Ideas about Voice in Poetry by Christopher Middleton

EXPERT studies of sound in poetry tend to take for granted the phenomenon of voice. My purpose here is to set up some thoughts about voice and its imprints in poetry. The physiological side of the matter is not what I have in mind, and rhythmic profilings of voice-sound are so all-important as to require separate treatment. I shall record, without much elaboration, as brief notes, some of the ideas, interrogatory ideas, that have occurred to me while reading poems and listening to voices in them.

1
The imprints of voice in poetry, pervasive and elusive, are fundamental to the whole range of lyric expression. The question is: What is meant by 'voice', and how does a reader or listener read or listen to it? The field is one in which variables matter, and they may matter significantly even within settled types of sound-patterning. We might discriminate, somewhat as follows: Textuality attracts, directs, and structures the literary intelligence of a reader, and sometimes it may transform his whole predisposition. His training, susceptibilities, detective skills, dialectical powers, all come into play when he gathers, in the act of reading, the manifold shimmering entity that is an imaginative text in its context. Vocality, on the other hand, is, in a sense, the very authority, or source of the shimmer, in a lyrical text. When a poem lacks vocality, as it may do with good reason, or otherwise, because the bird is dead, then this lack too merits attention.

I do not think that vocality is a subform of textuality. I do not think, either, that lyric vocality is exhaustible semantically in terms of suppressed 'differential structures', terms being used - and widely abused - today in studies of the nature of textuality. Even outside the lyric field, vocality may be paramount, as the voice of a narrator, the voices of his characters. There are poems, it is true, that race ahead of the consciousness of their epochs; but poetry also tends to carry into its present some rooty old features of pre-literate speech. It erupts - even when the text has been assembled over typographical and syntactical lacunae - erupts into its present, streaming with the ichor of the archaic.

Some voices are irretrievably lost, of course. It might just be possible for phonologists to reconstruct some of those that lie dismantled in the Chinese Book of Songs. The dynastic Chinese voices, too, even when originally bound to given tunes, had characteristics which are still to be identified (e.g., the tender swinging voice of Li Ch'ing-chao, of the Sung Dynasty).

2
The world consists of manifold signals which any individual, any animal or plant likewise, picks up and interprets sensorily. The sound signals in that manifold, or in segments of it, are no less crucial for being frequently and massively nonlinguistic. If I hear footsteps crossing the roof of my house, I do not go and fry an egg, but wonder who or what is up there. A solitary fisherman, offshore from Halicarnassus in 604 B.C., had he attended to the splash and ripple of waves against the hull of his boat, might have thought that
some other being was around him, at large, but within earshot, even if that other being authorised his element, water, to speak through a different phonetic system from that of the fisherman's Carian.

The manifold voices of the ancient cosmos, subhuman or superhuman voices, might also have engendered in the fisherman's inquiring mind the tremendous thought: 'They alone speak truly who, having learned and understood them, utter the voices of the cosmos.' Instead of accommodating that thought, and as they became Western and aggressive in their ways, peoples of the northeastern Mediterranean entrusted their fate to another thought: 'They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos…