Textual Practice 24(4), 2010, 607– 621

Simon Jarvis
The melodics of long poems

A tune is meaningless. Unless – it be deliberately made into, be coerced

into becoming, some sign or symbol. So stands one orthodoxy of one
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

kind of poetics, and so does poetics declare, upon every occasion when
any such article of faith is repeated, the continuation of its own indefinite
war against poetry: a war in which its disposition towards the enemy is one
of exaggerated respect and murderous deafness. The music of spoken
language, poetics can upon such occasions be sure, is ‘meager’, so
meagre that it not only is meaningless but also in addition can furnish
no pleasure except in harmony or in counterpoint with meaning, in that
amalgam of the sensory with the logical which poetic language is held to
constitute.1
But is a tune meaningless?
Let us compare two situations, both instances triggering a belief
system of pseudo-magical efficacity. In one, I arrange for that almost
incomprehensibly complex series of economic and political co-operations,
by which, at the end of 10 days, will arrive on my desk a copy of Boris
Eikhenbaum’s The Melodics of Russian Lyric Verse; in another, a king and
patron is imagined to have been lastingly preserved from oblivion, even
after his death, by means of a sung poem. In both cases what is at stake
is magically efficacious speech: in the latter, an ode, a highly elaborated,
and paralinguistically saturated instance of verbal and musical art, in
which metre, rhythm, and so on constitute not only the gift wrap round
the spell, but rather the very element of its efficacity, a needful melody
without which it not only will not appeal but also will not work, will
not count as an instance of truth, that is to say, of rescue from oblivion;
in the former, an almost perfectly toneless click, the most meanly shrivelled
sound that could be offered and could still be audible in this place, and yet,
for all that, a click which is in fact in no way an important part of the effi-
cacious gesture at work in this transaction, since it is there only for me, to
reassure me by making a little sound at me – just as though, when I move
my hand in just this way, I had indeed actually done something – and since

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2010.499647
 Textual Practice

I can if I please turn this sound off or turn it up or turn it into any little
tune I choose.2
What is the relation between these two events? In one case, the sound
of sung verse is itself understood as indivisibly efficacious. Its efficacity does
not lie in this or that part of its sonic texture, but in the entire complex
series. Certainly, the efficacity lies from one point of view simply in the
belief system that has made of poets the engineers against oblivion, and
which is prepared to accept that this is indeed a poet; yet the poet must
still sing, cannot do the job just by turning up and being his lovable,
magical self; the spell must be cast in these and just these numbers,
which do not dress it but are it. In the other case, no idea could be
more absurd, as though my bookseller should demand that orders be sub-
mitted only in dactyls or trochees. That a tune is meaningless, this univer-
sally acknowledged truth, goes along with the other one that a tune, since it
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

cannot mean anything, is also a perfectly private matter, that a tune is

always just up to me. We can contrast, then, not only two ontologies,
but also two political economies, of sound, except that, for the second of
them, sound can have no more to do with political economy than some
gravy stains on the Speaker’s tie.
Yet, at the same time all of us, with our ears and brains, know all this
to be perfectly untrue. We know that it is not true that a tune is meaning-
less. Parents and teachers consider this melody, known to you all:

This tune – let us call it, ‘Refrain: One’s joy is built upon another’s
woe’ – has a precise meaning, known to every one: it means: ‘I have the
better of you’. We can say if we like that this melody is merely a symbol
of that proposition, that it comes to stand in for it, and yet this does not
quite seem certain, because it, in fact, has this meaning without ever
needing to be paraphrased, just as in language acquisition and in the com-
position of verse alike, intonation contours precede, make possible, and
conjure up the individual semantic items which are later to fill them and
bring about a poem or a perfectly crafted request for a new Sony Play
Station.3 This tune and its meaning spread, irresistibly and ineradicably,
without ever needing to be taught; literacy never means the end of
orality, and a print culture of poetical texts is always also at the same
time an oral culture of verse rhythms. One professional analyst of this
phenomenon has suggested that it is seriously deficient to regard such

