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Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook
.
(2)
Brute beauty and valour and act,
oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle!
[. . .]
In the sense that patterns of sound palpably evoke the visual elements of their
respective descriptions, both examples are, to my ear, good illustrations of poetic
onomatopoeia at work. The example from ‘Pylons’ is
alliterative
(see A4) because it
foregrounds a certain type of consonant in order to ascribe a quality of aridity to the
entity it describes. Note the dominance of the voiceless stops /k/ and /t/ in this line,
supplemented by voiced stops /b/ and /d/ and the voiceless affricate consonant /t
∫
/
in ‘par
ch
ed’. Note also that because of their immediately preceding phonetic environ-
ment, the spelled ‘d’s at the end of both ‘mocked’ and parched’ are, when read aloud,
assimilated to the voiceless variant /t/. (This is a good illustration, worth noting in
passing, of the sometime disparity between written language and spoken language.)
Notably absent from the line are the conventionally ‘softer’ sounds like the fricatives
/s/ and /z/, or ‘slushier’ sounds like the fricative /
∫
/ which is (significantly) found in
a word like ‘lu
sh
’. My point is that Spender foregrounds a particular set of conso-
nant sounds in order to embody the dryness, the very desiccated quality of the empty
brook that his poetic line describes.
The example from Hopkins represents a different kind of onomatopoeia, built not
through consonant harmony but by a kind of vowel ‘disharmony’. The highlighted
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67
words in (2) are describing the path of the windhover (a species of falcon) as it flies
at speed through the air. If you try to sound out these words you may notice that
the vowel progression between them is almost discordant, with the articulation of
each new vowel representing a different place and manner of articulation in the oral
cavity. Although accents of English vary, an informal approximation of the six rele-
vant vowels would be: oh – eh – aye – oo – eea – uh. This sequence is a nexus of
phonetic contrasts, between front and back vowels (eh/oo), between open and close
vowels (uh/
ee
a), between lip-rounded and unrounded vowels (oo/eh) and between
shorter monophthongs (oh and uh) and longer diphthongs (aye and eea). My inter-
pretation is that the constant shift in type of articulation, from high to low, back and
forth and so on, follows the movement of the bird itself, such that the crisscrossing
in phonetic space becomes a mirror of the angles, the spiralling and the swooping,
that the windhover makes as it flies through the air. In sum, vowel mimesis works
onomatopoetically by mediating with the nonlinguistic world. And because exam-
ples (1) and (2) both use sound symbolism to invite from the reader an affective
response to a text, they can be said to express poetic
phonaestasia
.
The ‘phonaesthetic fallacy’
Did you find my interpretation of sound symbolism in (1) and (2) convincing? Can
phonetic detail be matched up with a text in such a way? Or perhaps the interpre-
tation reads too much into a few simple vowels and consonants? So were my views
mere hunch?
The simple truth of the matter is that in phonetics there is simply no such thing
as a ‘dry’ consonant or a ‘flying’ vowel, and such impressionistic labels have no place
whatsoever in the systematic study of speech sounds. If such direct connections could
be made, it would mean that every time we encountered a consonant configuration
like that in (1) we would instantly think ‘dry’, or every time we came across a sequence
of vowels like that in (2) we would think of a bird’s flight through the air. We need
look no further than the preceding paragraph of this sub-unit for proof of this point.
In the second sentence, beginning ‘Can phonetic detail . . .’, there were actually more
of the so-called dry /k/, /t/ and /t
∫
/ consonants than there were in the Spender line.
You can go back and count them yourself, but the point is that you are unlikely,
even when reading this sentence again, to conclude that it is a particularly ‘dry’ piece
of prose. More tellingly, the final sentence of the previous paragraph has exactly the
same progression of vowels as the Hopkins line:
oh
eh
aye
oo
eea
uh
so
were
my
views
mere
hunch?
You may have experienced a number of reactions to my sentence – what poor prose
style, what a lame rhetorical question and so on – but I would be very surprised
indeed if you felt that its sound structure mirrored the shimmering flight path of the
European falcon as it flies, spectacularly and fleet of wing, across the horizon.
Clearly, there is a certain risk in trying to connect up directly a particular feature
of sound in a text with nonlinguistic phenomena outside the text, and the sort of
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D E V E L O P M E N T
interpretative practice which does make such direct connections might be termed the
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