4—
Graphonic Tension in English Poetry

Re: reading. In the case of phonemic reading, always potentially a rereading on the spot, a double taking, one sound overtaking another in sequence. Such reading-over is only in this sense an over-reading, trans-segmental, transegmental. For this recursive reading, then, that is thus also a rewriting, read: over eading. All we have to do, and cannot help doing, is to listen as we read—not listen to but listen as our reading. Do this, and the letters list and slip, push and are shoved, fan out or vanish, pun on themselves or double under. The words formed on the run by these letters overlie each other through aural coincidence, the overlapping of graphically indicated phonemes (by elision) or their holding over (by the ligatures of liaison or gemination) from one word to the next. Having already located such slippages in the textual system, indeed in the lexical code itself, first within a broad spectrum of transformational functions in Shakespearean verse, and then within a wider field of phonemic exercise in the habits of English rhyme, and having further considered the linguistic and textual implications of such slippages for a revisionist theory of reading, we are now ready to survey—across the whole range of English literary texts since Shakespeare—the variety and functions of such evanescent effects in action, in context, in force. This is a matter, and a manner, of reading the unwritten, of unwriting the word.

"By Parting Have Joyned Here"

Even by comparison with the typographic exaggerations of Herbert's rhyming triads discussed in Chapter 2, it is Donne among the immediate successors of Shakespeare who offers the most arresting reactivations of the lexical code from within its own erosion. Donne texts everywhere demonstrate the hold that semantic sense has on the textual sensorium: the reader's relentless tendency to control the phonemic in the form of the morphemic, to bracket

free play by syllabification. Despite appearances to the contrary—despite lettering and spacing—even Donne's penchant for monosyllabism subserves the interdependence rather than the discreteness of lexical sequencing. His words are often overrun by each other, under mutual siege. In this sense, Dr. Johnson's famous definition of the metaphysical conceit—"heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together"—points us toward an equivalent violence at the morphophonemic level. In a transegmental thematization of lexical yoking that amounts to a "metaphysical" troping of juncture under the sign of an amorous coupling, Donne's knotty epigram "Pyramus and Thisbe" portrays two lovers who, by parting "love and fear," have themselves "joined here ." In "Love's Exchange," the persona's emphasis is placed on how the woman "knows my pains," a necessary condition lest that "tender shame m ake me mine own n ew w oe." The geminated consonants only begin to articulate the phonemic subtext, the transegmental reading effect, of these lines. In a semantic echo of "paines," the two yoked vocables "Shame make" may well release the syntactically extraneous "ache." At the same time, the lover's recognition of the speaker's pain ("she knows") is transegmentally echoed—as "my known"—along the antiphonal slope of "mine own." The line thus instates a mating of reciprocal empathies across a syntax otherwise engaged. Then too, once "mine" is layered upon "own" to form the unwritten "known," so may the blending of n 's and w 's serve to condense the last three monosyllables; they may thus be overead upon each other in a metrically aided imbrication that elides out "new" altogether, muting the "e" (to /¶ /) in one long-drawn groan of enunciation: "own n (¶ w) woe ."

It should be growing clear that the overead text is related to a sense of "overheard" vocalizations, but only in a special sense. We eavesdrop, but only on our own inner voicing as it sorts through the phonic strata of written language—often in excess of semantic necessity, sometimes of semantic capacity. Texts can be tongue twisters even when the tongue is not in motion; a line of poetry can depend for its effect on plosive alliteration when no lips move. Impedance is a textual as well as a vocal category, as is smoothness, as is flux, and so forth. We might, indeed, think of it this way: words as well as other structures have their own "eaves." To try listening from within such an extension of their basic framework is to overhear the inner workings of linguistic as well as textual structuration. Words have eaves, at least extended edges, abutments; making claims on adjacency, they have leanings and allow easements. The overead text as an overheard text is in this sense the registration of the passive phonemic incursion or overlap across adjacent sounds—not if they were realized by enunciation, but only in the continuous conjecture of the as if . Literary language is not conditioned by voice; rather, vocality remains its persistent conditional, a modality in abeyance.

Miltonalities

In moving forward from Donne into the later seventeenth century, it should be useful to refocus the notion of textual vocalization on certain major texts of the English poet for whom all texts, including his own, came to exist only as a system of phonemes, no longer letters. The blind Milton will not prove anything per se about sighted writers or sighted readers. Nor will his blindness prove anything about the way his verse sounds or should be sounded. Yet can we doubt that, in the tragic fortune of his blindness, Milton became preternaturally alert to one of the intrinsic rather than fortuitous dimensions of text production—its phonic texture? Milton would be worse than useless here if our investigation of his verbal effects were construed to suggest that all poets really take dictation from their own voices and that his need for amanuenses was only a special case of the general phonocentric process of composition-as-utterance, of text-as-transcript. We can, however, come at the issue differently. What is indisputable about late Miltonic composition might well illuminate what elsewhere must at least be held open for investigation. If what we hear in Milton's verses resembles, albeit at times in a more concentrated form, what we register in the contours of much English poetry, or in his own work before blindness set in, then the exceptional facts in his case suggest an overdetermined version of a phonological bias prevalent anyway in English poetry. Milton's texts thus become invaluable as the exemplary intensification of a tendency. It is certainly appropriate in this regard that the famous sonnet on his blindness (Sonnet 19) should provide a transegmental example in the opening line: "When I consider how my light is s pent." The elision that transforms expenditure into confinement is confirmed by binary opposition in the second line, with its image of the mortal prison's "dark world and wide," as well as enhanced by the possibility of a more compressed rhyme with "bent."

Beyond such local effects, Milton happens to be the only writer in this book to have another book entirely devoted to his techniques of lexical contraction under metrical duress, "the cutting out or slurring of a syllable in the flow of speech."^[1] This is the general subject of Robert O. Evans's Milton's Elisions , in which the metrical effects of verbal contractions are explored and debated. A prevalent technique in Milton's prosody for sustaining a metrical pattern across what amounts to a surplus of graphically indicated syllables is what Evans, alluding to Robert Bridges's borrowing of the classical term, calls "synaloepha," defined as "the suppression of hiatus (that is, vowel clash) between words by the cutting out or partial reduction of a vowel" (7). A typical, typographically indicated example from Paradise Lost would be "th' Ethereal sky" (1.45). Well beyond the purview of Evans's analysis, however, are those homophonic elisions, graphically counterindicated, that are found

bridging other lexical gaps than those turning strictly on the hiatus of consecutive vowel sounds. In a cautionary speech by Michael in Paradise Lost , female lasciviousness is imaged as the urge "To dress, and troll the Tongue, and roll the Eye" (11.620). In conjunction with the implied etymology of "trollop" in "troll," there is the transegmental ghost of "droll" (an archaic intransitive verb, functionless here) in "and roll ." It is part of what we might call a phonemic lubriciousness that—by internal echo with the dentalized overdetermination of "and troll"—unifies the image of promiscuous degeneration through a kind of lexical lowest common denominator.

The transegmental phenomenon is, of course, not confined to a version of elision or to its counterpart in liaison. By simple conjunction it can create from two whole words a third. In Samson Agonistes , when the hero blames himself for his sexual ensnarement by Dalila, characterizing himself as "vanquisht with a peal of words" (1.235), we overead the overt seductiveness of "a=p(p)eal" in the explicit denomination of a sound. Direct lexical punning of this sort—stable in its perfect ambivalence, poised exactly between the graphic and the phonic—is less frequent, however, than the passing graphonic ambiguity, lexically operable for only the split second of a sheared lexeme. This can be a fleeting evocation, in sound, of a murmuring whisper of sound: a phonemic mimesis. There is the image of a swarm of flies in Paradise Regained that, no matter how many times it is beaten back, still "returns as oft with humming sound" (4.17). It is a buzzing hum whose very sibilance we can scarcely avoid reading , though we can never see it in the line as written. In Paradise Lost , forewarning of God's "ire" (2.155) were it to be loosed again to fan the "grim fires" (2.170) of hell, the smooth-spoken Belial reiterates the idea of divine retribution twice over, as "rage" (2.170) and then again "vengeance" (2.173), before, three lines later, enfolding effect back into cause for the segmentally ambiguous "Cataracts of F ire" (2.176). Adam later, lamenting the "only consolation left/Familiar to our eyes" (11.304–5), contrasts this narrowed human scope to the unlimited power "Of him who all things can" (11.309). Despite the strange intransitive syntax of that last clause, the touchstone of divinity evoked by it is clearly omnipotence, a limitless enablement ("all things can"). At the same time that other chief attribute of the deity, omniscience, is made to seem consubstantial with the text's very phrasing through the momentary hint (by liaison, and despite the wrong verb number) of "all things (s)can."^[2]

Elsewhere, in Satan's fleeing from God's immediate "ken," there is the image of the archangel as "he wings his way / Not far off Heav'n, in the Precincts of light " (3.87–88). Or the more loaded phonemic irony of Eve's meditation on the apple as "the Cure of all, this Fruit Divine" (9.776). This obverse prolepsis for the subsequent cause "of (f)all" is an irony further

supported by the Latin overtone of "cure" as "care" or "trouble,"^[3] which also appears through repetition in Belial's speech about the fallen angel's only hope in death: "our cure / . . . sad cure" (2.145–46). In such a manner Paradise Lost establishes a phonotextual system in which a phrasing like "With Serpent error wand'ring, found thir way" (7.302), already etymologically redundant (errare : to wander), can never be entirely free of "serpent terror"—and one in which phrasing itself may be all the more readily thematized. In his response to Abdiel's speech about the "Word" by which "the mighty Father made / All things" (5.833), a universe "named" by the language of fiat, Satan Scoffs at this notion of created origin. He instead asserts his own being as "self-begot, self-rais'd" (5.860). His semantic stress on self-generation does not, however, quell the homophonic overtones of that phrasing, for in Satan's hubris we may also hear him claiming to be, through his own incarnate Word, "self-phrased." Beyond this, the additional ironic sense of the fallen archangel as "self-razed" would surface as an unsuccessfully repressed self-indictment, a Miltonic slip of his own fallen tongue.

Whatever Milton may or may not have recognized about his demonic allegiances in Paradise Lost, Blake himself was certainly of Milton's party at times, and knew it. And worried it. In an essay called "Re: Naming MIL/TON," Thomas Vogler evokes the breach or bisection of the precursor's name in the title plate of Blake's poem, going on to suggest that the bardic or Urizenic domain of patriarchy is contrasted with the zone of Beulah, whose "rhythmic babble" anticipates the "prelinguistic, semiotic chora described by Kristeva."^[4] In specifying what we might thus characterize as Blake's "Beulalangue," we can turn to the lateral biplay of an ironized transegmental drift in the Book of Thel . The title figure, anxious about accepting the mantle of human existence, stays sequestered from the toils of mortality in the unpotentiated sphere of Har, a place-name of obscure and undetermined origin. Its etymology might seem, in isolation, a monosyllabic irony, a pun (on "are") that exposes the entirely pre existent limbo (bordering on nescience) of Thel's state, the otherworld of all those things that are not . Once activated by the verse line, however, its thrice-repeated place in the refrain "vales of Har" (plates 2.1, 2.10, 4.22) seems finally to measure as well as to mourn Thel's timorous flight from the demands of being. By the time she has "Fled back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har ," we may well have recognized her symbolic purlieus as a realm removed forever and afar from life's immediate vale of tears. Such vocalized irony taps the semiotic flux beneath the symbolic regimentation of diction without collapsing back into it; its sheer phonic undulation is recuperated by the phonemic order of pertinent differentials as soon as it begins to slip away. By the very fact of irony, of human perspective, the dream of an unfallen invulnerability to the world is

mocked by the iambic twist of what might otherwise be read as a linguistic symptom of that otherworld's own amorphous evocation.

Esemplastic Voicings

For all this, Blake is by no means the most venturesome of the Romantic poets in these transegmental instigations. One thinks immediately of Shelley, then of Keats. The earlier generation of Coleridge and Wordsworth is also given to such phonemic bridgings and slips. Minor poets, too, make certain phonemic tendencies of the period baldly apparent, not just the punster Thomas Hood but Robert Southey as well. In a little-known, comically exaggerated, but in some sense quintessential Romantic text, Southey's 1823 "the Cataract of Lodore," we encounter "In Rhymes for the Nursery" (so the subtitle has it) the description of "Sounds and motions for ever and ever . . . blending," including a stupefying cadence of textual sounds designed to simulate, and finally subsume, the cascading of nature. Almost a dozen lines of dyadic participles—many alliterative, like "Flying and flinging" or "Turning and twisting"—give way to over twice as many pairs of such internally echoing participles as "threading and spreading," "pouring and roaring," "waving and raving," "foaming and roaming." The pattern then fans out to triplets: "Dividing and gliding and sliding," followed relentlessly by "And falling and brawling and sprawling, / And driving and riving and striving"—and so on, through more than another dozen lines of mixed pairs, triplets, and fourfold rhymes tumbling out in a deluge beyond all nursery patience or mnemonics. Cataractic phonology matches the steady plunge of a waterfall in a remorseless fluency of effect, including that transegmental tightening of the chime at the lexically reflexive juncture of a "riven" word in "Andd riving andr iving"—which can thus be taken as two of one or two of the other. Either way, first by elision, then by ligature, internal rhyme converts to exact echo.