608
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

tunes simply as signs of propositions, because, after all, tunes are at work in
every and any proposition and are at work to syntactical, and even to
semantic, ends. (The click I mentioned earlier is a kind of limit case, as
representing the fantasy of the perfectly tuneless utterance, perfected
anti-language, the Monsanto seed of speech acts.) My expert suggests
this, instead: the intonation contour is itself a kind of speech act.4 In
other words, this tune is not representing, symbolising, or otherwise signify-
ing a proposition held elsewhere and containing the meaning: the tune itself
is already the meaning.
Why so much about tunes? We’re not talking about lyric? But what
would that question imply about long poems? That they are too long for
melodies to matter, perhaps; that here, if anywhere in verse, a melodics
would be otiose.5 Anyone who works on prosody will have had the experi-
ence of its being assumed that he or she is therefore working on ‘lyric’, an
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

assumption that often brings along with it two further assumptions: that
lyrics are short and that melodics cannot be of central interest in the
case of long poems.6 But, there are some good reasons for not going
along with this. Not so long ago, it was demonstrated at length that ‘the
meter known as the dactylic hexameter of Greek epic originated from
lyric meters and that these lyric meters have an ancient heritage that can
at least be partially recovered through the comparative method of Indo-
European linguistics’.7 And this also implies the centrality of melodics to
epic right from the start. The metrical line is the compositional cell of
the long poem, before it becomes ‘the long poem’; the possibility of recom-
position-in-performance, essential to all long poems before they are cor-
ralled first into orally standardised and quasi-identically recapitulated,
then into written, and finally into printed texts, depends for its possibility
upon the formula, a unit which is at once metrical and syntactic and
semantic. When all these songs have dried into print, the formula, living
repetition as the ever-exploding, ever-generating cell, looks instead like a
calque: now sounds, not like the seminal word and tune it is, but like some-
thing insufficiently worked over, a dead spot.
This introduces the dialectic of melodics in the printed metrical long
poem or, rather, in the long poem as such, since the phrase ‘long poem’,
with its rational but helpless quantification, comes into being only when
the signs of death have clearly begun to appear on the faces of the old
genres (genres which were themselves the distorting death-masks of insti-
tutions, powers, and occasions). When I had just begun to fall into
prosody as a field of study, an older and wiser poet and critic reported
to me the prescient remark of an elder of his own: ‘Don’t go in: it’s a grave-
yard’. Yes, the problem is not peculiar to melodics, though; every long
poem is a cemetery, in so far as that of which it actually consists, these
printed marks, which of course because they include not only letter

609
 Textual Practice

forms, but also the myriad intonational directions offered by the so-called
accidentals, commas and points, indentations, cream or beige space, all this
can and must be a diagram of the recomposition in performance which of
course still takes place every time any poem is read, even silently, but now
within certain completely fixed and inalterable limits. And for just this
reason, of course, every long poem is also not only a cemetery but also,
each time it is read, a partial resurrection of the flesh, the resuscitation
of those voices of the dead which have been sealed up in it.
The line, in other words, is still the cell. It does not merely contain
ideas that the poet thought of earlier. It generates ideas, suggests them;
the old formula colonises and creates new thoughts. But this printable
poet is – an author. Here indeed is an idea which he, or she, has made
earlier. Large schemata are drawn up – plot, allegory, argument, and so
on – and sometimes drawn up even in prose, itself a late and baroquely
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

specialised form of art-writing, for the poet then to work at recasting in

verse. For this reason, every long poem ends in failure, a failure which is
at the same time the condition of the possibility of its life. Each of these
compositional generators – line and design – is murderously disposed
towards the other. At any point in the poem where the cooperative antag-
onism between them does not appear to be in active effect, the poem itself
will seem simply to have fallen asleep, followed in short order by its reader.
The poem can succeed only if neither principle is perfectly satisfied. In
other words, it can succeed only upon condition that it fails.
In 1962, J.H. Prynne diagnosed what he understood to be an involu-
tion of the English meditative poem taking place somewhere in the shift
from first- to second-generation Romanticism. ‘Meditative poetry. . .at
some point after Wordsworth’s last contact with the Augustan tradition
abandoned the ambition to present the reflecting mind as part of an experi-
ential context and withdrew into a self-generating ambience of regret. With
this went an amazing degree of control over incantatory techniques,
designed to preserve the cocoon of dream-like involvement and to present
a kind of constant threshold music – the apparent movement of a gravely
thoughtful mind. While the melancholia is switched on this noble under-
current is unfailingly present’.8 Prynne’s short talk still (for us, at least, if
not for him) represents advanced thinking about a problem that has not
been solved, but parked. What he calls the ‘virtuoso incantation’ thus
developed is, for him, an alibi. It is as though Wordsworth’s sense of the
anaesthetic properties of metre, metre’s ability to make the intolerably
painful bearable and even pleasurable, were to have become full-on narcosis.
Wordsworth’s austere refusals to heap his line with instrumentations
would by these later poets have been lapsed from. What replaces it is, in
Prynne’s account, designed not to reveal experience, but to blot it out.
The techniques of incantation are a cocoon. Life, the unbearable, lies

610
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

beyond them. So they are also a fetish, mere stuff fixated upon so as to
obviate experience.
Viktor Zhirmunsky had displayed the nuts and bolts of this, as Prynne
in his short talk could not, in his book Rhyme: its history and theory, published
in 1923. Zhirmunsky develops an extended contrast between two different
ways of handling rhyme in modern European, and especially in Russian,
poetry. One kind of poet, like Pushkin and Baratynsky, holds to a particular
series of canons about rhyme. Parallelisms must not proliferate. Rhyme-
words should belong to different parts of speech. The automatism associated
with rhyme is held against a refusal of automatism at the level of semantics
and syntax. The rhymes both sound and think.9 But, there is also another
way – what Zhirmunsky calls the ‘musical-impressionistic’ handling of
rhyme, already gathering in Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Fet, but reaching
a fortissimo in the verse of the Russian Swinburne, Konstantin Bal’mont.
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

Bal’mont delights in just that plethora of parallelisms which had seemed

vulgar to the earlier masters. Rhyme words come not only from the same
parts of speech but also as part of repetitions of entire phrasal and
melodic structures.
These two types of prosodic repertoire, of course, are also two reper-
toires of thinking. Yet, for Zhirmunsky, it is clear that more thinking is
going on in one repertoire than in the other. He remarks that ‘The roman-
tic poets, who sought chiefly for effects of sound, are especially fond of
short measures: the latter, characterized by the marks of an incantatory,
“musical” effect, represent an obscuration of the side of verse which has
to do with meaning, of the substantive significance of words, and a heigh-
tening of the general emotional coloration’.10 Pushkin’s and Baratynsky’s
or Batiushkov’s rhyme-technique lights meaning up, by counterpointing it;
Bal’mont’s obscures it, drowning it out in music. Zhirmunsky explains in
precise terms, then, just what the ‘virtuoso incantation’ of which Prynne
speaks might consist in. We find in both Zhirmunsky and Prynne a
sharply Platonic consensus about what thinking is and what its relation
to sound might be. ‘Musical’ rhyming, however ‘amazing’ its ‘mastery’,
is and must be cocoon or stimulant. It cannot itself be admitted to be a
kind of thinking or involved in noticing. Instead, it screens those percep-
tions out. Musical rhyming is automatism. It is Ion’s chain of magnets: the
series of automatic transmissions of inspiration awarded by Socrates to
rhapsody so as to destroy the rhapsode’s claim to cognition.11
But are melodies the opposite of thinking in this way? Is there not a
musical or a prosodic thinking, a thinking that is not simply a little picture
of, nor even a counterpoint to, that more familiar kind of thinking whose
medium is essentially semantic and syntactic, but one whose medium,
instead, is essentially prosodic: a kind of thinking in tunes? Line and
design, this Tancred and Clorinda, do not, in the long poem, enter only

611
 Textual Practice

into a combat between melody and thinking, but, also, between two kinds
of thinking. Both melody and thinking are at work in both line and design,
as the intonational cues essential to argument, narrative, rhetoric, and
syntax collide or go along with those held out by metre and rhythm. In
which case, might this ‘virtuoso incantation’ be, not simply a screen or a
cocoon or an anaesthetic, but a medium – a medium for thinking and
for thinking about historical experience, even, perhaps, when in the very
act of apparently retreating from it?
One leading method for understanding the melodics of long poems,
then, the doctrine of verbal mimesis, is faulty not simply because of its
underlying metaphysics, but because it turns this war to the life, the war
between line and design, into placid cooperation, a division of labour in
which design supplies the idea and line its decoration. Pope’s own adherence
to this doctrine concealed perhaps even from himself the degree of his invest-
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

ment in line; accordingly, the poem in which he most exhaustively and con-
spicuously executed his own exhortations to verbal mimesis, his Ode for
Musick of 1713, is perhaps also his worst poem. Melody dies into word-
painting. The thought is enfeebled just in so far as everything has been
put into its service. The ‘Essay on Man’, on the other hand, is deathless
just in so far as the continuous explosions of wit, arranged for by Pope’s
rhymes, think back against, detonate, those inert cosmological and moral
schemas which they should, according to Pope’s own poetics, meekly exem-
plify. The English Pindaric, the long and ‘greater’ lyric, owes its multiple
deaths and rebirths, a sequence that is still in train even today, precisely to
this war to the life between line and design. Its programme, from the
start, was and was received as a programme of abstract freedom; the anti-
nomies and crises of the so-called free verse repeat, whether as tragedy or
farce, those of the Pindaric.12 The mode generated several imperishable mas-
terpieces precisely because of the impossibility of the programme; because
line at every important point in the institution thinks back against the
inertly emancipated and dead anything-whatever of design.
How melody in the greater lyric sings back against its would-be sub-
ordination, whether this is attempted by means of pictorialisation or thea-
tricalisation, can be well heard in William Collins’s ‘The Passions. An Ode
for Music’.13 The compilers of Sheridan’s and Henderson’s Practical Method
of Reading and Reciting English Poetry, Elucidated by a Variety of Examples
taken from some of our most Popular Poets, and the Manner pointed out in
which they were read or recited by the above Gentlemen have this to say
about Collins’s Ode:

We cannot recommend to the scholar a piece of poetry better

adapted to the practice of reading than the foregoing. If read with
propriety, it will soon correct the monotonist of that sameness of

612
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

tone, which so disgusts in most common readers, and with which no

person can ever reasonably expect to give pleasure to those who are so
unfortunate as to be his hearers.14

Collins’s Ode is supposed to educate the reader away from the monotone.
It requires continual variations of tone. We can get an idea of what these
consisted in if we look at Sheridan’s and Henderson’s detailed instructions
for reading particular passages. How, for example, to read these two lines?

Throng’d around her magic cell,

Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting.

The words marked must be delivered as conveying a kind of echo to

Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

the sense. The first in a sort of voice, expressive of exultation, with a

pause ere you proceed. The second in a tone of fear and trembling;
the third expressive somewhat of rage; and the last with a weak
voice, low and fainting. There ought to be a short pause at the end
of each.15

We see here what sound echoing sense could come to mean by 1796. There
isn’t really any way in which the italicised words do echo the sense; they’re
all pretty similar rhythmically; but because of the doctrine, the reciter is
nevertheless expected to produce this alleged ‘echo’ effect. In order to
produce an effect of exultation, the word exulting should be read out ‘in
a sort of voice, expressive of exultation’. If these instructions are followed,
they produce a mode of delivery that would tend to make of Collins’s Ode
for music the faithful continuator of Pope’s 1713 one.
The monotone, meanwhile, had strengths of which Sheridan and
Henderson were possibly ignorant. Boris Eikhenbaum’s essay, ‘On
reading poetry aloud to a small audience’, contrasts two kinds of recitation:
the actorly and the lyrical. The first points up semantic, thematic, rhetori-
cal, and psychological contrasts and climaxes and the second is widely said
to be a monotone: ‘Especially strange for the public in the manner of poets’
– Eikhenbaum comments – ‘seems to be its songlike character – it imparts
monotony and uniformity to the reading. In part this impression arises
because the public listens to the poets in the context of actors’ recitations:
melodic intonation, irrespective of its upward and downward movements,
is perceived, against the background of dramatic or psychological
intonations, as monotony. In fact the vocal intervals which are utilized
in the readings of Mandel’shtam, Akhmatova or Bely are quite likely to
be greater in quantity than those which we make use of in ordinary
speech’.16

613
 Textual Practice

Melodic intonation, Eikhenbaum suggests, actually has very wide

pitch intervals; the impression of monotony comes from giving underlying
metrical sets their full weight in delivery, as against that delivery that would
point listeners towards particular interpretations by means of non-metri-
cally or rhythmically motivated points of emphasis. Anyone who has
heard, for example, the recordings of Tennyson or of Yeats reading their
poems, and then contrasts these with readings by modern actors, will be
able to appreciate this contrast. Eikhenbaum comments thus, about
hearing a reading by Blok: ‘. . .for the first time I did not experience the
feelings of awkwardness, embarrassment and shame which “expressive”
recitations had invariably aroused in me. Blok read indistinctly, in a mono-
tone, somehow in individual words, evenly, making pauses only at the ends
of lines. I felt that the poem was being given to me, but not performed to
me. . .It did not exert violence or commit fraud upon me, because it did
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

not exert violence or commit fraud upon the poem itself’.17 Those
readers whom Sheridan and Henderson found disgustingly monotonous
are likely instinctively to have appreciated the difference between giving
a poem to their auditors and performing it for them and also to have
understood the disastrous consequences that an actorly mode might have
for the central fabric of the poem’s melodies.
Sheridan’s and Henderson’s reading of the cues provided by the train
of personifications has led them to read the poem in a direction that it
cannot bear. When they get to the end of the poem, we find this: ‘We
shall’, they say ‘leave out the remainder of the poem, as it affords no oppor-
tunity in which a reader can exercise his talents’.18 It is significant that they
think about this part of the poem. This is just the point at which the argu-
ment is delivered. Music has become over-elaborated. It needs to return to
an ancient simplicity, although such a return may now be impossible.
Implied here is a farewell to the music-ode in the form it took under
Pope and Dryden. Their Cecilia, with her ‘mingled world of sound’, is con-
trasted with Greek simplicity.19 And the reference comes in a train of coup-
lets, which do not depart at any point from adjacent rhyming and from the
sevens and eights of Milton’s Allegro and Penseroso.
This closing passage, which so resists the actors, offers us our clue for
the way in which the Ode as a whole needs to be interpreted. Passages of
continuous sevens and eights both open and close the poem. In other
words, it is not a full Pindaric, but rather a sort of framed Pindaric. The
interior excursions are samples or examples of wildness. They are instances
of passion. Strophically, meanwhile, the Ode is something like a collision
between the Horatian and the Pindaric, or, better, an acceleration and
explosion of the Horatian into the Pindaric. From sevens and eights, it
moves, as soon as the passions start trying out music’s lyre, into quatrains.
Each passion is at first given a single quatrain, but Hope gets more. Hope,

