This is a collection of four of Griffiths’ essays, ostensibly about Victorian poetry, but far reaching into the depths of culture, politics, religion, and marital relations. His first essay, “The Printed Voice”, most directly deals with the differences between the spoken word and the word on the page. Griffiths writes, “No page displays a voice’s pace, its dips and rises, how some words come readily to it and others only with reluctance, the ever-varying timbres of allegiance, longing, shyness, or disdain which colour utterance and give character to a voice, give voice to a character…. Print does not give conclusive evidence of a voice; this raises doubts about what we hear in writing but it also gives an essential pleasure of reading, for as we meet the demand a text makes on us for our voices, we are engaged in an activity of imagination which is delicately and thoroughly reciprocal.” In this essay, Griffiths first quotes John Hollander, “speaking and writing are both language…. it is the region between them which poetry inhabits.” And then, almost immediately, W.B. Yeats, “English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printed-press.” Griffiths continues, “Whatever else poetry may be, it is certainly a use of language that works with the sounds of words, and so the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word creates a double nature in printed poetry, making it both itself and something other—a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the voice in air.” Griffiths comments on meter and form, “metre tends to ‘divest language in a certain degree of its reality’ because it provides, as it were, an alibi for the words in a poem…. The metrical form of a poem records the poet’s compositional activity which may or may not entirely square with the drift of what is said, or the state of mind implicit in that drift…. Poetic forms…. speak to the divided soul of man.” Again speaking of poetry in general, Griffiths quotes T.S. Eliot, “To be living on several planes at once/Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.” Griffiths concludes that “ambiguity, in fact, requires the concept of intention, for to detect an ambiguity is to ascribe two or more possible intentions…. If reading is to be a response to a work, then ‘what seems important’ to a reader must be influenced by what was of moment to the writer of that work. Accent is the sound of what was of moment in writing.”
Griffiths' second essay, “Tennyson’s Breath”, focuses special attention on how Tennyson’s poetry sounded read aloud. Tennyson, himself, seemed to be of two minds. He wrote, “the Poet swears no being, existent or possible can read this but himself” and “He will not admit that any one save himself can read aloud his poems properly.” But later in his memoirs, Tennyson admits, “poetry looks better, more convincing, in print.” Griffiths considers, “Every body breathes, and poems written in the rhythm of the breath must be of all others those most patent to any body, but no two bodies breathe alike…. Tennyson’s verse sounds as if the body thought.” Griffiths returns to the effect of meter in this essay as well. “Metrical stress and the stress of meaning need not be identical.” Another theme of Griffiths’ essay is Tennyson’s conceptions of mortality and morality and how those affected his poems. Tennyson wrote, “I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself.” He was, at heart, an individualist. Griffiths relates, “Goethian moral evolution, quite as much as Darwin’s physical evolution, worried Tennyson because growing thus ever upward, we might outgrow each other, and find that, from the perspective of our higher selves, our past lives and those we shared them with, had become dead things…. [Tennyson] repudiates the theory of infinite development because one of the simplest reasons for wishing to believe in immortality [of the soul] is the desire not to be separated from what we have loved, including our own selves. An immortality in which we endlessly change, though, would itself be a process of separation; finite people infinitely developed would eventually become incapable of recognizing each other.”