Coleridge certainly shares this Romantic instinct for phonetic iteration, especially in an imitative descriptive context, though he never carries it to anything like these lengths. When "Bard Bracy" is asked to address Sir Leoline in Christabel, he speaks like the poet he is, describing a dove "Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan" (1.535) so as to stress the containment within one word of its own released echo. Coleridge is elsewhere capable not just of such insistent paronomasia but of unreserved homophonic punning even more ingenious and strained than Hood's. Coleridge was indeed a self-conscious exegete and theorist of such wordplay, as well as an avid practitioner in both prose and verse. There is a densely punning passage in his 1821 letter to James Gillman that includes two transegmental oddities as lexically defiant as almost anything in Joyce. First there is an aside involving the bilingual deformation of "Poor dear Jew!" into the French "pour dire adieu,"

with its junctural elision of a weak vowel (or synaloepha), and then (in connection with a wound Coleridge has suffered, and with apologies for his "Punarhoeia") the English liaison of "leave it's card on your arm."^[5] The pronoun "it's" in that clause is punctuated with the apostrophe despite its possessive form; it is then glossed by Coleridge as if the apostrophe were a transegmental signal: "Now that last Pun, my dear fellow! is I admit, rather obscure [itself presumably italicized for its play on "cure"]—but if you will imagine a various reading in the margin, 'leave it scarr'd', all becomes clear as a Thames Fog." Coleridge had indeed planned an "Ode on Punning" as well as an essay on the subject, had defended Shakespearean wordplay, and had at one point in his notebooks tossed off the trisyllabic punning aphorism "Anymadversions of an Author's meaning now a days pass for animadversions."^[6]

This leads us inevitably to wonder what signs of this hypertrophied verbal imagination might be visible, or audible, in his poetic texts. From such puzzle-like breaks with spacing—or spacings of the break—as that which converts "its card" into "it scarred," what crossovers are possible in a general verse practice very far from comedy or verbal farce? Any such homophonic alternatives, if mobilized in poetry, would indeed readily find theoretical justification in Coleridge's account of the Shakespearean oxymoron, whose meaning remains "unfixed and wavering."^[7] Likewise, the pun that plays between meanings, especially the phonic doublet that does so by playing between lexemes as two alternate aural segmentations of the same sequence of letters, seems a perfect instance of imaginative instability, "still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected" (104). This is very close, in fact, to Christopher Ricks's characterization of the "anti-pun," of which there is a twofold, phonemically sprung instance (not mentioned by Ricks) in a reiterated line from the Ancient Mariner : "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked" (ll. 157, 162). Until he "sucked the blood" of his own arm, the Mariner was "mute" with drought, unable even to hail an oncoming ship. Twice over, though, the straining toward speech is actually there to be heard in the enunciatory torsion of "lips baked "—a "mute" liaison phrasing exactly that active preterite which is ruled out by being swallowed up in the past participle. At the other end of this doubled refrain we may also hear a transegmental antiphone in which the impossible, the paradoxical "s=unslaked" holds out a mocking chance of relief from within the very source of feverish desiccation.

Or take the famous passage in "The Eolian Harp" added some two decades after the poem's original publication (here as printed in the Errata):

O! the one Life, within us and abroad,
Which meets all Motion and becomes its soul,

A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light,
Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance everywhere
(ll. 26–29)

In textual terms, what exactly dictates the "rhythm" of this "thought," what syncopation and elision, what contrapuntal beats? Here it is worth examining the most direct evocation of the wind harp's seductive melody, whose "long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise" (ll. 18–19). This is a music characterized in the next line as a "soft floating witchery of sound," where the slackening tendency toward elision in "soft floating" only enhances the airy delicacy of the described notes. With actual semantic force, too, a hint of immanent will slips into the collocation "delicious surges " by way of elision at the sibilant juncture. This further argues for the shading of personification in the archaic term "sequacious," which in musical parlance indicates only a strict metrical succession but which in its larger range of denotation (now obsolete) refers to the easily led, the intellectually tractable, the ductile, the pliable, the readily moulded. To the will of the wind, to the "urges" of that nature which is "within us and abroad," to the very breath of life which alone these notes make audible, they are at the same time subservient, dutifully attuned. It is worth recalling here that moment in the Biographia placed as an epigraph to my Prologue, where Coleridge describes the course of reading itself as a wavelike pattern resembling "the path of sound through the air." In this sense, his poem of Eolian visitations might well be meant to identify the "sink and rise" of wind as a trope not only for vocal production but for the very pulse of even silent reading.

The real crux of Coleridge's passage, however, is the metaphysical tenor to which its symbolic wind song is vehicle: the unifying interpenetration of "A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light." These "figures are technically oxymorons," writes M. H. Abrams early in an extensive investigation of the "cognitive infrastructure" organizing the lines.^[8] He sets out to broaden that received reading into an awareness of the larger scientific context of the "figures" provided by Coleridge's studies of optics and acoustics. Revising Newton's holdings on the properties of light, Coleridge came to believe that sound and color were coefficients of each other: "'Color is Gravitation under the power of Light while Sound on the other hand is Light under the power or paramountcy of Gravitation'" (166). Sound, in other words, is light weighted toward a kind of palpability. Though Abrams does not develop his argument in linguistic directions, his researches can help to draw out the transegmental play—the ligature of "alight" in the image "A light in sound"—introduced before the more scientifically couched corollary of the answering notion, "a sound-like power in light." Abrams does note in the first half of the line a

deliberate echo of divine fiat as well as of post-Newtonian physics: in the uttered Word that brought Light. This should only confirm a sense of the lines as playing in their own right between sound and light, sound and the medium of vision—between, in one sense, listening and script, phonic and graphic signification. The phonic ambiguity offers, in short, a reflexive analysis of reading itself under its alternating "paramountcies" of eye and ear. Taken in this way to name the procedures of its own decoding, "A light in sound" becomes "Alight in sound" in the double sense of "brought to light" in sound (lit, lighted, imaginatively kindled) and descended, settled, or come to rest therein (alighted). The past participial form, alight (for alighted ), is already obsolete by Coleridge's day but not therefore less operable as a poetic overtone. If the first version of this transegmental meld only spells out the sense of the oxymoron as scripted ("a=light" as implying "lit in"), the second (the archaic "a=light" as "descended") seems to evoke what Abrams demonstrates (though without mention of the wordplay) as the primary allusive intertext of the line: that theoretical hypothesis which sees sound as light virtually weighted down by a gravitational pull. What Coleridge called the "reciprocal neutralizations" by which the particular qualities of a thing arise in proportional relation to other properties co-present in the object would thus seem to apply as well to that reciprocal elision and reinstatement of the junctural break that determines the morphemic proportion—and, hence, lexical properties—in this perfect aural ambiguity. The "rhythm in all thought" has thus become the rhythm of reading with the ear, an access to the space of imagination beyond the constraints of sheer mental demarcation. Here is that profound coefficiency of light and sound, of eye and ear, in all reading that will not be more subtly—or more indirectly—addressed in English letters before Stephen's meditation on the reciprocal modality of the visible and the audible in the "Proteus" section of Ulysses .

Coleridge the extravagant punster, Coleridge the scientist of optics and acoustics, Coleridge the philosopher of the imagination and the fancy all meet on such a textual terrain. By not resting content with the "fixities and definites" which he claims in chapter 8 of the Biographia ("On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power") are manipulated by fancy without that resynthesizing power of the imagination, lexical transmutation of the sort we have examined "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates." It erodes, in particular, the readerly threshold between eye and ear—between a written sequence and a malleable phonic sequacity—to produce the transegmental or esemplastic reassemblage "alight." In this sense, the poem's titular symbol itself, the wind harp—a structure of taut lines awaiting the breath (or inspiration) of the wind, a material symbol of a latency whose music is potentiated only by the breath of "vocal" performance—is therefore a "meet emblem" (to borrow Coleridge's

phrase from this same poem) of the poem itself, this and any poem. It is an object whose parallel lines are activated only by an inner (at least) enunciation that manifests the two senses of "sequacious," submissive (to creative urges) and sequenced. This is the pliability (within progression) of passively voiced script. The poem, like the wind harp, is thus a model for that "one life within us and abroad" which is the metaphysical touchstone of this whole conceit of collaboration between the natural and the constructed. The conceit is extended, and so reinforced, by the entirely nonmetaphysical fact of silent reading—as in its own way a responsive internalization of the outer text by a voice held always "within us."

The subjective (as well as subvocal) interanimation of textuality is part of the thematic of empathy which energizes an even more pivotal phonemic biplay in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." In the concluding stanza of the ode's revised address to the generalized "Lady," the feminine Other, in which her freedom from despondency is actively willed by the morose persona, an apostrophe to sleep is generated out of the desire to spare her the wakeful "vigil" from which he suffers: "Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing" (l. 128).^[9] In the speaker's originating "wan and heartless mood" (l. 25), he must admit that "I see, not feel" (l. 38) the beauty of nature's forms. Feeling is, from this second stanza on, the negated and unsaid impulse of the text, its vanished power. It nevertheless hovers—in the drift of a wavering fricative—behind the climactic phrase "wings of f (h)ealing," manifesting the psychic cause of that blessing's transferred effect. The more familiar(izing)—and resocializing—phrase, "wings of feeling," denoting that uplift which is feeling (by way of what Christine Brooke-Rose calls the "genitive metaphor") is thus the unsaid cliché whose paraphonic activation is here a self-fulfilling prophecy of the speaker's own restoration, the repeal of the "heartless" by empathy. To vary Wordsworth, feeling comes in aid of healing—and vice versa.

Wordsworth himself is, of course, not a poet of such luxuriant phonic texture as Coleridge nor a writer (despite his name) with the same punning bent. Yet segmental ambiguity still operates in the Wordsworthian text, in both overt and more elusive ways. When, in the narrative poem "Ruth" from Lyrical Ballads , Wordsworth's eponymous heroine, deserted by her lover, goes mad and is summarily "in a prison housed" (no external agency mentioned for the passive verb), it is a metaphoric as well as literal internment from which the mind, well before the body, achieves release. As with the image of the "prison house" everywhere in Wordsworth, what is required is that the imagination break itself free. True to form, Ruth wanted neither "sun, nor rain, nor dew, / Nor pastimes of the May" (ll. 200–201), for, as suggested by the pun on "pastimes," all these joys are recoverable by memory: "They all were with her in her cell" (l. 203). Permitted by the iambic rhythm, though

jolting the syntactic parallelism—unshackling, that is, its semantic grip-lock—is the transegmental sense that this beneficence of nature is so far internalized that it floods the "inner cell" of her spirit (as one might say, "they were all with her innermost soul").

There are other phonotextual effects, just as suggestive, which do not so neatly fit the iambic cues of the given graphic script. By contrast to the clear-cut homophony in "Ruth," the rhetorical question on which the whole consolatory logic of the "Intimations" ode turns—"What though the radiance which was once so bright/Be now forever taken from my sight" (ll. 179–80)—leaves only the least trace of "from eye -sight" in the metrically divergent "from my sight." The (not unwelcome) result is that the difference between "my sight" (figurative as well as literal) and "eyesight" is thrown open to question in the space of an ambiguous lexical juncture. It is, in fact, at exactly this climactic turn of the poem that sight is redefined as a faculty of spirit, paraphrased later as "the faith that looks through death" (l. 189; my emphasis). Hence the rhythm of the verse might seem to have muted but not entirely suppressed the earlier transegmental pun, "fro/m eyesight," as an impertinent equivalence to that keener incorporeal seeing which the ode is striving to define even in the midst of its nostalgia for present and unmediated vision. It is the soul's sight, the mind's-eye-view of retrospect, in particular, that permits each of us (as recovered "seer blest") to envision the "immortal sea" of our origin, "And see the Children sport upon the shore" (l. 168). What in the general sense of these lines is there to veto the probability of the antiphonal phrasing "children's port," designating the threshold of life, the harbor of all arriving and unfettered energies? This is indeed the textual equivalent of those "intimations" the ode has set out to trace, fallings from us, here phonemic shavings, vanishings.

A similar instance, but harder yet to disambiguate—especially if read aloud—is also a case that illustrates more directly the interrelation between expressive sequence and lexical order or, in Paul de Man's terms, between rhetoric and grammar. This is the opening line from the short lyric, "The Solitary Reaper," whose junctural ambiguity, like that of the "in her"/"inner" pun in "Ruth," operates within a strict iambic format. Two of the three vocative gestures toward the reader in the opening stanza of "The Solitary Reaper"—"Stop here, or gently pass!" (l. 4) and "O listen!" (l. 7)—tacitly identify the reader as inhabiting the same space as the "Highland Lass." Depending on how we hear the poem's opening line—"Behold her, single in the field"—this stationing of the reader is either implicit still or actually explicit. Either each reader, by a transegmental blend (across the aspirate), is isolated as a lone "behold(h)er" on the landscape (even as the momentarily fused noun form can also describe the lass herself), or else (the more "obvious" reading) the

scripted imperative grammar asserts itself simply to enjoin our role in beholding. Either way, our identification with the reaper (herself perhaps a beholder too) extends to the figurative sense of reading as its own version of garnering in solitude. Moreover, from a theoretical perspective associated originally with a critique of Romanticism, that epoch's entire aesthetic of imaginative manifestation comes into focus in this arguable ambiguity on "behold=(h)er"—as involving both subject and object, both rhetorical addressee and paragrammatical denomination. As we saw in Chapter 1, Paul de Man makes the figure of prosopopoeia, or its special case of apostrophe, the touchstone for a deconstruction premised on the working of literary language as a figural "giving face" to absence. This is a sustained rhetoric of the literary which he insists—against Riffaterre's more representational semiotics—must be understood as the activity of sheer inscription rather than description. We have at hand a peculiarly compressed test case. That apostrophic gesture, "Behold her," constitutes an address to an always, in one sense, absent reader who, even when present to the words of the text, beholds never more than words. If and when this conjuring gesture is heard to collapse, from a mere accident of inscription, into either the actual designation of (rather than summons to) the onlooker's role or into the correlative designation of the posited viewer's posited object—"beholders" each and all—we are that much more likely to perceive the latter, and our relation to "her," as sheerly a function of marks on a page, marks variously "realized" under the opportunistic laws of lexical convention. If so, we here confront a quintessential instance of poetic address—poetic inscription—as the reciprocal nullification, through mutual evocation, of both the referential object and the textual subject, the latter a reading "I" as implied vocative object "you." Retreating to the graphic security of script alone, to retrieve "(You) Behold her" again from the phonotextual ambiguity of "Beholder" is thus to give rhetorical face once more to the sliding effacements of grammatical metonymy: to effect, by insistent apostrophe, the very prosopopoeia of prosopopoeia. Wordsworth's line offers in this way a troping of the trope dependent entirely on the material inscription of the written text and its syncopated production as read. The self-"dis-figuring" inscription analyzed in de Man's deconstructed rhetoric may therefore be further isolated and unstrung—according to the present deconstructive linguistics —within the dyslocutionary force of phonemic reading.