614
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

just where the others have given up, refuses to give back the rhyme, but
gives a new one and, at the same time, introduces the poem’s first ten;
more and more long lines appear, until the last lines of Hope’s hypertro-
phied stanza are both twelves.20
This small technical fact represents a decisive innovation in the history
of the greater ode. Melodic repertoires live and die in history, and part of
their death is that tunes turn into signs. When the Pindaric has been
repeated fifty or a hundred or a thousand times, it ceases gradually to be
responded to as a real vehicle for melodic transformations and starts to
be seen instead as a marker: the marker of a certain kind of genre which
is a sign leading the reader to expect certain kinds of content or trope.
Collins, by starting out in the manner of the Allegro and Penseroso,
by shifting to the Horatian ode, and by then unfolding this into
quasi-Pindaric freedoms, is not merely doing something boring and
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

routine like subverting or undermining readers’ expectations, but is pre-

venting verse melody from shrinking to a sign. The ode is reactivated as
a repertoire of possible expressive effects.
Because of its peculiar extent and shape, Pindaric foregrounds in a
new way an old question for melodics: the question how long it takes a
rhyme to decay and still remain a rhyme. Collins pushes at this wound
throughout. Just where the genre seems to break down or explode, at the
shift from Horatian to Pindaric, where the a rhyme is denied in Hope’s
stanza and a c rhyme given instead; just here, the denial of the rhyme is
not any old denial, but one on which the poem’s mode and identity
pivots, because its absence means that the poem is turning out to be a
different kind of poem from the one we thought it was; and this rhyme,
awaited with unconscious eagerness or anxiety, does not come back until
the very end of this stanza. To think of this as mimetic in some way of
‘Hope’ would shrink Collins’s thinking-through-technique. The rhyme
is likely to be something we are fumbling for with half our mind, while
the rest of it is following the argument. Decayed or lost rhyme memoria-
lises the mode overcome.
And so the identity of the stanza itself becomes something proble-
matic. The poem begins as an apparently non-stanzaic poem, which,
however, then breaks up into quatrains and, further, into irregular
stanzas. In the first printing, the gaps between the stanzas, though, are
only very slightly larger than the gaps between lines. And the relation of
stanza length to page size means that in that first printing, it is often
very difficult to tell where one stanza has ended and another has begun.
There is a way in which, in fact, this poem represents a kind of giant mono-
stanza, where the overall shape – a curve away from regularity to irregular-
ity and back again – leaves a more important impression on the reader
than the shape of any individual stanza. Rhymes tie quatrains to irregular

615
 Textual Practice

paragraphs: constraint is pushed forward until it bursts into apparent free-

doms, or freedoms are shown their truth in constraints. It is, in fact, almost
impossible to produce a rhyme scheme of this poem, because if you take
the whole poem as a single unit, you run out of letters in the alphabet,
but if you break it down into stanzas, you have no way of expressing its
hardest-thinking rhymes, the metastrophic ones. The difficulty of con-
structing a rhyme scheme is, in fact, not merely a difficulty for poetics
but also a symptom of one of the poem’s most considerable prosodic
achievements – its disintegration of the absoluteness of the distinction
between line and stanza.
And this perhaps puts us in a position to offer an interpretation of the
poem as a whole, an interpretation proceeding from melodics to argument,
just as, in this poem, argument is generated out of melody and not simply
poured into it. The poem registers that difficulty which Johnson noticed
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

