Research Report: Sound and Meaning

By John Estioko, Textones

    In Sound and Meaning in English Poetry by Katherine M. Wilson takes a detailed look at the correlation between sound and meaning in language as well as poetry. She guides the reader step by step through the formation of sound in nature up to the more logical processes of assigning meaning to sound in the structure of poetry. Her discourse leads us through the very basic parts of language, such as the alphabet up to more complicated parts including the rhythm and cadence of natural language. Her overall objective is to help the reader realize the musicality that is natural in animals, human language and poetry.

    Sound, music and English poetry share many of the same characteristics. Many people are familiar with the structured forms of sonnets, ballades, villanelles and others; these forms have many components that are common. It is no accident that when close reading or speaking of a sonnet that common terms of description include the octave and the chorus. The author of Sound and Meaning in English Poetry, Katherine M. Wilson, studies the connection between the formation of English poetry and the intrinsic song that comprises life. The very detailed study includes looking at the structure and formation of the English language and how that is intertwined with the formation of emotional and logical meaning.

There is little information available online or in print resources to provide an adequate background of the author. The book in question was first published in 1930 and I would think at the time it would have been seen as something out of the ordinary in scholarly circles. The only information available about the author is that she received a PH.D from Cambridge and her main area of study includes studying the versification of English poetry. Versification is the study of the phonetic characteristics of a language and deriving information as to pitch, rhythm, inflection and various other aspects. (Hieatt)

      The "sound" portion of Wilson's book is a close study of the musical characteristics of poetry. Questions the author brings up are if music came from speech or speech from music as well as if poetry was a setting for music or vice versa. A very interesting thought that the author studies are the aspects of music that are present in nature. Rhythm is equated to a beating heart and melody to the singing of birds. There seems to be an intrinsic connection between our nature and the formation of song with the components of our language taking on some of those characteristics as well as assisting them. The ideas in the beginning portions of Wilson's book borrow heavily from the studies of William Gardiner. Gardiner notes that the tones used by humans are usually onomatopoetic in nature and this is something that "nature has impressed upon us" (Gardiner 40). Though Gardiner's studies are very subjective and there are opinions as to sounds that are pleasing to the ear, there is some truth to that which he says. Once Wilson forms the basis of what music is and how it is naturally present she goes on to study the inflection of speech. The author notes inflection as "the modulations of voice with which we speak" (51). The basic idea of inflections is that they influence the emotion that someone derives from speech. Inflections can be used with the idea of versification to define the pitch that is made in different kinds of inflection. The inflection of surprised or rushed speech usually is of a higher pitch than that of speech of a relaxed inflection. The last aspect of music that the author looks at is the cadence of speech. Cadence is caused by several things: line arrangements, sentence and phrase closes (132), there is also the case of rhyme influencing cadence. The ideas presented are very abstract yet they all connect and lead to each other. Cadence is directly influenced by the inflection of speech and the formation of speech is influenced by the nature of sound that surrounds us.

      The "meaning" portion of Wilson's book looks at the significance of sound and how we derive meaning and emotion from sounds as much as the words that are within the poetry. The typical meter of English poetry, iambic pentameter, is structured so that there is emphasis on some syllables, moreover, this emphasis can be used aesthetically to emphasize certain sounds rather than whole words. There are component parts to the formation of meaning and language, the author looks at the alphabet and concludes that "English, used properly, has no really unmelodious words" (230). The English language can be separated to component parts, common collections of letters that form words (such as: es, ce, th, ht) from these parts a tone or pitch can be found. By using these ideas it is possible to make music and meaning agree well and thus influence the aesthetic of a poem. Shakespeare particularly uses sounds to influence meaning; a specific example would be the "oe" sounds in his 30th sonnet, "sad account of fore-bemoaned moan". The repetition of sounds has an intrinsic onomatopoetic connection to sounds one would naturally make in response to a certain emotion.

This item is of interest because we are attempting to assign music to meaning. At this point in time the assignation is primarily arbitrary but if there is intrinsic meaning to the formation of language we would hope to find a musical pattern that displays that. The work studies specific methods of deriving meaning from poetry; those include simplifying component parts of language and finding audible meaning in that. This seems contradictory to our methods of interpretation at this point as we are assigning musical meaning to parts of speech. Yet if there is meaning to the formation of English poetry and sentences there should be a significant pattern as sentences are formed logically (noun + verb + object). If the formation of poetry is significant in respect to the formation of sentences then we would be able to assign tones to the component parts of speech and discover musical significance. The work would also be a good starting point to other studies, an example would be a phonetically significant musical study of language, and by assigning tones to individual phonetic parts we may be able to construct words as music. Yet this would be somewhat of a redundant work because as Wilson said language, speech and words are already musically significant.

Resources

Gardiner, William. Music of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849.

Available at http://books.google.com/books?id=umYPAAAAYAAJ

Hieatt, Kent. "Versification". University of Colorado. 02/20/2008 <http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy2/E64ContentFiles/LiteraryGenres/Versification.html>.

Wilson, Katherine. Sound and Meaning in English Poetry. Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1930.