In Griffiths’ essay, “Companionable Forms”, he touches on how the Victorians incorporated into their poems ideas of love and marriage. He speaks of how “the lyric utterance consciously idealizes the facts of the dark world it issues from as it idealizes that world’s speech.” Griffiths relates how there might be multiple audiences for the poem- the (sometimes fictional) singular lover, as well as the reading public at large. “The world crowds itself betwixt poet and the unique addressee, lover and sole beloved, yielding up to public judgement lines which the fiction pretends are an intimate exchange.” Griffiths speaks to Browning’s use of rhyme to take us out of the direct exchange between two lovers to the page, while also relating the emotions between them. “The purpose of the rhymes…. when they have purpose rather than merely signalling his own exuberance, is to set the voice on edge with the demands of the page, indicating the distinct existences of the written text and vocal renditions of it, so that we shall not think that they are altogether such as each other, nor that we are altogether such ones as the speaker whose speech the text informs us of.” Line breaks can also serve the purpose of distinguishing verse from speech. “Lineation in poetry can make at once a ‘cut’ into speech, put speech in view of its own precarious position, and at the same time hold a firm ‘line’ of regular and decent behaviour.” Griffiths relates the strain and responsibility of the reader. “Particularly when a reader faces and tries to voice an intonationally ambiguous line, he is asked to reflect on the pull one reading rather than another exerts on him, and to ask why it does so. He comes to know himself in the act of becoming convinced that he knows the fictional speaker.” Griffiths again relates the tension between writing and speech in Victorian poetry in general, “writing may be regarded by the Victorians as an idealization of the actuality of speech, its refinement and correction, or speech may be the longed-for ideal of full and vivid communion on the condition of which writing continually only verges.” Later, he continues, “One condition of conversation which follows from the facts of acoustics is evanescence; the spoken word perishes as it comes into communicative being just to make way for the next word. Written words stay on the page after we have passed over them, and we may have recourse to them at will…. Print offers such time to revolve and absorb words which were too much for us in the prime of their occurrence.” Coventry Patmore writes, “In the finest specimens of versification, there seems to be a perpetual conflict between the law of the verse and the freedom of the language, and each is incessantly, though insignificantly, violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other…. The language should always seem to feel, though not to suffer from the bonds of verse.”
Griffiths' final essay, “Hopkins: The Perfection of Habit”, relates the strain that Gerard Manley Hopkins felt in leaving the Anglican Church for Rome. In particular, Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism was to play a large role in the subject matter, as well as the form, of his later verse. Hopkins was well aware of his new minority status in England, as well as the hostility his newfound Catholic faith often engendered. “Hopkins was an artist consciously at odds with some parts of the community of English-speakers and so needed to resist as well as to collaborate…. Part of the nature Hopkins himself strained against was that Leavisian ‘spirit of the language’, as the numerous preciosities and dare-devillings of his poems against the norms of English speech show…. We should then expect Hopkins to be wary of the language while also schooled in it and responsive to it…. Language is such a ‘part of this world of objects’…. A language essentially informs the mediacy between the self and other selves. The conduct of poetic style within language, then, forms part of the broader activity of ‘knowing one’s place’ in a culture.” Griffiths writes of Hopkins’ use of repetition, “Hopkins characteristically and purposively creates his repetitions, as also the exclamations in his verse, to have such a double aspect, at once of baffled and of heightened fluency; repetition would not of itself suggest a range of possible bearings on vocalization but the short-term density of repetition in Hopkins and its frequent occurrence at points where it interrupts syntactic cohesion or strains liaison between words often lends it this dramatic aspect.” Another technique of Hopkins was his use of silence in his poems. “Hopkins’s attempt to make his poetry vocal and for realizing that the difficult reserve of his written texts, the occasions when they do not sit easily with spoken English, represent, amongst other things, an attempt to produce in verse something approaching ‘the silence and severity of God’ with regard to the language in which they are written, to make that silence itself audible.” Griffiths continues, “In Hopkins’s work, the drama of voicing exemplifies the activity of faith in search of understanding…. The special claim of the Catholic Church was to be the living bearer of the meaning of the Scriptures, writings were not a text for the Catholic, but a voice.” Hopkins, himself, wrote, “My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.” Griffiths relates that the success or failure of how a poem is received by the reader is often a perilous circumstance. “It baffles poets when the page yields only with reluctance their intended voices back to readers…. It strikes a poet particularly, though, because the pleasure of poetry dwells in an exactness of words, blurs show up more clearly in the reading of poetry, especially in the reading of it aloud, like stains which are the more evident the whiter the table-linen is.” Griffiths concludes, “The language is a witness, and poetic work bears witness in and to a language and the world of those who use it.”
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