Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

16.4 Making interpretations on the basis of sound patterns
Unit 16 Rhyme and sound patterning
Section 4 Poetic form

Having looked at how sound patterns may function, we need to consider how the identification of sound patterning can be used in ways of reading, and to assess some of the possibilities and problems involved in doing this.

Understanding the conventions of many idioms or genres requires that we recognize aspects of their use of sound patterning. Contemporary rapping involves rhyming as one of its main organizational principles; and headlines and advertising slogans have characteristic ways of using sound patterns. Many texts written within established literary traditions draw on conventions of sound patterning (and sometimes sound symbolism) as a conventional compositional resource. Traditions of interpretation of these texts also draw on the same network of conventions.

The conventional register of poetic language has itself fluctuated throughout its history in terms of its use of sound patterning. Some periods and poets have preferred highly complex effects, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose sound patterning is evident in the opening lines of ’The Windhover’ (1877; published 1918):

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king

Dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy!

Such complexity of sound patterning contrasts strongly with, for instance, Wordsworth’s aspiration for poetic language (or ’diction’) to approximate to the ordinary language of speech, famously presented in the ’Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (1802) roughly half a century earlier. We should nevertheless be careful about generalizations about the contribution made by sound patterning to poetic styles. This is partly because sound patterning intersects in complex ways with rhythm and other aspects of register; it is also partly because writers are not always consistent in their practice.

Wordsworth’s co-authorship of the Lyrical Ballads with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, did not stop Coleridge less than two decades later producing one of the most celebrated instances of intricate sound patterning in English verse - the first lines of ’Kubla Khan’ (1816):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Earlier in this unit, we named various types of sound pattern that can emerge in a text. These labels are useful if they help us to describe sound patterning; but in the actual analysis of texts it often seems that there are no clear-cut boundaries between sound effects. Rhyme, assonance and consonance are mixed together not as a repertoire of separate devices but in a texture of complex and interconnected patterning. Consider the lines from ’Kubla Khan’ above in this respect. If you try simply to list instances of sound patterning, you quickly run into difficulties (including difficulties that are the result of language variation as well as language change). Does the vowel in ’Khan’ in the first line, for instance, assonate with ’Kubla’ (and possibly with ’Xanadu’)? Or does it rhyme with the first vowel in ’Xanadu’?

In attempting to interpret sound patterns, it is useful to distinguish between fairly systematic and predictable patterns that serve to define a form (such as rhyme schemes and local kinds of ornamentation), and patterns that have locally marked effects and seem to have expressive or symbolic functions (such as extra memorability or special suggestiveness). One problem with trying to interpret this second kind of pattern is that the expressive or symbolic significance of sound effects cannot simply be read off from a text in a series of mechanical equations between sound and sense (see the examples from Keats and Tennyson on p. 201). A sequence of words beginning with the same sound may suggest one thing in one context and quite a different thing in another. The context and meanings of words that appear to create local, expressive effects should therefore take priority. Only after considering these is it safe to suggest ways in which the sound might support (or perhaps undercut) the sense.

More generally, it is rarely, if ever, possible to prove an effect of sound patterning or sound symbolism. Caution is therefore needed in putting forward interpretive arguments based on the connotations or symbolic qualities of sounds. Arguments regarding the expressive or symbolic qualities of sound in a text are persuasive only when they are based on some mutual reinforcement that can be shown between properties of the text at different levels (between its sounds, grammatical structures, vocabulary, etc.), rather than when appeals are made either directly to fixed symbolic values for sounds, or to a reader’s personal sense of a sound’s resonance.

Finally, when writing about a text, there is little point in simply listing aspects of its sound patterning (e.g. its rhyme scheme, or the fact that two words alliterate). Comments along these lines only become interesting when linked to one of two kinds of argument: either as a contribution to the identification of a genre or form, where for some reason this is in question or worth establishing; or else to support a case for some local interpretation, where the evocative effect of the sound connects with other indicators of what is meant.