Unheard Melodies

Rather like the "Eolian Harp" in Coleridge, with its rows (or lines) of latent instrumentation waiting to be breathed upon, Keats's sculptural symbol in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" may at one point be more directly an emblem of

poetry as text, as inhibited vocalization, than has been recognized. Everyone finds in this ode a parable of art and imagination. But when the musicianship pictured on the urn, as in turn rendered by the ode thereon , is characterized as producing "ditties of no tone" (l. 14), there would seem to be more textual auto-commentary at work than just wholesale aesthetic meditation. In texts, as in plastic representation, "melodies" are not less melodious for being "unheard" (l. 11), for keeping the silence of their unspoken vocalizations. Rather than being generated for the "sensual ear" (l. 13), the unintoned "ditties" portrayed on the urn's surface are registered solely in the mind—yet registered as music, not just as the idea of music.^[10] Then, too, Keats has even more in common with Coleridge than this may so far suggest. In his correspondence he is a homophonic punster as well, who gives Coleridge's "any-madversions" a run for its money—for its lexical short-changes and syntactic overdraft—with his complaints about the "{hie}rogue glyphics in Moors almanack."^[11] In that rebuslike syllable, Keats's drifting phoneme (carried by the grapheme gue ) doubles by liaison for the g of "glyphs" (just as the r of "hier" could have been made to operate in this way with the fuller spelling "hier-rogue-glyphs"). Such "rogue glyphs," loosed by phonemic slack, can, as in Coleridge, certainly inflect the graphonic contours of a verse line as well. In the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for example, there is a transegmental overlay in the very thought that art's idealized and wholly imagined music would not pipe or pander to the "sensual leer," to that fevered gaze of desire that animates the male lovers on the urn. From this we infer some sort of sensory luxuriance apart from aggressive sensuality: a rarefied state which the line, by thematically positing, also phonemically enacts.

In Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," we have already noted the critically debated rhyme on "sole self"/"deceiving elf," with a potential homophonic ambiguity at the sibilant juncture that returns more unmistakably in Lamia, where the title creature is either "some penanced lady elf ," or, if not, "Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self " (1.55–56). In the multiplicity and logical contradiction of these lines, an uncertainty turning on identity-versus-possession would readily serve Keats's purpose. So with the proleptic irony of Lamia uttering her first words in the poem "for Love's sake" (1.65). As we saw in Donne's "Love's Exchange," the elided underside of the possessive "Love's s ake" sounds a warning of that "ache" which attends the possessiveness of love in the tragic remainder of the narrative. In Lamia's own description of Hermes' nymph, the fourfold repetition of her going about "unseen" (1.96, 99) also impresses a narrative logic upon transegmental ambiguity: "From bow'd branches green, / She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen" (1.98–99). The virtual redundancy (for the sake of rhyme) in "branches green" is rescued by the sense of it being precisely their leafage which creates the "branches'

screen" that provides her privacy (recalling Shakespeare's "summer's green " in Chapter 1). Such is Keats's ear for the thickening textures of the literary tradition.

In the second part of the poem, well after Lamia has taken up with the hero, Lycius, the climax is precipitated by the appearance of his stern mentor, Apollonius, at the wedding feast. Once within sight of his pupil's bride, the dry rationalist begins to puzzle out the mystery of the snake lady, her embodied ambiguity. The task is described as a "knotty problem" that "had now begun to thaw, / And solve and melt" (2.161–62). It is another highly Shakespearean moment in this poem. Keats would indeed seem to be consciously alluding here, and in the process normalizing, Hamlet's famous sequence, "melt, / Thaw, and resolve," while retaining a related pun on resolution in "solve." It is a pun that is submitted in Keats's line to a transegmental drift as well. Holding the place at once of rational "solution" and of metamorphic "dissolution" (as immediately restated in "melt"), the punning lexeme gives out laterally. In a silent voicing of the line, that is, the slight sibilant hiss of "And solve" is all that is necessary for the inner ear to generate, following the dental sound, the near equivalence of "And (d)(i)s olve." Elsewhere, evidence of Keats's revisions also supports such a transegmental audition of his texts. The well-known change in the "Bright Star" sonnet—from "feel forever its warm sink and swell,"^[12] describing the pillowing breast of the speaker's love, to "feel forever its soft fall and swell"—has everything to recommend it, including the transegmental echo in "soft fall an d" of the snow's "soft fallen mask" four lines earlier. Also in favor of the change is a no doubt unwanted transegmental possibility in the original: the hint of "swarm" welling up from "warm" as if by way of a transferred epithet confessing the persona's inundation by erotic thoughts. It is in the very nature of such phonotextual tendencies that they come unbidden—and must sometimes be avoided by rephrasing, just as the reader must at times censor their irruption in order to keep to the track of sense.

Keats's odes are a rich field of such effects at their most openly activated, however, as we began to see in Chapter 2. The famous fifth stanza of the "Ode to a Nightingale," which begins with the speaker admitting that he has "been half in love with easeful Death" (l.52), closes with his imagined relation to the nightingale's song once he has given up consciousness: "To thy high requiem become a sod" (l. 60). Without relating it back to Milton's synaloepha (his metrically determined eliding of vowels), Walter Jackson Bate, in The Stylistic Development of Keats , notes instead the "extreme and persistent" tendency toward "hiatus" or "vowel-gaping" in Keats's early sonnets. But what of the cross-lexical shunt that moves to span this gape, this gap—or, should we say, threatens to?—even at the expense of meter, in a phrase like "thy high

requiem"? To have ascribed that song to the nightingale, in the context of the speaker's wished-for return to earth, is to have defined it, by contrast, as "high." In this sense it is fitting (indeed, by a close phonemic fit) that the pronominal adjective seems to entail, to trail off into or be taken up by, the epithet. This is so even as the full measure of "high" (in a kind of kinaesthetic enhancement of the referential elevation) would tend with its "high" vowel to lift away from "thy" in enunciation—against the enforced prosody of Keats's own iambic requiem, where "thy" rather than "high" would take the accent. The inner speech of the body as reading site must negotiate in this way between two contradictory impulses, transegmental and kinaesthetic. If held to metrical regularity, this phrasing thus suppresses that normal hyper-articulation which might otherwise work to offset thematically the languid blurring of "a(s) sod" at the close of the line.^[13] Just as the reflexive recognition of "the very word," like a bell, will help the persona recover from his death wish a stanza later, the tension here in both phrases between hiatus and elision, enforced juncture and conflation, might equally be felt to hold alert (even if under constraint) the verbal consciousness (ours by proxy for that of the "speaker"), to keep the mind and body energized at one crucial point of their intersection: in silent as well as spoken enunciation. In this, the self-conscious literariness of graphonic tension encodes the very force of its utterance as a will to (still) living speech.

The subsequent stanza now ends on the belling note "Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," where the subjective admonishment slipping into the phrase through the elision of a transegmental drift—namely, the chastisement of "perilous (s) eas(e)"—registers the indolent mood of mind from which the speaker is about to rebound into the chastening echo of the next stanza. Given that the "full-throated ease" (l. 11) of the nightingale has initially led the speaker to his thoughts of "easeful" death—the latter adjective used in Keats's day, both passively and actively, for "slothful" as well as "easing"—the word "ease" has cut deep, always potentially recurrent, grooves in the poem. The lexical risk incident to a sibilant juncture like "perilous s eas" is therefore all the more likely to let slip into "production" the text's more telling noun, for which "seas" is part of a figure here anyway. Against the grain of the written phenotext, that is, the phonotext has once again sounded (at the level of a suppressed matrix) the implicit tenor to a metaphoric vehicle operating at the scripted surface of a phrase.

The easy slipping in of the verbal rather than substantive form of "ease," though without the monitory overtones of the "Nightingale" ode, is even more self-enacting in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where "ease" carries the sense less of torpor than of aesthetic release. The synecdochic urn, silently inscribed vessel described entirely by the sheer inscription (to recall de Man's

terms) of the poem "on" it, is apostrophized in the last stanza as precisely that (quasi-textual) "silent form" which—in a self-illustrating animation of such silence—"dost tease us out of thought" (l. 44). It is just that formal second-person-singular ending ("dost "), insignia of direct address (of prosopopoeia in the form of apostrophe), which permits the very slip in inscription that draws off the (in context) synonymous "ease" from its less predictable variant, "tease." If "seas" edging to "ease" in the "Nightingale" ode seemed confirmed by the prehistory of that noun in the same poem, so may this climactic image from the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" be at least encouraged by comparing its earlier formulation in the "Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds," where imagination's desired objects cannot be willed into existence: "Things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought" (ll. 76–77). As noted, it is the later shift into the formal vocative case, "dost," that introduces the possibility of elision into the ode. In this sense what we find there is a Riffaterrean matrix that could be said to undergo deconstruction by its very apostrophizing inscription—but a deconstruction negotiated in the play between graphic (in particular, here, ekphrastic) inscription and the "sensual ear" of the phonotext. The artifact's teasing us free of anxiety, its role in aesthetic appeasement, is indeed possible, given the urn's exclusively textual embodiment, only through the tease of inscription itself—which pretends to address the object as present to us, to give plastic face and form, shape and dimension, to its sheer imaginary status.

Another, later "closure" comes to mind. Keats breaks off the unfinished Fall of Hyperion with a vision of the title deity rushing past the dreaming speaker, his "flaming robes" streaming behind him. The poem then closes with a portmanteau blur of their flaring and his wayfaring, as if Hyperion were burning up distances in his speed: "On he flared." A comparable ear for the power of lexical compression is, earlier in this late poem, directed against the terrible verbal power of Moneta's awesome disclosures. Containing in their narrative the whole englobed tragedy of the Titans, her words seem shaped by the vastness and devastation on which they report. By a transferred epithet from the mythic sphere whose fallen world they evoke, her language is characterized as "an immortal's s phered words" (1.249). By elision and another transference, here from cause to effect, the words naming her words thus also characterize the narrator's recoil from this "feared" revelation. Such a wording on the text's part is rounded to contain its own microdrama, its own tension between utterance and response.

Mon Blanc

In just this sense of textual repletion, it was Keats who gave phrase to the rhetorical mission of second-generation Romanticism in urging that poetry

should "load every rift with ore."^[14] Shelley's Defence of Poetry may be read in part as an expanded meditation on this impulse. In Shelley, however, the rifts and crevices that must be made full are explored as the poet's natural province because of their extratextual relation to the gaps, blanks, and lacunae of lived experience, the slumps and dead spots of existence, which the poet exists to animate. The term "interstices" recurs suggestively in the Defence . In celebrating the poetic imagination for its "unapprehended combinations of thought," Shelley argues that these new admixtures "have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts," forming "new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food."^[15] Filling gaps in our consciousness that we never before knew existed, by linkages and surpluses never previously engaged, is the task of a poetry whose own gaps and lapses remain real enough. No poem is all sustained inspiration. The craft, rather than the genius, of poetry is the fashioning of serviceable bridge passages, a more or less "artificial connexion of the spaces between by the intertexture of conventional expressions" (504). All the rifts can never quite be swollen with gold. That Shelley here argues home his point in evocations devoted to the maneuvered interval and trace, the phonic visitant and larded interstice, does not of course in any way demonstrate that his defense of poetry is mounted explicitly as a theory of style. I am merely noticing how much his prose seems to evoke what he calls later in this paragraph, in figures again of perceptual blank and traversed interval, "the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life" (505). Far more than his prose, the Shelleyan verse text can be found replicating these interlunations at the micro-level, finessing their ruptures, thickening their interstices with the music of his own "evanescent visitations," a play of phantom ripples and echoing traces.

With his stress on "vanishing apparitions" and "interlunations," Shelley's anticipation of Derrida's trace-under-erasure seems phonetically activated in another image from The Triumph of Life . The only "trace I find," says the persona, is "as of foam after the Ocean's wrath / Is spent upon the desert shore" (ll. 162–64). Rather like Keats's "become a(s) sod," though by elision now rather than reverse liaison, the collocation "as of foam" is virtually interchangeable—by way of phonemic meltdown as well as descriptive reference—with the analogic construction "as a foam." So, too, in the "Mutability" sonnet, where human life in the collective is analogous to "forgotten lyres" with "dissonant s trings," the very noun "dissonance" manifested across its own transformed adjectival bond. In "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," the "sun upsprings behind" (1. 100) on "the level quivering line / Of the waters chrystalline" (ll. 102–3). In this volatile dissolve of sound, the noun "sun" seems to have merged into a fuller subject, "sunup," before its second

syllable is claimed by the verb. Moreover, the aurally overrich rhyme on "line" and "l/line" actually risks phonemic redistribution in the pleonastic rephrasing "Of the water's crystal line"—a quivering of segmentation itself, with the ambiguous "liquid" phonemes as lexical solvents. Quite apart from the motifs of quivering evanescence, Shelley's phonemic transmutability can, for instance, work toward the consolidation of an outer power through apostrophe. This fluidity thus provides yet another interfusion of representation and verbal registration. In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," the climactic invocation voices the hope "That thou—O awful LOVELINESS, / Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express" (ll. 71–72). But "these words" themselves attempt to encompass such sublimity—in exactly its quality of majestic pervasiveness —by a sliding synaloepha at the all but double elision "thou—O aw ful." For a moment it is as if address, exclamation, and attribute were all one suffused epithet. Indeed, the founding prosopopoeia of this invoked loveliness here seems generated, evocalized, out of a distended ablauted matrix still in the process of morphemic consolidation, a genotext still gathering the expressive force of a phenotext.