about the pleasure given by the long lyric: ‘Both the odes’, he says (that
is, both Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast and Pope’s Ode for Musick), ‘want
the essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence
of settled numbers. It may be alleged, that Pindar is said by Horace to
have written numeris lege solutis: but as no such lax performances have
been transmitted to us, the meaning of that expression cannot be fixed;
and perhaps the like return might properly be made to a modern Pindarist,
as Mr. Cobb received from Bentley, who, when he found his criticisms
upon a Greek Exercise, which Cobb had presented, refuted one after
another by Pindar’s authority, cried out at last, Pindar was a bold fellow,
but thou art an impudent one’.21 That metrical instability, which had
characterised the Pindaric from its Cowleyan beginnings, and which
remained for much of the following century one of the most applauded
characteristics of Dryden’s performance, was for Johnson already a liability.
Collins’s ode is no longer attempting to use metre and rhythm for mimetic
effects, whether as in the modal shifts practised by Dryden or as in the
word-paintings of Pope. We can read its shape, the way in which what
begins as a Horatian ode gradually unfolds or blossoms or explodes into
a Pindaric, before returning once more to the stricter form, as a coded cri-
tique of Dryden and Pope. Collins is not only asking for the return of
music. He is attempting to do it. Music returns in his poem because
metre and rhythm are no longer bound down to a pictorialising function.
There is, of course, a pictorial imagination almost frenziedly at work in this
poem; but it is at work in Collins’s rhetoric, in his train of personifications,
and it does not need imperialistically to lay hold of the melodic texture of the
poem and bind that down to its purposes too. And in this sense, Sheridan’s
and Henderson’s idea that the poem is above all suited to the display of tonal
variety may be a mishearing of it. Its melodic texture constitutes as it were a
single curve, rising from calmness to excitement and falling back again like

616
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

Webern’s great passacaglia. In framing Pindaric irregularity and in binding

up his stanzas into a single monody, Collins is doing two things at once. He
is returning to a certain simplicity, but he is also showing himself capable of
evoking Cecilia’s mingled world of sound, the sound-world of Pope’s and
Dryden’s odes for music. This poem, as it were, wants to eat those two
poems alive; they are heard singing as though from inside it.
The long poem, then, is a war to the life, in which line must show
itself the equal of design, if the whole body is not to become sclerotic.
Let me, then, in conclusion, offer battlefield maps of three long poems
from the very era taken as the zenith of incantation, proper names tempor-
arily postponed in order to direct attention to the descriptions. (All three
maps are the result of ‘actually doing a reading’.)
How one long poem, then, the one understood as the high-watermark
of intonational ascesis, instead unfolds in a medium intensely melodic –
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

but a melody which is not the rousing return to parallelisms, pushing

syntax and semantics and rhetoric and intonation together into a parody
of the good old anthem, but instead a new kind of breathlessness: a rational
breathlessness, where the idea of the line itself is made to help out the
movements of thought, so that an argument, which might choke the lis-
tener if transcribed in prose, is instead allowed to sing at just those
points where it most concentratedly thinks. The connection between
metre and diction is not so much severed as systematically uprooted.
This is a work of grubbing up which is never done, just in so far as that
connection between special language and metrical set has by this date for
all readers of poetry become a kind of second nature. So that the extirpa-
tion of that connection, throughout, is the continuous work of thinking;
thinking here happens not in opposition to melody but partially by
means of it. It is like a prose that has begun to sing, yet which pushes to
an even more exacting sharpness the criterion of making prose sense
already established by the best poets of the previous century. The renuncia-
tion of inversions, of hypotaxis, nevertheless newly accompanies a persist-
ent non-coincidence of metrical and syntactic limits, so that the gentle falls
and undulations of the previous century’s unrhymed verse are diverted into
a more powerful and sustaining current. And this at the same time means
that the unit of the sentence grows to an unforeseen extent and in an
unforeseen way. This new verse sentence turns round upon itself, amplifies
or qualifies itself, and illustrates or negates or dissolves itself; so that design
feels itself continuously obliged, after these acts of worked self-transcen-
dence, to utter a series of recovering coughs of apology, short protocols
of authorial housekeeping, which themselves then gather into the next
cloudburst: The Recluse, the unfinished philosophic song.
Or, to take another instance, we find in another long poem an archa-
ism, which is able to become the essential means of poetical innovation

617
 Textual Practice

precisely in so far as the poet does not frame for us a quaint manner from
the past, in which to paint the story he has got ready beforehand, but,
rather quite evidently begins with only the palest intimations of design,
allows design, also lexicon, to be created by being thrown off from the
melodic repertoire. This poem’s first, hostile critics accurately identified
a certain automatism or game of bouts-rimées as the principle of its compo-
sition; or, rather, what they considered to be its automatism was instead the
engine of its thinking. Register is detached from metrical set, here, not by a
work of extirpation, but by the very priority of melodics over argument, so
that what the critics are still trying to police as bathos becomes instead the
camp and virtuosic collapsing of registers and levels in whole passages and
also in single phrases. From this series of spirals crystallise phrases whose
energy could have been arrived at in no other way: let ‘tiptop nothings’
stand for the way the beginning of the third book arrives at satire of an
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

