseated by “what lonely meanings are read” into our untethered remarks. The poem includes these worries, but the stanza ends sturdily, where a verb is licensed to transcend its meaning in ordinary speech: “And yet I say/This silence here for in it I might hear you.” You can’t say a silence, strictly speaking: but your words can open a space for others to be heard.

I can see why a deconstructionist reader (Leighton compares Graham to Derrida) might discern a continual undoing of meaning. Graham has a sequence called “What is the language using us for?” which repeats the question, and in his “Private Poem to Norman MacLeod,” we’re told that 
“communication is always/On the edge of the ridiculous” (still, the word itself is present, he cares for what it represents). “The Beast in the Space,” which we might read as a companion or counter-poem to “The Constructed Space,” begins:

Shut up. Shut up. There’s nobody here.
If you think you hear somebody knocking
On the other side of the words, pay
No attention.

Leighton’s central fecund reading is of de la Mare’s “The Listeners,” a poem in which a door, knocked on, yields no response; she moves into Robert Frost’s intriguing remark, that the best way to catch what he calls the sound of sense, is to hear voices arguing behind a closed door, which cuts off the words but not their acoustic contour. She convincingly aligns Graham’s poems with his letters to friends (several of the poems call themselves “Letters”), but it’s important to recognize that for every moment of real, not pretended doubt in his verse that communication is feasible—given the opacities of language, and psychology, both—there is time for a message which may come through, which may not be a pure transmission of what was intended, yet still amounts to something: “See./This night moves and this language/Moves over slightly/To meet another’s need/Or make another’s need”; “These words this one night/Feed us and will not/Leave us without our natures/Inheriting new fires.” Language both creates and assuages desire, in a telephone game which may thwart a face-to-face meeting (Graham returns to this idea) but which nevertheless postulates a real interaction.

Within “The Constructed Space,” the assertiveness of “say,” renovated in the previous stanza, can’t be maintained, and the poem’s speaker is pressed to rephrase:

I say this silence, or, better, construct this space
So that somehow something may move across
The caught habits of language to you and me.
From where we are it is not us we see
And times are hastening yet, disguise is mortal.
The times continually disclose our home.
Here in the present tense disguise is mortal.
The trying times are hastening. Yet here I am
More truly now this abstract act become.

Ralph Pite explains that “disguise is mortal” in “two contradictory senses”:

It is temporary and it belongs to the human condition. Disguise will pass at last and yet its passing is a trial to us because we are wedded to it. Graham places against this paradox the “abstract act” which provides an escape from both the thrill and the fear of losing your disguise and being exposed to another person.

The poem—Pite discusses visual art too—is such an abstraction, but it’s also a speech-act which can’t be downright purged of these angsts; its power, in fact, depends on that proximity. It’s so marvelously discomforting, intimate-seeming, specific in being non-specific: what it says about times, 
trying times, hastening times, and how they “continually disclose our home” has a power to touch, it would seem, readers in sundry situations. The recognition of a limited but real agency, and a partial yet true perspective, is given in language steered by a purpose, yet wavery and plural.

The convoluted final sentence continues the work of nuanced affirmation: Graham queries his own assertiveness without descending, pronto (Wallace Stevens, a philosopher-poet Leighton admires, can be like this), into mock-heroic bathos. So the poem doesn’t click shut, like Leighton’s formal box: it’s a touch ragged, unguarded, it knows it may sound frustratingly abstruse, pointlessly gnarled. The slant-rhyming of “home,” “am” and “become” approaches closure, while remaining suspicious of it; what’s ventured, with the verb “become,” echoes a comparatively translucent, if not transparent, love poem of Graham’s, the seventh of “Seven Letters”:

A sweet clearness became.
The Clyde sleeved in its firth
Reached and dazzled me.
I moved and caught the sweet
Courtesy of your mouth.
My breath to your breath.
And as you lay fondly
In the crushed smell of the moor
The courageous and just sun
Opened its door.

Does the first line say all that needs to be said? Maybe not, because the poem goes on. The sounds—the slant and full rhymes, the assonances, the glissade of “caught” into “courtesy,” and then “crushed” and “courageous”—point to a content within immediacy, a depth to touch, and a process of intellection beyond and within feeling, which has to do with two people, not one.