As against such swollen aurality and metaphysical repletion, barrenness and vacancy as textual conditions also, as we have seen before, phonemically impinge on the Shelleyan text. The title "Epipsychidion" refers to that projected soul which makes full the "bare and void interstices" (l. 482) of nature. Here, quite explicitly, the style and theme of the interstice are made to coalesce—as do the lexical units of the line themselves, for "bare and void" is likely to be evocalized in passing as "barren void," an anti-pun quickly readjusted by syntax. This takes place according to a logic which the poem has earlier exemplified by spelling it out in an enjambed description of the lunar cycle, "whose changes ever run / Into themselves" (ll. 278–79). So, of course, do the phonemic changes of language, as in such acoustic—if nonsemantic—elisions as "ever(r)un" (compare the first word in Joyce's Wake : "riverrun"). In Prometheus Unbound , there is the image of a geologically retarded assault, "crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears" (1.31), with its harrowing vision of suffering time spatialized as the inching forward of primordial masses. The phrase is arranged so that the temporal drift of reading itself encroaches upon the scripted logic of phonemic spacing—to create the proleptic first thrust of "spears" in "glaciers pierce ." Later in Prometheus , the loss of life's animating moments "leaves this peopled earth a solitude" (2.17), the phonotext itself thus bewailing that very "dearth" feared by the speaker in the spiritual vacuum so portrayed.

In the context of Chapter 2's attention to the closing rhyme of "Mont Blanc," we can observe an earlier transegmental effect that cooperates in the text's resistance to void. Inaugurating the closing apostrophe to the mountain,

we have heard how the "secret strength of things" (l. 139)—rhyme word for the final "imaginings" four lines later—forever "inhabits thee" (l. 141). Here is another prosopopoeia whose rhetoric is underwritten by inscription at one level and interanimated at another by phonemic reading. Indeed, in those vexed closing lines already examined, it is exactly at the point of nearest abutment between the outer world and the inner landscape of response that a transegmental restitution sets in. At the very point of enjambment, that is, in "if to the human mind's imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?" the pluralized subjectivity of "imaginings," figuring their variety without enumerating it, blurs over into—takes up or is taken up by—that existential "silence" with whose signifier the previous plural will fuse and whose vacancy such multiplicity may infuse. The text itself is thus less "silent" here than it seems, energizing the very gap at the end of a line with a sibilant ligature. The unsaid matrix of this whole interrogative image is blankness , with its suggestion of external void but also of emotional depletion. The constitutive textual blank itself, however—in this pivotal moment halfway between the portentous chimings of "and sea" / "-ancy" explored in Chapter 2—would defeat and repeal that implicit nullity, rendering it connective. Invocation ("thou") depends upon inscription, yes, but inscription depends upon, and may even be rectified by, the energies of evocalization. Mon(t) blanc , Shelley suggests in French, is never to be taken for granted in his English texts.

"A Sound But Half Its Own"

The oratorical apostrophes and incantatory lamentations of Adonais might also be expected to inspirit the phonic interval, to breathe life into the lacunae of its dirge. They do. The text's early invocation of the blind Milton is a call to the author of a precedent elegy, "Lycidas," a poet summoned as the "Sire of an immortal strain" (l. 30). With "strain" meaning "song" as well as "generic lineage," the monosyllable "Sire" is all the more likely to release its aspirated homophone, "sigher," both opening up and at the same time filling in an internal phonemic juncture where none exists in the scriptive form of the lexeme. A transegmental variant of such phonemic decontraction may hover as well over the image of the Muse Urania in Adonais , whose "distress / Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress" (ll. 224–25). At this chiastic pivot, the paronomastic chiming of "Roused" against "rose" works less to enforce our instantaneous aural recognition of the second verb than to delay it. We expect more variety from the syntagmatic sequence. Instead of this etymologically related "gradience" (in the manner of Hopkins), we are just as likely to hear the antiphonal phantom phrase, "death throes." Yet even that most terrible motion native to death is beyond possibility in "the death chamber" where Keats lies stilled.

A related anti-pun in Adonais , again phonetically poised across a lexical juncture, and again brushing the written utterance with the shadow of a false hope—a trace of wish fulfillment in the gaps of the elegiac—appears in the clause "cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay" (l. 351). Reversing the original effect, before revision, of Keats's juncture in "Bright Star," in the phrase "its=swarm sink," here the paronomastic inner echo of "swarm" against "worms" only encourages a more strictly alliterative parsing of the sequence as "cold hopes (s )warm." Elision thus unleashes a verb antithetical to the adjective "cold," as if the dead dream were being warmed to renewal by the very delusion these words half seem to generate. A later elision describes the "lofty thought" that "Lifts a young heart above its mortal l air" (l. 393), where "air" as "atmosphere"—and, by extension, the human "sphere" or "clime"—would serve only to literalize the metaphor of mundane shelter and containment in the figure "lair." In so doing, the transegmental drift might also dislodge an equally secreted pun on "air"—for the lost poet's remembered song. In an earlier image of "lofty" ascent, the dead Keats is already seen to have "outsoared the shadow of our night" (l. 352), saved thereby from "the contagion of the world's slow stain" (l. 356), a phrasing in which only a mimetic slowing of the last three monosyllables could prevent a reemphasized designation of the world's "low" contamination in its contrast to the soaring release of death.

The shifting, ephemeral power of junctural irony or of segmental indeterminacy in verse is most intriguing perhaps in the case of Adonais 's very title, a combination, as Earl Wasserman has argued convincingly, of Adonis and of Adonai : the Greek figure of perfection crossbred with the Hebrew name for the Lord. The first two incantatory appearances of the name, in the poem's first two lines, are deployed around an internal chime that accentuates the is syllable and its homology with the verb of being, here in the oxymoronic predication of "being dead": "I weep for Adonais —he is dead! / O, weep for Adonais!" The vocative "O" renews itself, along with the internal rhyme, two stanzas later: "O, weep for Adonais—he is dead!" (l. 19). The next half dozen mentions of the proper name, distributed over three dozen stanzas, appear without that synecdochic echoing of the is, until the doubled anticipation of "'tis Death is dead, not he; / Mourn not for Adonais" (ll. 361–62; my emphasis). This last consolatory imperative is then reversed into a rhetorical question six stanzas further along: "Who mourns for Adonais?" (l. 415). Five stanzas later, the remaining five stanzas space out alternately the last three appearances of his name. First: "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" (l. 459), which abuts unmistakably with the part-echo of predicated existence. Next: "'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither" (l. 476), a phrasing which reiterates the is in slightly strained elliptical grammar, amounting to "It is

Adonais (who) calls." And, finally, as the syntactically surcharged climax to the whole pattern, sparked by a double grammar itself energized by phonetic ambiguity:

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
(ll. 493–95)

The genealogical portmanteau that has kept Adonis and Adonai vying for lexical and semantic space in the proper name—across fifty-five stanzas inaugurated by "Adonais—he is"—is finally unpacked and momentarily redelegated. Punctuation cannot stop it, the pull of grammatical and semantic probability being for a split second too strong; the middle line above thus reads as a momentarily stabilized and grammatically complete unit, whose verb simply posits the deathlessness of its subject in a divination (both senses) of poetic powers—"The soul of Adonai is (,) like a star." In such a phonemic reading of this line, the poet is compared to a star that "beckons"—or "beacons" (as the text has it in an anti-pun on the more likely verb). He is compared in either case to a shining exemplar, a light in darkness, a no-longer mourned artist whose refulgent genius above all, and despite the grave, is.

To audit Shelley's verse texture in this fashion is to sense that the most telling microcosmic statement of his verbal purposes may not lie primarily in The Revolt of Islam 's phrase for a "subtler language within language" (7.3112).^[16] We might find it more specifically in the figuration from "Mont Blanc" of a river's continuous music amplified by the adjacent tumult of nature, the rushing water murmuring "with a sound but half its own" (l. 6). Given the graded cross-lexical paronomasia of "sound . . . its own, " the phrase is indeed self-exampling, each partner in the internal slant rhyme a part-echo of the other. So "speaks," so we speak, the flowing Shelleyan word, tributary to other lexical sounds into which, in the phonemic stream, it perpetually feeds. As the paronomastic turn two lines earlier in "Mont Blanc" has it, each word may be found "lending splendour" to its neighbor, turning contiguity not just to equivalence (Jakobson's rule for poetic combination) but to overlap.

This phonemic layering and exchange can aspire in The Revolt of Islam to the highly Miltonic "road of Hell's s ulphureous s urge" (11.4305), with the variant recurrence of ell in ul encouraging the sense of "all-furious urge." Or it can be arrayed in a more uniquely Shelleyan vein, its evocations nearer the heart of the Romantic program. In the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" we hear sung the very birth of the hymnist, as well as his theme. The vocation of the Romantic poet seems materialized in the crevices of his own language. The fourth stanza begins with a panorama of evanescence typical of Shelley, where

natural ephemera are arrayed at the turn of an enjambment to image the slippages and recuperations of the mind: "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart / And come, for some uncertain moments lent" (ll. 37–38). This is again the lent "splendour" of inspiration, but it is contextualized here as an epiphany of commitment. Within four lines, the spirit of beauty is being lauded as a "messenger of sympathies" (l. 42), a harbinger of love, like the "winds" that "are wooing" vitality out of the earth in the next stanza (l. 56). Nature is a solicitation, the incipient poet all ears. This is, of course, nature in its undeconstructed state, or status: nature as yet unexposed as the referential figment of a vocative inscription. Apostrophized itself as voice, this image of nature helps figure in turn the attentive response of the lyric subject. Further, it is in this same stanza that the speaker describes the onset of his vocation, the moment when the "shadow" of intellectual beauty "fell on me" (l. 59), sealing an ecstatic pact. As we hear in retrospect at the opening of the sixth stanza: "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers / To thee and thine" (ll. 61–62). The text's earlier transitional image, concerned with the mutability of those elevated thoughts that are only "for some uncertain moments lent," takes on now a prescient overtone. Call it an interstitial anti-pun, or antiphone, or transegmental drift, but in any case the inner ear may well be made alert to the suggestion that it is ultimately "for summons" ("for some unc ertain") that "certain moments" are indeed briefly "lent" to the craving spirit. In the flux of language itself, then, esemplastically transformed, we are to hear the invitation to another life, a life perhaps dedicated to the very words that have, in every sense, shaped its calling .

In a famous passage from Prometheus Unbound , Shelley writes that "Language is a perpetual Orphic song," a "Daedal harmony" designed to unify "a throng / Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were" (4.415–17). Even before the flickering agrammatical hint of "swir(l)" in "s-wer," it has been precisely the resistance to such transegmental adhesion in the sibilant-laden collocation "else senseless" which is necessary to make sense of that adjectival phrase. Without language, without pertinent oppositions, without a respect for lexical borders, there would be only the swirl of sound and aimless perception. Enacting the very consolidation of the lexical out of phonemic sequence, the Shelleyan text has here mounted one of those transegmental effects that is actively, even metalinguistically, ruled out by context. Thematized in such a line, then, is the need for the kind of hyperarticulation of juncture that—turning back to Keats—would provide a further differentiation between first and second versions of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." In the 1819 text, the phrase "The latest dream I ever dreamt / On the cold hill side" is shuffled in refrain to the possessive "And I awoke, and found me here / On the cold hill's side," a variation flattened out in the 1820 revision.

In the original version, the phonic densening of the doubled sibilant—to the point of almost unforestallable elision—seems to retard the enunciatory process in a minuscule equivalent of the knight's arrested quest, his drugged heaviness of mind in desolation.

In Shelley, however, as elsewhere in Keats as well, the transegmental temptation is usually situated so that it should be succumbed to rather than resisted. In the most luxuriantly plotted phonemic exercise in all of Shelley's work, the "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker, in apostrophe to the wind, imagines a boyhood vitality wound up to the point where "to outstrip thy skiey speed / Scarce seemed a vision" (ll. 50–51). Enhanced by the dynamic of enjambment, the syntax must outstrip its own lineation in order to round out a last strained phrase that may at the same time homophonically regroup itself to "thy sky's speed." Sense would permit this, since the wind's speed is visible as "skiey" only insofar as it pushes clouds on before it. Phonemes too, then, are outstripping themselves there. Against the semantically intriguing, albeit somewhat thick-tongued, metrical regularity of "skiey speed," the no-longer iambic rapidity of "sky's speed" scuds past. This etherial rush at last comes bearing down on the inspired present speaker for the inverted copulative clauses of "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" (ll. 61–62). With the first comma again "unheard," the enjambment would move to close off one possible, slightly elliptical grammar—"Be thou (a) spirit fierce"—only to have it reopened and adjusted when the tentative predicate nominative is displaced in retrospect to an appositive. The speaker's own "spirit" next takes up the grammatical slot following the equative verb, only from there to be swept up into the second appositive phrase, "impetuous one," across the vernacular solecism of "me" in the objective case. Once again, grammar deconstructs rhetoric by exposing a self still subject to—still object of—the wind with which it hopes to fuse. Yet the wind's spiritualized velocity impels identification, impels fusion—so the speaker dreams. It is an impetus that, once scripted as the quatrasyllabic "impetuous," introduces—by way of phonetic rebus—the pronoun "you." That encrypted pronoun is placed, and suddenly played, against the first person authorial plural of "us," though still in the objective case. It thus takes part in a swift but no less emphatic positing of subject and object that—given the spondaic precedent of "Be thou me"—blends into the phonemically lent splendor of impet/you/us/one . Such is a desideratum—difference subsumed to unity, lack transcended—written only in the chord progressions of a natural harmony, not traced anywhere upon the legible face of things, whether of nature or of poem. Indeed, it is produced as text only by what the next tercet reflexively highlights as "the incantation of this verse" (l. 65)—to be heard and not seen.