expectorating vehemence unmatched since Oldham’s Satires against the

Jesuits; simultaneously, notice how for each word this poem recovers
from the obsolete verse-bank, it coins another: any elegantly despairing
presupposition of lateness, any idea that the language is done and
dusted, is broken open just in so far as the priority of the tune keeps allow-
ing new verbal material to be made up in order to fill it: rhythmic reper-
toire becomes once again, as it had not been for two centuries, the
motor of semantic innovation. Endymion, indolence as diligence.
Or, in another case, and finally, hear another mode in which urbanity
is not ditched as a criterion, but retained even while the most richly musical
patternings and echoes are woven around it: ‘And frost performs in these
what fire in those’. A momentum as powerful as Milton’s is achieved
not in the renunciation of rhyme, but while making rhyme return twice,
courting severe difficulty and surmounting it with apparent ease. Syntax
and argument, a powerfully organising ratiocination, drive the verse
onward through its many carriages; while all the while, at just the same
time, the individual line is coloured with the most delicate, the subtlest,
instrumentations, not alone with chiasmic ornaments of vocalic and con-
sonantal material, but also with interior rhythmic patternings. Now
there will be a perfectly antithetical poise between two halves of a line,
in which the same tune rings out in both; now the line will bunch all its
emphases together in the middle or at the end of the line; now a whole
series of lines will run two metres against each other simultaneously, so
that a whole passage can be construed either as tens or as sixes; so that
the same passage is, as it were, at once epic and lyric. The tension
between plethoric parallelism and its deliberate negation is kept perfectly
taut, so that, in fact, the entirety of the poem is a conflict between the
apparently irresistible momentum of syntax, rhetoric, narrative, and
argument, driving us through, and the rational seductions and detentions

618
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

worked into the fabric of each line: so that now some small monosyllable,
some is or I or O, will be made to bear at once the burden of metrical and
syntactical interpretation, or be forced, impossibly, to choose between
them; so that, underneath that false Triumph of Life which the poem nar-
rates as an allegory of self-preservation, a true triumph of life emerges,
never stated, never narrated, but heard in the poem’s melodic fabric.
Deaths and rebirths of the Pindaric, I suggested earlier, constitute a
series, which is still in train. The fantasies and possibilities of freedom
from constraint, which surface with that genre, are pursued in a still
more drastic and more exhilarating or more deluded form when the idea
of the complete renunciation of metre becomes widely established as a fun-
damental possibility for poetry. With that, too, the character of metrical
verse, and of all the devices associated with it, changes irrevocably. These
devices now bear a symbolic weight, are saturated with metacommunica-
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

tive force, to a degree which outstrips anything which had previously

been known. All those paralinguistic or extralinguistic features of verse
which constitute the printed indices of its melodics, rhyming, indentation,
majuscules and minuscules, letter-forms, as well as metre and rhythm too,
become, first of all, badges, marks of affiliation, readily legible to friend and
foe alike, who, as it were, already know all about you before you have even
begun to open your mouth: verse as haircut. This metacommunicative
aspect of verse paralanguage, of course, has never been absent; but its inten-
sive saturation as a series of party poetical markers has tended to drown out
altogether the force of melody as thinking, as an expressive repertoire of
enormous complexity and of almost irrecoverable implicitness. Total
absorption in the work and play of melody as thinking is what stops
these repertoires dwindling to a narcissistic fantasy of abstract freedom,
on the one hand, to a resentful fantasy of masterful craft, on the other.
The living long poem tends to destroy the metacommunicative legibility
of its melodics, precisely in order to recover them as an array of devices
for thinking. In such a poem, the tune is not a sign, yet neither is it mean-
ingless. Melodics is the way verse thinks at the limit of explicability.

Robinson College, Cambridge

Notes

1 W.B. Wimsatt, ‘One Relation of Rhyme to Reason’, The Verbal Icon. Studies in
the Meaning of Poetry (New York: The Noonday Press, 1958), pp. 152 – 166,
165. But the richness or poverty of music is in no way dependent on the acoustic
complexity of the forces involved. Otherwise, the ‘music’ of Bach’s cello suites
would always be ‘meager’ in comparison to an orchestral piece by Delius. So that

619
 Textual Practice

even were we to grant, as I do not, the assumption that the repertoires of vocal
gestures deployed by poetry are in some absolute qualitative or quantitative
sense insufficiently rich, this would still tell us nothing one way or the other
about the poverty or richness of verbal music, which is dependent not on the
materials, but on what is done with them. For illuminating commentary on
Wimsatt’s argument, see James I. Wimsatt, ‘Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope,
Icon/Symbol’, Modern Language Quarterly, 55.1(1994), pp. 17– 46.The
present essay originated as a talk given at a conference on Long Poems: Major
Forms at the University of Sussex, May 2008. I am grateful to the organisers
for that opportunity to develop some of these ideas.
2 For the first of these situations, see, for a historical study, Marcel Detienne,
The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone
Books, 1996), and, for comparable contemporary cases, Webb Keane, Signs
of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997),
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