Romantic Interlunations

Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology , makes claims for a stylistic component in his "revisionist critique." Stressing, first of all, a reading of texts in and against "the socio-historical ground" of their production and consumption, he is quick to insist: "This does not mean that 'purely' stylistic, rhetorical, formal, or other specialized analyses cannot or will not be pursued."^[17] Few books of such frankly historicizing ambitions are so professedly open to stylistics, and so McGann's work might serve as a test case for the always elusive rapprochement between linguistic and socio-historical reading. But what kind of "stylistics" are in order? Nothing is ever spelled out by McGann, only ruled out. In order to support his sense of the radically destabilized ideological ground of Romantic assumptions in the major texts of the period, their uneasy compromise with their own contradictions, McGann resists what he sees as the critical compromise that takes the texts as part of a "poetry of process" (28), exploratory and irresolute. In such an (unsatisfactory) view, the exemplary Romantic texts, searching, tentative, and ambiguous, participate in their own uncertain interpretation, an approach related by McGann to the "reader-response school." In his view, any such method passes the buck. It makes over the poetry's deep self-divisions, the rifts and contradictions of its insufficiently examined purposes, into a capacious dialectic in the hermeneutics of reception. For McGann more is at stake, and at peril, in the Romantic text. What, then, might any sort of stylistics have to offer by way of elucidation? How are the fissures of Romantic ideology conveyed to, or carried by, the verbal topography and tropology of a text? The closest we get to a direct confrontation with such questions in McGann's book is his reading of the last four stanzas of Adonais , with their poignant tension between a sense of irreparable human loss and a consolatory "futurism" (123) of poetic immortality. Lest the reader relax into the "sentimental idea" of the latter, McGann proposes "an historical analysis" that would help "distinguish the ideological, the stylistic, and the emotional aspects of poetic work." Though issues "stylistic" are twice invoked in this culminating paragraph of McGann's chapter on Shelley, and though he quotes as full an excerpt from any Romantic text as we will find submitted to commentary in his entire study, there is no adduced evidence whatever of specifically "stylistic tensions" (123)—except, perhaps, in the closing tonal contrast between "cold mortality" and the shining "abode" of Keats's immortally fixed "star." A tension in metaphor ? Even this is not specified.

The present discussion, of course, has earlier closed in on more strictly stylistic—or morphophonemic—details of this passage. If we were now to recast the tenor of earlier observations in terms of emotional contrasts widen-

ing to ideological contradictions, if we were to register moments when the verbal texture of the poem protests too much its own visionary resolution, we might first return to that recurrent echo of the verb of being, "is," in "Adonais." By the close of the poem, predication itself, displaced and sacralized, is absorbed into the strained and grammatically unstable plural of the last rhyming word: "The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." "Beacons," as we have seen, is not quite "beckons"—indeed, not quite as inviting as "beckons." At the other end of the line, capitalized and reified, "the Eternal" might emerge as if it were an abstract singular noun, requiring (students regularly assume so) a singular verb (as in the earlier "A portion of the eternal" [l. 340]). Until, that is—in a reader-response trajectory? surprised by sublimity? by anonymity?—we realize that Keats's single "star" is put in rhyme with, even while erased in its singularity by, the plurality, the host, of those who have gone before to their immortality. Romantic individualism in a stylistically coded tension with meliorative eschatology? Poetic eternity as cold comfort for the intensified subjectivity that attends life in the flesh? Ideology at odds with desire? And this a tension that is itself part of the uneasy ideology of the transhistorical long view?

Looking again at the final stanza, which McGann has not so much read as simply delivered wholesale into evidence, we can notice a transegmental marker of just such a gulf between human feeling and visionary schedule, between mourning and ideological manifesto:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, . . .

The smiting loss of all that might have been is converted to the "might" of poetic inspiration, fanned by the breath of the lost Other only when internalized as the living speech of creative continuance. The comma that interrupts the more natural enjambment at "driven / Far from the shore" seems momentarily to mark the poetic "drive" in its other sense, as the thrust of literary ambition. This repeated lexical tension is prolonged by the homophonic double of "spirit's bark" (the rather quaint metaphor) in the more clichéd and predictable "spirit's spark," related to the earlier image of the poetic "fire" that "outlives the parent spark" (l. 408). For one thing, the suggestion of "spark" draws on the "breath" of inspiration descended upon the living poet earlier in the line. Second, by way of a more distant early prediction, the poem has long before imaged the sad remains of a death without poetic immortality as the "sparkless ashes" of an "unlamented urn" (l. 360)—as opposed to the urn of aesthetic permanence in the Keatsian

intertext. The closing transmutation of Keats's dying breath into Shelley's inspiration is, after all, more likely—as "spark" rather than "bark"—to fan the soul than to put wind in any sails. When this transegmental alternative, or matrix, is thus repressed by the paraphonic variant ("spark" by "bark"), what has happened is that the normal resuscitative energies of a mourning friend and poet, lifted to new confidence in the name of the Other, is graphemically recast—sobered, if not chastened—by the more ominous figuration of the bark's deathward voyage, "darkly, fearfully, afar." In short, the disturbing ideological cross-purposes of this climactic passage—wavering between an elegiac fervor converted to furor poeticus and a more distant philosophical consolation—are kept alive in the cross-lexical phonemic ambivalence of "spirit's spark" versus "spirit's bark."

All this said in amplification of McGann's sparse gesture toward the work of "stylistic tensions" still leaves us far from any systematic understanding of the relation of style, let alone the activity of the phonotext, to the "sociohistorical ground" of literary production. Yes, ambiguities—whether understood as textual mechanisms or as reader-response signals—may negotiate (or embody or enact or thematize) various contradictions and cross-purposes. Given the self-conscious architectonics of certain texts, one might even be willing to say that a verbal cleft, a lexical blank, a consequent segmental slippage may actually replay a conceptual irruption or schism in the ideological superstructure determining a poem. But what about an ideology of the text itself, as textuality? McGann early on explains that he will substitute the term "ideology of poetry" for "theory of poetry" (10) in his deliberations. But is that emphasis meant to imply the relegation of both poetics and aesthetics? Moving even beyond the literary text, can we responsibly subordinate all of linguistics and philology to the ideology of a historical epoch as well? Here, of course, our questions verge again upon Foucault's archaeology of the human science of language. Understood in Foucault's terms, the Romantic moment—exemplified, for instance, by Shelley's expressive tensility of phrase, his romancing of the phoneme—stretches as watershed between classical conceptions of discourse as representation and the modern ontology of language as a thing in itself.

Yet this epochal turning point of Romanticism finds that its ideology of language—conceived as the means of an independently articulated armature of human communication—is an ideology, and an ideal, mediated at crucial literary turns by the lyric operation: as in itself a suppressed crisis in subjectivity, a site of anxieties less expressed than covertly enacted by language. These anxieties have, in fact, to do in good part with the relation of language to time passing, of record to history, of writing to things recoverable. In all the Romantics, history is in some sense or another rewritten as the Fall, first in

Blake, where recovery involves an at least intermittent access to the unhindered tongues of Beulah. This would entail no reversion to mere babble but, rather, the achievement of an organized lingual innocence—available to the poetic effort within and against, not simply before, the Urizenic or rationalist hegemony. If for the Romantic enterprise as a whole in one of its important aspects—as for Shelley, in particular—language is identified as "a perpetual Orphic song," the underworld to which it makes its foray and from which it retrieves its visionary treasure is the unconscious itself. This is the locus of expressible desire still in touch with a poetic impulse before symbolic acculturation, though later absorbed into it (ideally, without too extreme a denial). To dwell in these alogical depths is not only the beginning but also the end of speech; to visit there, however, in the visionary raids of Orphean adventure, is to mine that song waiting at the very root of speech, that rhythm underneath reason, that lyric pulse before linguistic ordering—in Kristeva's terms, if we choose, the semiotic stratum upon which the symbolic is mounted. But to do so programmatically could never be a matter of a poet's conscious decision from line to line. Any cogent sense of such Orphic power in Romantic poetry, therefore, resides merely in the recognized tendency to a certain excessive and unregimented texture, to the preferred surplus of signifier over signified, to Coleridge's "soft-floating witchery of sound" (validated by analogues in nature, to be sure: this is its most obvious ideological component). These are the resonances and reverberations that, in other terms, inflect the Shelleyan interlunations of both world and text; of world and text together, the one in the other's image: as Wordsworth put it, of nature's meanings half-created, half-received. One avowed philosophy—or ideology—of language in Romantic poetry rests just here: in a recognition that its lyric aspirations work toward a "Daedal harmony" connatural with what is visible and audible in the labyrinthine symmetries of the experienced world—a synesthesia, for instance, no more artificial than nature's own admixtures and sensory interfusions.

This program entails a more perplexed ideology, whose contradictions thus go unexamined, when it requires for lyric transmission a theory of the uttering subject, of subjectivity as utterance. This is a verbally conscious subject whose anxious discontinuities—whose psychic caesuras and ellipses, ambivalences and elisions—must also be mapped, along with the landscape of nature, onto the topography of a text. Romanticism, it may be shown, arose contemporaneously with the dawn of philology in an independent but parallel gestation, birth, and development. It continued to flourish, or at least survive, in Victorian and even twentieth-century revisions only as long as the systematic study of language, the scientific rigors of linguistics, did not threaten the cherished metaphysics of individual selfhood. Inspiriting as they were to the

style of poetry as part of the generalized spirit of an age, its verbal predisposition, these linguistic investigations could thrive only as long as their rigor was kept from deconstructing exactly that lyric subjectivity, that bardic centrism, lending authority to a philologically preoccupied art of words. But the frictions that would become fissures were already apparent, even in high Romanticism, already seeking appeasement by rhetorical deflection. The ideological cleavage McGann spots at the end of Adonais might in this light be recast as the living poet's recognition that in the death of Keats, the death of the Author as Other, lies the innate destiny of all authorship, the fixity of a presence only within the structured absence which is any and every text. In or out of the elegiac mode, all prosopopoeia is merely figural, funereal—and on both sides of the personifying contract. As the almost dead-metaphoric "spark" of Keats's living genius is scriptively overruled, to become instead the more insistently figural "bark" of immortal destiny and reputation, something like a true "stylistic tension" has thus opened consciousness to the potentially terrifying void between even the persona's own psyche and his text, between all voice and any poem. Here, then, is an ideological irreconcilability—to be laid bare a century and a half later in Derrida's term "thanatopraxis"—which Romantic instances of the elegiac genre disclose only to contain.

If the Romantic ideology of language is such that the word is seen to absorb and transfigure experience, then the extreme malleability of language—when highlighted, for instance, at a junctural slippage—may offer a stylistic emphasis to an even more oblique metalinguistic tremor of the text. Here we may look aside for a moment from Shelley to a comparable instance in his nearest peer. There is no overt evidence in the "Ode on Melancholy" that the Keatsian persona is speaking as a literary voice, that he is writing his way into a poetic stance. For all the florid staginess of his conceits, there is, in short, no mention of writing, of the melancholic as writer. The "speaker" appears to be merely setting forth the existential rather than literary premises of the melancholic visionary, who sees, among other things, the beauty of the fleetingness of beauty. He addresses the first two stanzas in second person to a kind of spiritual advisee, if implicitly to himself at one remove. It is only by extrapolation from the "sovran shrine" of a personified Melancholy that the courted goddess may become in fact the Muse, the presiding genius of that poetic wisdom won from the bittersweet of luxuriance. Explicitly in the lines, it is merely the human agent, as "poetic" sensibility, not in particular the poetic craftsman, whose fate is sealed at the close of the poem, in a stanza that has shifted into a general third-person formulation: "His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung." But if Melancholy is not only a general inspiration to the Romantic spirit but, after all, the specific Muse of Keats's verbal artistry, his one hope of that bardic

immortality which would enshrine forever his insights about a terrible pleasure feeding deep on loss, then the closest hint of this may appear in a poetic warping of the final juncture: literally, letterally, the poem's last word(s). Anticipating this, it is easy to imagine a figural transference in the last line from him who can "burst Joy's grape against his palate fine," the ultimate credential for melancholic service, to the poetic use of the mouth in lyric utterance. Following from this, it is then by the overtone of a sibilant liaison in "trophies s (h)ung " that the "him who" of this last stanza becomes a melancholic dedicant specifically hymned into the pantheon of spiritual insight. In our phonemic adjustment of Riffaterre's terms, to have one's achievement "sung" among those of the goddess's other adulants is the avoided cliché; to be "hung" among them, incarnate, is the more striking paraphone of that monosyllabic matrix. Once again, phonemic reading can work to sustain the Romantic dream of verbal embodiment, the very stuff of "cloudy" and evanescent incarnation.

Precisely because so many of the phonotextual instances we have noted fall within the always-churning realm of the contingent, no direct ideological link can be demonstrated, except by way of the general inclination toward such a thickened, excessive, and hence polyvalent style. This is just what would doom to confusion any programmatic attempt to read off some Romantic "ideology" from the unregimented verbal flicker and phonemic slip. There is, we can readily see, an ideology (read, "poetics") of the Romantic lyric, an ideology (read, "aesthetics") of Romantic euphony therein. Both, moreover, predispose such texts to a richness given (and sometimes given over) to phonic accidents poised against the graphic grain. This predisposition is, in fact, part of the largest antirationalist bias of the period, its nostalgia for the unfallen state of nature and for its psychic cognate in the "immortal sea" of imaginary totalization. But the poetic (or, rather, psycholinguistic) counterideology — of a subjectivity neither preceding nor exceeding the letter of the text, and thus dispersed and imperiled by the text's every lapse — this must wait, long and impatiently, with an impatience warping the surface of many a text in the meantime, for the theoretical enterprise of another century.

Tennysonorities

In its Keatsian debts, the phonotext works overtime almost everywhere in Tennyson. A reader may come upon the most fleeting of transegmental effects, as in the image from "Mariana" of a "sluice" that "with blackened waterss lept," where le(a)pt emerges from the signified stagnancy and signifying sibilance as an impossible but relevant anti-pun, the pertinent antonym of the water's portrayed state. It is no accident, however, that the phonic texture of Tennysonian verse, the rhythm of voice itself as an adjunct of script, is at its

most dense and crafted in the dramatic monologues. The heroic speaking subject of "Ulysses," in the stanza beginning "This is my son, mine own Telemachus" (l. 33), concludes with a dismissal of the son's "common duties" and "slow prudence" — and this in implicit celebration by contrast of his own martial exploits: "He works his work, I mine" (l. 43). The drudgery of mere "work" has already been contrasted to the image of a community of achievement among "Souls that have toil'd, and wrought , and thought with me" (l. 46), where working and thinking, objective labor and subjective purpose, are made in every sense to rhyme with each other. This is not the prudent, mundane toil of Telemachus, and so the quotidian form of the verb, in a cognate repetition, has been used only of the son — "He works his work" — whereas Ulysses has spoken more compactly of his — "I mine." Beyond the semantic pun on the verb form of "mine" as a dredging passionately in the depths of experience, this phrasing is also syntactically ambiguous even when "mine" is taken as adjectival, involving not only the grammar of ellipsis but also the phonemics of ligature. For over against the routinized and unvaried "works his work" stands the radically unalienated labor — indeed, the equative predication of being itself — in "I'm mine." The verb is not just left out; the object is lent, overlapping, to the subject, in a transfusion of self into its effects. Any potential psychic divisions would thus seem healed across the lexical breach. We might say that in this text about a defied discontinuity between youth and decline, the nostalgic speaking subject also seems to suppress, by momentarily mastering, the very consciousness of linguistic discontinuity and rupture that contributes to defining modernism and the theories of its textuality.

If this is so, then one would also have to say that the ironic counterpart to this dramatic monologue, "Tithonus," can be seen to exploit the same lexical ambiguities and cleavages for what looks, what sounds , much more like the dissociated sensibility of a modern identity crisis. The verbal fissures are there in both cases but seamed over in differing degrees of lexical precariousness. The fading Tithonus, lover of the dawn, is an antihero withering endlessly in the grief of his granted wish to be made immortal. He begins a stanza of excruciated retrospect with the double pun on his own identity, as ambiguously subject or object of this bleak nostalgic vision:

Ay me! ay me!  with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch — if I be he that watched —
(ll. 50–52; my emphasis)

The specular gap, opened by pun, between the present bemoaning "I" and the "other eyes " that used to perceive the world leads us to the transegmental irony

of "If I be he that watched." By an elision at the very turning point of predication, this textual effect subordinates even present as well as past identity to the pathos of the subjunctive: "If I be(h)e [at all anymore] that [formerly] watched." The very idea of being, once put in question, swallows the pronouns that would identify it — or at least threatens to against the sway of metrical stress. Even though usually subserving the meter, Miltonic synaloepha boasts no more strategic examples. Then, too, this transegmental meld reminds us that exactly what Tithonus is not saying in a Ulyssean vein, with that "Ay me!" two lines before, is that "I'm me" — or even "I'm (h)e that." If such anti-puns show their face on the obverse of the more apparent morphemic play, they remain merely antiphonal hints whose sense is banished by the semantic default of confident self-predication in the rest of the passage.

By contrast, Robert Browning — one's reading of Browning — has a different "sound" altogether, but not a stabilized one.^[18] His transegmental play between syllables is certainly grittier, less melodious, than anything in Tennyson. When Browning's Childe Roland moves toward the Dark Tower over "Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth" ("'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" l. 150), our mind is so fixed on the desiccated topography that we are likely to hear a disyllabic "black'd earth" rather than its scripted equivalent, "black dearth." The more likely alternative, indeed, seems left to the paraphonic variant. Then there is this from "Fra Lippo Lippi": "And nip each softling of a wee white mouse, / Weke, weke , that's crept to keep him company!" (ll. 10–11). Around the turn of the enjambment slips the very sibilant necessary to convert this eccentric encoding of mouse noises (alliterative with wee ) into a closer approximation of the familiar "s -weke-weke. " Later, asking why a painter cannot "Make his flesh liker and his soul more like" (l. 207), Lippo's comparative adjective "liker" has already anticipated the likeness to which he turns in the next line: "Take the prettiest face, / The Prior's niece." Since the touchstone of his realism will indeed be the achievement of an image more and more "like (h)er," it is as if, though metrically suppressing it, he had that sensuous beauty on his mind all the while.

In a dialogue with his dead wife in "The Householder," Browning's speaker, recognizing the revenant, answers her rhetorical question — "What else did you expect?" (l. 8) — with "Never mind, hie away from this old house" (l. 9). The transegmental phonemic structure itself calls out for the only departure possible, another dying away. Elsewhere, Browning is a poet of such marked consonantal imbrications that he gives us at two different points in "Love Among the Ruins" a syllabic or phonemic irony timed to enjambment. There is the hint, momentarily confirmed, of the metaphoric vehicle "pyres" hidden in the tenor of "spires," an overtone prepared for by one elision and transegmentally released by another: "Where the domed and d aring palace shot its

s pires / Up like fires" (ll. 19–20). In addition, the poem's very first line passes over to its second as if the metaphoric verb were constituted somehow by the expanse of its application: "Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles / Miles and miles." To the ear, the figurative verb seems twice repeated by liaison — "smiles/(s)miles" — before it cedes to an overlapping reduplication of the adverbial noun. The given alphabetic format, overlain with its phonemic other, thus generates, as if from an unwritten matrix, the overdetermined image of sunset as a pervasively insistent "beaming" across the land.

Words Listing

If, as Auden thought, Tennyson had quite possibly the "greatest ear" of all the English poets, Hopkins may well have had the most brilliantly nervous. In order to prepare the groundwork in Chapter 2 for a consideration of Hopkins's tandem rhymes, I have already taken account of the phenomenon of vocalic "gradience" in his verse, attempting to extend this principle of incremental phonemics into a transegmental phonotexture. We shall pursue this extension even farther here, since the concept of verbal "inscape" can now be seen as a late nineteenth-century English equivalent to the early modernist ontology of language in French literature described by Foucault. Survey the inscape of one word and you will find another, and another, and, in conjunction with a second scripted word, yet another — one that scoops out and instantaneously refurbishes the hollow between, the downslope of one lexeme overead as merely the upswing of its successor. The obsessive, mock-etymological word lists of Hopkins's early diaries testify in this sense to a sounding of inscape. This, for example: "slip, slipper, slop, slabby (muddy), slide , perhaps slope , but if slope is thus connected what are we to say of slant ?"^[19] Displayed here is an instinct for minimal phonic discriminations in the lexicon that Hopkins shares with Coleridge, whose notations on language can coax out a punning homophonic series from a conjunction like thing/think, here from the Notebooks : "'Thing': id est, thinking or think'd. Think, Thank, Tank — Reservoir of what has been thinged — Denken, Danken — I forget the German for Tank/The, Them, This, These, Thence, Thick, Think, Thong, Thou."^[20] This goes farther, faster, than anything in Hopkins, but the parallel is manifest: in each case a linguistically oriented poet preoccupied more with the ontology than with the strict etymology of language, more with its materiality, its thingness in the work of thinking and writing. When this interest in subterranean bonds between words begins to contour the inscape of a given textual phrase, it is likely to result in the partial telescoping of the list across a lexical break, a listing of one word into its neighbor.

We have already noted in Chapter 2 the paronomasia of "diamond

delves!"/"the elves' eyes," where the transegmental ligature makes this seem like one of Hopkins's word chains rendered metrical. A simple conjunction may grammatically separate the echoing phrases a bit more, as in the next example from "Inversnaid," while at the same time transegmentally participating in their phonemic reprocessing. The iterative predicate here conspires in the evocation as well as designation of a whirlpool: "It rounds and rounds / Despair to drowning." The doubled verb thus anticipates a root finite form of the line's closing participle by way of the transegmental homophone "and =rounds " (including, in an ever-broader phonemic swath, the dental ligature of "It =rounds "). It is as if both were portmanteau clusters combining the cause and effect of rounding to the point of drowning. Further, the kind of transegmental rhyming discussed in Chapter 2, even while absorbing lexemes into fuller, nonsemantic echoes, may still imply a referential kinship between the separated phrasings. In "God's Grandeur," for instance, since all "the world is charged with the grandeur of God," the link between the rhyming words of the next two lines — "shook foil "/"ooze of oil " — works to suggest, in an effect enhanced by the transegmental spreading of the echo, the commonality of foil and oil in the inventory of divine attestations, of transcendental witness. Origin of the world, God is also the authoring cause of its divergent tongues and terms, the poet-priest his mystic etymologist.

Such transegmental accords, collected within a single line as oblique internal rhymes, may, again, resemble the word lists of Hopkins's diaries. The sonnet "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" spells out seriatim the phrasing "earliest stars, earlstars," as well as the phonemic prolongation of "Our tale, O our oracle!" At another point in this same sonnet, there is an enjambed disclosure of a quasi-etymological bond between "off" and the transegmentally activated "doff": "ah let life wind / Off her once skeined stained veined variety." This same preternatural attunement to the inscape of the lexical declivity, earlier in this sonnet, has brought to the textual surface an echo of the swelling cause behind the overwhelming effect of "our night whelms, whel ms, and will end us." It might be noted here that the logically implausible drift "l=end" that follows in this line is phonemically just as likely, lexically more complete, and yet semantically canceled by context: another instance of the accidental and arbitrary contained in reading by the cumulative, by the developing sense rather than just sensory potential of an utterance. Context is necessary to activate the latent. The octave of "The Windhover" ends with an image of the speaker's sympathetic awe before the windhover's flight, recounting a heart that is first said echoically to have "Stirred for a bird." Such paronomasia, spread across separate lexemes, is next condensed in the appositional phrase for the bird on the wing, "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing." Phonemic reading tends to inflect the "heave off" in "achieve of," as if "heave" and

"achieve" (like "foil" and "oil") were filed away in some cryptic listing, their common denominators to be revealed only in the inscapes of poetic epiphany.

This is, of course, merely a special case of the general transegmental play in Hopkins's verse, which does not always recall the lexical autonomy of his speculative philological chains. In the sestet of "The Windhover," a related effect appears within a single syllable, a mere inflection of tense, without dislodging an independent lexeme. In noting devices in Hopkins that are "kinaesthetic in nature, determined by the sense of stress or muscle," Geoffrey Hartman includes among them the phrase in question: "Plough down sillion." The effect in this case is said to derive from the evocation of "neither the shining plow nor the new earth but the kinaesthetic effect of plow-breaking-through-earth."^[21] What this assessment leaves unsaid, however, in its link between vocal and agricultural musculature, is the additional transegmental pressure exerted on the line by the unscripted weight of the past participle "ploughed ," operating under erasure at the junctural break complicated by "plough(e d)down."

Alongside Hopkins's diary passages explicitly devoted to the topography and archaeology of the English lexicon are those that concern, in another sense, the "inscape" of the phenomenal universe, prose evocations that attempt to take the mold and contour of the world in words. Both need to be understood, separately and together, in light of the term "inscape" in its full range of designation. James Milroy, arguing that too few critics have realized the bearing of the term upon the language as well as the natural subjects of Hopkins's poetry, calls his chapter on Hopkins's diction "Wordscape."^[22] Hopkins himself attempted to make clear the verbal application of his famous term in the essay "Poetry and Verse," when insisting that "Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake — and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on."^[23] Stepping back to an example of poetry that is not verse, we may turn briefly for clarification to the prose poetry of natural observations in Hopkins's journals. The passage in question is the inscape of a seascape, of the sea escaping over shelves of rock in a channel. Two sentences from this 1872 paragraph divide up the two chief effects of Hopkins's phrasal inscape: the multiplication of phonic patterns across intermittent items of diction, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fusion of phonemes at contiguous borders. As we have seen, it is when the two appear together, in tandem, in tension — as they do not in this more straightforward prose excerpt — that his poetry achieves its most daring and characteristic effects. The first of these sentences from the journal passage goes like this: "The sea was breaking on all the stack and striking out all the ledges and edges at each breaker like snow does a building" (255). Water overflows and erases first the surface of the ledge, then the very edge that distinguishes it

from the others in the shingled terrace of flat rocks. The second sentence at issue in this description generates two adjacent transegmental liaisons that seem arranged to evoke a fluid overlap without forming a separate lexical item: "In the channel I saw (as everywhere in surfy water) how the laps of f oam m outhed upon one another" (255). Mouthed as vocables, with their own kinaesthetic inscape as well as their explicit referents, the word "of" encroaches upon "foam" as "foam" does upon "mouthed": an aural emblem of overlap.^[24]

To combine the separate effects of these two illustrative prose sentences, so that, for instance, a word ending in l might overlap with "ledges" and thus unpack the implied sequential world listing compressed to a single malleable lexeme: this would be to create the Hopkins verse text as we know it. It is a text incorporating as fully as any in English that aural tropology which Hopkins, well before Jackobson, called the "figure of sound." For Hopkins as well as Jakobson, the term refers to a mapping of phonic recurrence upon syntactic contiguity — and for Hopkins, every bit as much as for Jakobson, it provides the very definition of poetry, as "speech which afters and oftens its inscape" (289). The use of the preposition "after" as verb suggests the kinetic trace, the aftermath, of one word left reverberant in its successors. Narrow the gap of succession so that it becomes overlap, and you have a special transegmental case of that "oftening, over-and-overing, aftering of the inscape" on which poetic effects depend. Understand these adverbial predications in a spatial as much as temporal sense within the dynamics of reading, and "over-and-overing" becomes something very much like that overeading with which we are concerned. In his "Lecture Notes" on "Rhetoric," Hopkins follows comments on what "may be called the lettering of syllables" — by which he means all the recurrences we normally identify as alliterative, assonant, and so forth, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of words — with a category of verse effect little discussed in the criticism of his poetry, perhaps because so sketchily characterized in Hopkins's own passing mention of it: "Holding, to which belong break and circumflexion, slurs, glides, slides, etc."^[25] In this category we might include the transegmental drift: that holding (over) of phonemes, that gliding or skidding, that slippage and blurring of a suddenly delettered lexeme which refashions adjacent diction on the sly, the slide.