pp. 94– 137; for the second of these situations see everyday life.
3 For an illuminating discussion of the relevance of language acquisition to pro-
sodic and phonological features of verse, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry:
The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), e.g. p. 15: ‘language is as sexually charged as sexuality is linguis-
tically charged, and the concurrency of the two processes renders the borders
between elements of language and the “textual”, erotogenic body permeable, as
is clearly seen in psychopathological confusions of the body and language.
While psychoanalytic literature engages the operations of the elements of
the signifier – letters and phonemes – in the “unconscious” and amply docu-
ments the imbrication of language and sexuality, the notion of an “uncon-
scious” is of little help in understanding the poetic “I” because it rests on
the repression of the crucial, formative history of language acquisition. It is
astonishing that Freud’s “science”, which covers all facets of sexual develop-
ment and relies on the operations of the literal and phonemic elements of
the signifier in psychic life, never addresses the history of language acquisition
and its inseparability from the concurrent history of sexualization’. I argue,
however, that there is no reason why the considerations developed by
Blasing should apply only to lyric poetry.
4 Ann Wennerstrom, The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analy-
sis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 142: ‘The
contour is itself a kind of speech act’.
5 ‘Melodics’ has had little currency in the Anglophone study of verse; it is a term
I borrow from the Russian tradition, and, in particular, from Boris Eikhen-
baum, ‘Melodika Russkogo Liricheskogo Stikha’ in O Poezii (Leningrad,
1969), pp. 327– 511, without implying that all the necessary features of a
melodics of verse are to be found in Eikhenbaum’s study, which was written
immediately after the Russian Revolution.
6 Blasing’s oscillation in her important discussion between ‘poetry’ and ‘lyric
poetry’ (for example, in the fourth full paragraph of p. 30 of Lyric Poetry)
perhaps constitutes a kind of practical admission that many of the phenomena

620
 Simon Jarvis The melodics of long poems

which she discusses in the first, theoretical, portion of her book might belong
to verse as such rather than only to ‘lyric’ in particular. Prosody is the elephant
in the room for much of the discussion of ‘lyric’ in a recent issue of Publications
of the Modern Language Association of America (January 2008, vol. 123, no. 1),
although Jonathan Culler addresses the difficulty in his ‘Why Lyric?’,
pp. 201– 206. Once more, when Culler suggests that ‘Lyric is the foreground-
ing of language, in its material dimensions, and thus both embodies and
attracts interest in language and languages – in the forms, shapes and
rhythms of discourse’ (p. 205), I would want (with appropriate qualifications
to the formula) to extend this to art-verse as such and to question the idea that
longer or non-lyric poems do not, or even do not usually, do this. The main
example discussed in the present essay (below) happens to be a long lyric, but
in the closing section, I indicate why I consider melodics to be pertinent also to
three longer poems which are not usually understood as lyrics.
7 Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore,
Downloaded By: [University of Leeds] At: 16:29 15 December 2010

MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 3, describing the

argument of his own Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1974).
8 J.H. Prynne, ‘The Elegiac World in Victorian Poetry’, The Listener, February
14, 1963, pp. 290 –291, 290.
9 For example, V.M. Zhirmunsky, Rifma: eyo istoriya i teoriya (Petersburg, 1923)
[repr. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970, Dmitrij Tschižewski et al. (eds),
with a new preface by the author [Slavische Propyläen: Texte in Neu- und
Nachdrucken, 71]], p. 83, where Zhirmunsky discusses this phenomenon in
Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, anticipating by some decades Wimsatt’s
more often quoted article on the topic.
10 Zhirmunsky, Rifma, pp. 39– 40 (my translation).
11 Plato, ‘Ion 533c–535a’, in Penelope Murray (ed.), Plato on Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 41–42.
12 For ‘diversion’ and the Pindaric, see Joshua Scodel, ‘The Cowleyan Pindaric ode
and sublime diversions’ in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds), A Nation
Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 180–210.
13 Collins, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (London, 1747),
pp. 46 –52.
14 Sheridan’s and Henderson’s Practical Method of Reading and Reciting English
Poetry (London, 1796), p. 38.
15 Ibid., p. 31.
16 Eikhenbaum, Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘O Kamernoy Deklamatsii’, O Poezii
(Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1969), pp. 512– 541, 520 (my translation).
17 Ibid., p. 514 (my translation).
18 Sheridan and Henderson’s Practical Method, p. 32.
19 Collins, ‘The Passions’, p. 52.
20 Ibid., pp. 47– 48.
21 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Lives of the Most
Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2006), 4 vols, vol. 4, pp. 1 –93, 68.

621