A lexical inscape rebuilt along the instep of a metrical foot, this holding over of phonic matter — produced as text through overeading — can be seen powerfully at play, at work, in Hopkins's greatest litany of ontological inscapes, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." The poem's central premise is that "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same" (a transform by tmesis of the matrix "one and the same") or, in other words, "selves" (a verb form in context), "Crying What I do is me ." This is a poem that repeatedly asserts how being

(rather like the condition of textuality itself) is defined in its own actualization, produced in process. The sestet arrives to cap and theologize the point:

I say more: the just man justices;
     Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
     Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places

We find here a phonemic play (Empson's "engineering" sense: a slack) in the paronomastic echo of "plays" against "plac/es." Preceding that is the Miltonic synaloepha of "In God's eye he is," with the phonological glide of /ay/ all the more likely to precipitate a gliding or "holding" that will elide out the pronoun. Since this is a poem in which every nomination is only at base a predication, a name for that being which is ultimately declared only as enacted, it is entirely appropriate that this syncopation of a whole word makes no semantic difference in the line. The just man is hereby understood to act in the sight of God what in God's eye is , the only thing in God's eye when justice is under scrutiny — namely, the omniscient Christ immanent in "ten thousand" worthy places. Such is the inscape — or, as Hopkins elsewhere calls it, the "instress" — of identity as a presence to . Which brings us back to "the just man justices," where the cognate verb, though found in the dictionary, is nevertheless estranging enough to seem generated by another "holding," an "over-and-overing," of an antiphrasal variant, "the just man just is, is." This oddity is all the more destined for reception because the scripted "justices," unless otherwise heard, makes a weak rhyme with the verb of "in God's eye (he) is."

Returning now to the opening of the sonnet, we encounter through phonemic reading a curious bidirectional "holding" at the first enjambment, an "aftering" and retrospective elision. More explicitly sonic (at the level of the signified itself) than the effects of the sestet, this phonemic meld captures the inscape of the poem's essentialist predications:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
     As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
     Stones ring

The enjambed lines may recall the Tennysonian ear for verse sounds — in particular, that previously treated rhyme from the openings of In Memoriam on "divers tones "/"Stepping stones " (st. 1). The comparable diction in Hopkins's run-on line, when submitted to overeading, elides the second sibilant across the very mimetic drop from line to line which the hissing ligature serves at the same time to defer — thus bringing out, bringing forward, the tones of the falling stones. It is as if the natural inscape has been weirdly plumbed, metalinguistically sounded, disclosing that "one thing and the

same" which asserts itself as the auditory essence (or inevitable effect) of such natural gravitational motion.

Though nowhere to the degree we find it in Hopkins, post-Romantic American poetry of the period also experiments with that phonemic play which puts the vocable at lexical risk. Emily Dickinson's sustained system of marked hiatuses, of dashes, of rests and arrests, does perhaps tend to militate against certain elaborate ligatures in her verse. There is nevertheless a fricative "holding" to be heard, for example, in "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (J 341), an aural contouring of sequence itself. A velar prolongation appears first in the emergence of "c omes" from the participial g in the first line, then, more dramatically, in the gemination of the poem's last line, "First chill, then stupor, then the lettingg o." We might call this the inscape or instress of pain, the hold it has on both sentience and its expression. It is registered in a phonemic grip that must be loosened before bringing to utterance the final "o(h)" of relief and release.

Modernist "Symphonetics"

Before glancing briefly at a very few representative instances of the modernist wordplay that continues the line of phonemic density from Shakespeare through Milton to the Romantics and their direct Victorian heirs, I should say a word again on the methodology of these passive auditions. They are in the double sense phonological , recuperating the sensory for the sensible, the phonemic for the semantic. Why so? To trace out the transegmental effect in context and in force, this chapter, as those before it, has repeatedly moved from merely reading such latent aural features to tentatively interpreting their effect, binding them over to certain thematic imperatives, giving them only enough play to justify themselves as restructured diction. If this is false to their function — or dysfunction — in the field of verbal contingency, false to their sheer inevitability in syntactical buildup, it is no less true to their role in literary text production. As soon as we read , we tend to process; we incorporate into larger and larger aggregates; we install the phonotext within a widening hermeneutic. As with Hartman's "wounds" of wording, including the extreme lacerations audited by Lucette Finas, even the most severe morphological hemorrhaging is soon staunched by the suturing force of simply reading on. Hence the tendency for this chapter's readings, these registrations of phonemic layering, to be found in close conjunction with more familiar strategies of stylistics, with reader-response theory, with analyses of conceptual and phonic figures, of ambiguities in diction and syntax, of punning, double grammar, and the shifting emphases of enjambment, with examinations of self-revising syntax and self-referential metaphors, and so on. Already embedded within a context, and certainly within an overarching

grammar, the transegmental effect is likely to fall into line ; is likely, that is — in its very flux and flexion — to fit, to make one kind of sense as fast as it undoes another. It is in the nature of reading to naturalize input through interpretation. This is the way texts are always generated in process. Phonemic reading just takes us deeper into the works, beneath and between the apparent minims of semantic sequencing.

As reading rather than writing, words have no status until produced in reception: this is a fact upon which some texts openly capitalize, and none more implausibly than a 1914 poem by Thomas Hardy that takes its title from its interrogative first line, "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" The power of this phonemically tortuous gambit consists in an utterance from beyond life that can be enunciated by the reader only like some reverse death gasp. The text seems struggling up to articulation through one prolonged inaugural phoneme that finally closes off its transegmental dilation in a recognizable word. Lending voice to the gothically exaggerated nonpresence not simply of a poetic persona but of a dead one, our evocalization of the spectral question cannot help but bestow a more formal lexical shape — the groaning "Ah are" slurred to the monosyllabic "A(h)re" — upon a posthumous cry summoned up from the grave of language itself.

With a more mellifluous case in point, the verging of contingency upon design in the transegmental generation of texts is addressed directly by John Unterecker's comments on the opening line from the second stanza of Yeats's "The Sorrow of Love," from The Rose volume. "A girl arose that had red mournful lips" strikes Unterecker as part of the "great craftsmanship" of the poem, though he admits that some of its "effects" may be "accidental."^[26] The following comments are set off in a lengthy parenthetical aside: "That repeated 'arose' which pleased Louis MacNeice because of its abruptness delights me because it puns so accurately on the title of the section." It does so, for Unterecker, because of the lexical breakdown from verb into article and substantive. His "eyes, seeing double, enjoy the simultaneous vision of 'A girl arose' and 'A girl, a rose, that had red mournful lips . . .'; such second sight might even have entertained Yeats" (81–82). The last clause confirms Unterecker's understanding of this effect in particular as probably "accidental." Be this as it may, it is crucial to realize how no so-called double vision could operate here on its own. The lexical gap, an opening for ambiguity, would never have yawned as a possibility between the syllables a and rose if it were not for the double audition as well. Yeats may be overead elsewhere, as well, according to this same homophonic scansion, as when the heard music of nature at "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is internally synchronized, in high Romantic fashion, with the orchestrated motions of the mind: "I hear it in the

deep heart's core ." Or when, in the thundering paratactic redundancy of "The Second Coming":

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed  upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,  and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

With the emphatic repetition of the participle "loosed" attracting the preceding sibilant — to form on its trace the passive transform of the transitive verb sluice , for "to drench" or "to flood" — we audit a decentering of the enunciatory regime of script itself.

The foregrounding of aurality, in close conjunction with printed textuality, can be yet more explicit in Yeats. An early text, "When You Are Old," a lyric address structured around the intertwined acts of reading and enunciation, commands in the first quatrain a perusal of the very book that contains it. The former beloved is told to "take down this book" in old age "And slowly read, and dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once" (ll. 2–4). Hardened by time, these once pliant eyes are now confined (by the deadlocked rhyme of "book" with the activating "look" it requires) to the only effectual seeing left to them: a rueful backcast spurred by verse across the anagrammatic ligature of "read, and drea m." So, lexically and mentally, would the addressee now naturally drift off; but human voices wake her — her own in particular — for she is next urged (across the same conjunctive grammar) to evoke the vanished past in a whispered lament that can only coincide with the lines she is still reading. The poem that begins in the eyeing of a text, that is, now summons its own muted voicing:

And . . .
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
(ll. 9–11)

Here is where the act of reading and the theme of acknowledged loss are, one might say, somatically confronted — in as piercingly ironic an antiphone as verse can achieve. The saddening climax of a personified "Love fled," precisely when evocalized as a murmur by the aged voice of lyric reception, elegizes the woman's faded yearning to be drawn forth by Love to erotic heights ("the mountains overhead") — and so registers, in other words, the decline of a once "pilgrim soul" (l. 8) whom in the dimming years it could no longer be said that "Love led." In reviewing the first Oxford installment of the Yeats letters, Helen Vendler closes with the volume's "earliest anecdote,"

which "shows us Yeats at the age of four: introduced to Edwin Ellis, he asks whether Ellis is related to Cinder Ellis. Truly, poets are born and not made."^[27] Those poets, at least, of the lexical drift.

Ezra Pound is at times such a poet, though in a more disjunctive modernist vein. When he speaks famously of the poetic endeavor as "the dance of the intellect among words," he implicitly catches the right balance between the spatial and the audible in the processing of texts.^[28] Poetry is the choreography of conceptual signification performed upon the phonemically based gestures of wording. It is a dance among, and therefore between, lexemes. We can attend such a poetic "dance," a virtual pirouette at line's end, in the first of Pound's cantos, his recast image of the Ulyssean (partly Tennysonian) quester pressing ever beyond the "margin" of experience — as well as of textual limits:

Then we sat amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water
(1.8–11)

Three times in these lines Pound deconstructs an idiomatic phrase, once by the echo of "midshipmen" in the adverbial invention "amidships," twice by the opening up of a compound, "windjammer" and "overseas" transformed to "windjamming" and "over sea." In the context of these experiments in lexical resegmentation, there appears a remarkable flaunting of linear segmentation as well: that enjambment (despite punctuated end-stopping) across "till day's end. / Sun to his slumber." The absolute (or nominative absolute) grammar opened by the new line is never completed by a verb form (as in "Sun gone to his slumber"), which frees it all the more for a ligature with the line before. In this realignment we may now read Pound's complex slide of bidirectional liaisons as "we went over sea till day ('s)end(s) sun to his slumber," a momentarily continuous (because enjambed) syntax that defies the given punctuation as well as shifts into the present tense for a kind of generalized definition of sunset. Compared to this "dance of the intellect among words," this radical reprocessing of the graphic text according to phonic cues, the transegmental effect that later closes Canto 20 can seem only rather traditional. After the description of "gilded barocco" (a Joycean portmanteau) in a hall of "columns coiled and fluted," Pound's text pictures "Vanoka, leaning half naked, waste hall there behind her." Given that odd collocation of noun modifier and noun in "waste hall," what inevitably strikes the inner ear is "waste all there behind her."

Whether (in Vendler's terms) born or made, Wilfred Owen is certainly — and self-consciously — a poet of the transegmental tendency. As with Joyce's

texts in prose, Owen's poems marshal as often as possible the "symphonetic" effect. That last is a portmanteau coinage (from symphonic plus phonetic ) in an unfinished draft entitled "All Sounds have been as Music."^[29] In it, we find the elliptical clause "Bridges, s onorous under carriage wheels," as if the sibilant unfolds a near pun on "burden" for the musical and the "onerous" at once. It is a poem whose next stanza is also likely to hint of "lutes" in the "drawl of f lutes and shepherds' reeds." In alliterative parallelism with the phrase "G urgle of sl uicing," this same stanza is also likely to register the harsher "slap" in the "g luttonous l apping of the waves on weeds." The well-known experiments with "slant rhymes" in Owen's verse have their equivalence in oblique internal rhymes, these often aided by a transegmental regrouping, as in "To the world's towers or stars " ("The Roads Also"). At other times the internal slant rhyme can warp the verse with an anti-pun, inoperable in context, the ghost of a vanished or suppressed possibility. The poem "Training" begins "Not this week nor this month dare I lie down / In languor under lime trees or smooth smile." Reminiscent of Browning, this denied smile then haunts as anti-pun the next stanza's "My lips, parting, shall drink space, mile by mile."

T. S. Eliot is scarcely this sort of poet as a rule. The stark vernacular of his mature verse normally eschews the kind of thickening effects that are carefully cordoned off in the (almost parodistically full) transegmental chimes of the few rhyming stanzas from "Little Gidding." In that poem's "Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash that burnt roses leave " (ll. 56–57), the first line's sibilant is no sooner elided to anticipate the rhyme than the ending of "roses" drifts over a line later to fill out the echo. Or there is the fuller tandem rhyme of "incandescent terror " with "sin and error " (ll. 203, 205). In bringing The Waste Land to a close, "What the Thunder Said" is perhaps the best-known phonemic rumbling in modern English literature, first "DA" on one line, "Datta " on the next (ll. 401–2), then twice more, at narrowing intervals, "DA/Dayadhvam " (ll. 411–12) and "DA/Damyata " (ll. 418–19). Eliot's note, of course, identifies his source (in the Upanishads) for the repeated syllables issued by the Hindu divinity when speaking in tongues, as it were, through the accidental phonemic overtones of the thunder. Three pregnant DA s are followed by three responses generated from within the semiotic impulse of the listening interpreter. Like Saussurean anagrams, two of the responses, "Datta " and "Damyata " (to give alms; to practice self-control), may be said to be generated from the sacred syllable "DA" according to a bracketing "mannequin," while the common denominator of all three consists simply in the fact that the single, capitalized, presyllabic transcription "DA" yields up the first two letters of the next word, the primal noise incurring the human phoneme. But this is not all. In the original manuscript of The Waste Land , the first

reverberation as well as the response appear in the same typographical format, all caps: "DA/DATTA ."^[30] This makes all the clearer the way in which the tripled boom of the thunder sings out its riddling three syllables even in the sheer phonetics—quite apart from morphemics—of the very first enunciation and hymned return: DA, DA, TTA . The revision thus secures the sense of the thunder's threefold DA being pieced out across this whole climactic passage, its appearances never directly collapsing into the meaningless repetitions they would produce without the intervention of lexical processing. Never directly—and yet even across the highlighted shift in typographical format, one may also hear three times repeated, by transegmental enjambment, the name of that contemporaneous offshoot of modernism whose aesthetic role, just the year before, Eliot had minimized and dismissed, no doubt for its tendency to belittle all the revelatory fervor of art's hieratic aspiration.^[31] In Eliot's modernist script(ure), that is, the defiant voice of DA/da is evoked only to be drowned out by a more resonant phonemic fiat.

A poet as different from Eliot as is Robert Frost cannot help but be overead this way in his most lexically overrun moment, the pun on a fence in "Mending Wall": "Before I built a wall I'd ask . . . / . . . to whom I was like to give offense." So too, if less flamboyantly, in "The Aim Was Song," about the telos of natural music passing through meter into melody, even through phonation into lyric. In its play between theme and thematized medium, this could be Frost's version of Coleridge's Eolian emblem for breathed poetic meaning. "Before man came to blow it right," the poem opens, "The wind once blew itself untaught." That last participle then recurs as a lingering instructive aftertone across a segmental break in the second stanza: "it blew too hard—the aim was song. / And listen—how it ought to go!" As we know from one of Geoffrey Hartman's examples of "junctural zero values" in the Prologue ("le monocle de mon oncle"), we can find such "symphonetics" in Stevens as well as Frost, and in English as well. In "Anecdote of the Jar," a passing transegmental shift accompanies a clear case of Empsonian double grammar in the opening stanza. A jar is set down in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

From the clausal format of "And round it was," we are led to expect, at least until or despite the comma, some delayed subject. It turns out, rather, that "round" is adjectival rather than adverbial ("around"), the grammar entirely self-contained in its inversion ("round it was," it was round). Its roundness, like everything else about the jar, is focal, centering. Enhanced by sibilant enjambment, the second sentence of the stanza next inscribes an almost

perfect homophonic alternative for the unwritten "made the slovenly wilderness / around that hill"—with "made the landscape" understood in the vernacular sense of giving it form and focus.

Dylan Thomas is a poet whose ear runs to such crisscross lexical effects as those in "Poem in October," where the enjambed unpunctuated series "With apples / Pears and red currants" finds its first two items reversed two lines later for a homophonic anagram in "the parables / Of sun light." Words in his verse can also be fused in their given order, as when the famous lines "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age" manage with their last strained metonymic figure (transferred epithet plus noun) also to suggest the single vocable "greenage" (as implicitly contrasted at the level of an antonymical matrix to a formation like "dotage"). Besides such transformations of separate lexemes into the new syllabic units of a larger term, there are transegmental phantoms in Thomas that shear off a single phoneme at a subliminal level. "It's Not in Misery but in Oblivion," for example, covertly anticipates (and afterward explicitly reiterates) the noun "sin" by the fluid (lubricious?) phonic drift of "By us in sin or us in gaiety." The opening of "I Know This Vicious Minute's Hour" involves the phonemic imbrication of a transegmental bond in "minute's hour; / It is a sour motion in the blood." Internal rather than end rhyme, though inaugurated in terminal position, thus enforces an adjective that seems endemic to the moment. But as soon as such possibilities for liaison are allowed by the ear, the reverse momentum is also permissible. The second line thus seems able to insinuate the inevitable equivalence between "a sour motion" and one that, by definition, "is as our motion." In "Now the Thirst Parches Lip and Tongue," a stinging acid "pours away . . . / Into the places and the crevices / Most fit for lover to make harmony." In the accompanying clause, "the acid (d)rips," such virulence is further conveyed in a lexical crevassing whose effect—by gemination and elision—is to split open one verb to reveal a more rending one. In connection with such verbal rifts and clefts, there is a transegmental rhyme in the first quatrain of "Clown in the Moon" that one could read as an oblique thematizing of the lexicalized d/rift itself. "My tears are like the quiet d rift / Of petals," Thomas writes, and "my grief flows from the rift / Of unremembered skies and snows."

Graphonology

From Anglo-American modernism on, then, to what? Any closure brought to bear on this cursory survey of transegmental activity in the English poetic tradition since Shakespeare will be to some extent as arbitrary as its starting point. There is no reason, however, to let our modernist examples trail off without a glance forward to their theoretically oriented succession in

poststructuralist poetry. In her chapter on these recent experiments, "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," Marjorie Perloff includes among her epigraphs, without comment, a typifying parapraxis of phonemic sensuality: "But this is a false tart, the trap door insecurely latched, a tear in the velvet curtain."^[32] This run of appositives, excerpted from Ron Silliman's radical linguistic primer, ABC , kicks off with the transegmental absurdity of "false tart" (Shakespeare's "Trojan strumpet" by any other name) as a monosyllabic false gambit, the second lexeme getting underway a sibilant too late. This self-instancing initial solecism is indeed the lexical promiscuity as trap, an unlatching, a tear in the eroticized veil of language. If we take this instance of the phonotext rectifying the graphic slip as in some sense a quintessential instance of graphonic relativity in such experimental verse, then in the very exposure of this materiality and biplay can be felt a vestigial link to Romanticism. For this is the legacy within which verbal art increasingly aspires to provide yet more self-conscious stagings of "literature" in the very condition of its possibility. In the high modernist period, despite an ontology of the word as sign, this still meant the enactment of literature as ideality rather than of language as sheer substance—of literature, in other words, as an "ideology" of language. In this as in many respects, modernism is a phase, not a phasing out, of Romanticism.

But Romanticism relies on a more foundational myth yet: its glorification of the personalized and prophetic voice of lyric utterance. This is the reason why this chapter, though providing a desultory survey of the whole tradition of English phonemic play, has repeatedly taken focus as a theorizing of Romanticism per se. In Romantic verse, the heady privileging of the signifier is not regularly indulged at the intended expense of the referent but, rather, in purposeful homage to—and in a willed mirage of—the very density and mutability of the natural world, the thick but permeable life of things. Yet sound play is not thereby restricted, as acoustic evocation, to one delimited zone of mimesis, licensed only as the phonemic mirror of natural harmonies. Instead, Romantic textual vocalization operates at the very core of the lyric motive itself: a text's impulse to represent the voice of its own representations. Such is the myth of presence—in warrant of reference—that of course co-opts the reader as well. And in particular, the reader's passive vocal organs. This is indeed the way in which aural presence is borrowed, rather than earned, by Romantic texts. One recalls here the embattled confrontation of phonography and premodern textuality speculated upon by Friedrich Kittler in Chapter 3. Yet the fullness simulated by Romantic texts, the repletion they would impart, can only be brought to, not sought in, the surface of their inscription. For it is Romanticism's dream as well as its perpetual default to engage the very pulse

of the reading body, whose palpable equivalent it would at the same time pretend to incarnate in the organic vitality of its own verses.

Let us return in closing, then, to a locus classicus of high visionary Romanticism—in order to read its reflexive fantasy of creative fabrication from within the materiality of its own production. Coleridge's exemplary fable of divination and manifestation in "Kubla Khan" becomes, instead, the admission, indeed the site itself, of an aurality ingeniously veiled and inverted. It is masked by an "ideology" of epiphanic vision within the complementary mode of lyric in its descent from the lyre. When Wordsworth, late in his career, casts into imperative grammar his invocation of the reading agency as sole oral source—"Give voice to what my hand shall trace" ("Inscribed Upon a Rock," 1. 5)—the notion of engraving in solitude for some future visitor ("Pause, Traveller!") localizes the moment so that it stops far short of a general theory of Romantic text production. The indirections of aurality in "Kubla Khan" are more typical. Kubla had a dome; Coleridge a dream; posterity a poem. There was once a perfect shape decreed, decreed by the fiat of a potentate. There was also a damsel with a dulcimer once, more recently, in the living memory of the persona, the memory of his own dream. If he were to remember again here and now the full splendor of her "symphony and song," her voice and its accompaniment, then

  To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there
("Kubla Khan," ll. 44–48)

The buried matrix of the speaker's—the lyricist's—empowerment lurks on the obverse side of a single preposition: "in air" as in "out of (thin) air." The rondure of a dome would thus emerge from melody, for which in one sense "air" is only another word. In this fashion a spatial presence would be generated out of the temporal continuum—and alliterative dilation—of a "music loud and long." A poem, in short—once more, a textual "symphonetics." But when texts are shaped out of air, out of breath, out of "inspiration" in its material agency, and then written down in ink, the tensed breath that remains to sustain them is nowhere to be summoned but from the phonic imagination of the reader—alone from our bodying forth of silence  as latent vocalization. When the text suggests that all who hear the music would see the created object, would find the dome in air , the Romantic "ideology" is working overtime, and specifically on its linguistic front. It is using one myth

of poetic articulation to cover another. An important brilliance of Coleridge's poem is how close this ruse brushes the truth, the terms simply manifested in reverse. The real dream of Romanticism is not first and foremost that, in "listening to" its transcribed oracles, we will see their visions but, more fundamentally, that, in seeing marks on the page, we will seem to hear the music of (their) words.

A music ambiguous and unstable. For at the turning point of the poem is yet another transegmental drift that captures—any way you take it—the dubiety of juncture and the paradoxes of visionary manifestation. "To such a deep delight 'twould win me." Out of the metrical telescoping of "it would" comes the decontracted multiplicity of the phrase. "To such a deep [that is, depth] my delight ('t) would win me," we may well read by way of evocalization, with the second t unprocessed and with "deep" therefore functioning as noun rather than adjective. In this role the word "deep" would indeed be somewhat less dead a metaphor, recalling the "chasm" and the "caves" earlier in the text: that mysteriously empowering and threatening underside of the pleasure dome. Concerning the damsel singing of Mount Abora, that ad hoc Muse chanting the highest reaches of human habitation, this production of "deep" as noun might even draw out the profundity, the unplumbable otherness, latent in her designation as an "Abyssinian maid." Into and out of the visionary "abyss" flows the power of art, coded here as the displaced vernacular matrix of inspirational "depth," the Orphic prototype of the poet's heroic trials. All this would be tacitly mobilized in that tiny secondary elision, within contraction, syncopating out that extra t from "'twould" and reconceiving "deep" as a noun. Short of this, however, even if we don't evocalize such a phonotextual double grammar turning on a single elided letter, we certainly do hear within the given inverted syntax the smooth overlap of cause and effect: the reverse linkage between "'t" ("it"), with "her symphony and song" its antecedent, and the creative "delight" it precipitates. It is this that enunciates the very dream it at the same time begins to fulfill—fulfill, though, only within the twofold illusion of Romanticism—the text as heard in the service of a vision seen.

In and along the untractable drift of the signifying flux, we thus confront in textual reception the relative f/utility of all reference; in Coleridge's words from "Dejection" (for natural rather than textual interanimation), we receive from language but what we give, giving only what we cannot get along without. The dismantling, in turn, of the vocal subject of such truant utterance is therefore something that the major Romantic texts already do for—and against—themselves. When Romanticism draws on the phonic register to confer aural presence, but does so with a luxuriance and manipulation that turns exuberance into excess, excess into surplus, surplus into undecidability,

the overflow of full utterance into dispersed textual biplay, it has thus begun to deconstruct in its own right the logic of all that it posits in the name of prophetic voice, let alone of adumbrated visions. It is such an uneasy and beleaguered logic that nevertheless remains the deepest mythology of expressive style itself. It is this that phonemic reading works to account for from the (morphophonemic) ground up, even while taking it to pieces.

This chapter's concern with the microparticulars of the poetic word has meant in part to register the potential shivering of the Romantic mystification from within its grandest linguistic designs, to record the infinitesimal cracks in its monuments, in its whole cultural edifice, well before major fault lines become evident—and to do so while noting that it is upon the reader's body that the least shocks are registered. The hard gemlike flame of the literary word, let alone of aesthetic response, is not formed to be so internally obdurate after all, its intrinsic friction felt in the reading. This is especially true at the level of junctural pressure upon lexical structure, upon literality itself. Exposed by a transegmental sequencing at odds with syntactic coherence, the decentered word is schismatic at its most prismatic. Such an induced d/rift entails a shaving off of phonemic matter that makes of what is left a refractive and oblique register, an angled surface in which other lexemes glint, other phonemic clusters, alight in the unheard melodies of a sound but half their own. In prose too, as we are next to see, such are the aural facetings that overeading retrieves from the steady suppression necessitated by grammar itself.