CHAPTER XII.

EFFECTS OF POETIC QUALITY CONTINUED.

Imitative Effects of Letter-Sounds corresponding to Aspirate Quality, representing Serpents, Sighing, Rapidity, Winds, Slumber, Conspiracy, Fear, Frightening, Checking-Guttural Quality, representing Grating, Forcing, Flowing Water, Rattling, Effort-Pectoral Quality, representing Groaning, Depth, Hollowness-Pure Quality, representing Thinness, Clearness, Sharpness, Cutting-Orotund Quality, representing Fulness, Roundness, Murmuring, Humming, Denying, etc.— These Effects as combined in Various Illustrations of Carving; Dashing, Rippling, and Lapping Water; Roaring; Clashing; Cursing ; Shrieking; Fluttering; Crawling; Confusion; Horror; Spite; Scorn;

etc.

ET us turn now to poetic effects produced by quality corresponding to those of dramatic, as distinguished from discoursive, elocution; and first to the aspirate. In poetry, as in elocution, the repellant aspirate imitates any thing that hisses; for example:

He would have spoke,

But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue
To forked tongue; for now were all transformed
Alike, to serpents all as accessories

To his bold riot: dreadful was the din

Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and amphisbæna dire,
Cerastes horn'd, hydrus, and ellops drear,

And dipsas; not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropped with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa.

-Paradise Lost, 10: Milton.

The acquiescent aspirate imitates any thing that sighs; for example:

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;

She swore. In faith 't was strange, 't was passing strange,

'T was pitiful, 't was wondrous pitiful;

She wish'd she had not heard it; yet she wish'd

That heaven had made her such a man.

-Othello, i., 3: Shakespear.

But it is possible to go still more into detail than this. As Guest has pointed out in his "History of English Rhythms," developing for that purpose a suggestion made by Bacon, certain letters and combinations of them seem especially adapted for the imitation of certain specific operations. Things, for instance, that fly rapidly, make sounds resembling those of the sibilants. Hence the appropriateness of the following:

How quick they wheeled, and flying behind them shot
Sharp sleet of arrowy showers against the face

So do nurses, fountains, and sea-waves, when lulling one

to sleep:

O Sleep, O gentle Sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee
That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,

Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber;
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,

And lulled with sound of sweetest melody.

-2 Henry IV., iii., 1: Shakespear.

In the following we seem to hear the whisperings of conspirators:

Who rather had,

Though they themselves did suffer by it, behold
Dissentious numbers pestering streets, than see
Our tradesmen singing in their shops and going
About their functions friendly.

-Cariolanus, iv., 6: Shakespear.

And here the whisperings of fear :

A hideous giant, horrible and high.

-Faerie Queene, 1, 7, 8: Spenser.

Fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom
To enter and his dark suggestions hide.

-Paradise Lost, 9: Milton.

When we wish to frighten a bird or animal, we often make a prolonged sound of s, and then stop it suddenly with the sound of t. Now, look at the use of st in the following to indicate motion that is checked by being frightened:

Stern were their looks like wild amazed steers,
Staring with hollow eyes and stiff upstanding hairs.

-Faerie Queene, 2, 9, 13: Spenser.

Though death-struck, still his feeble frame he rears;
Staggering, but stemming all, his lord unharmed he bears.
-Childe Harold, 1: Byron.

P and t, because their sounds cannot be prolonged, as well as d, when pronounced like t, have also the effect of representing the stopping of movement; e. g.:

Sudden he stops; his eye is fixed: away,

Away thou heedless boy! prepare the spear:
Now is thy time to perish or display

The skill that yet may check his mad career.

If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

-Idem.

-Tempest, i., 2: Shakespear.

The poetic guttural imitates any thing that grates; for example:

How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood-the iron gate

Ground his teeth to let me pass.

-A Serenade at the Villa: R. Browning.

Besides this, it is well to notice that the chief guttural consonants, g, j, k, and ch, are all made as a result of effort, and, more than this, of effort that is internal in the sense of not being outwardly visible. They are produced by forcing the tongue against the palate, and the breath between the two. For this reason they seem to be recognized as appropriate for the representation of effort, especially of effort that is internal; for example:

Caitiff, to pieces shake,

That under covert and convenient seeming

Hast practised on man's life. Close pent-up guilts,

Rive your concealing continents, and cry

These dreadful summoners grace.—I am a man.

-King Lear, iii., 2: Shakespear.

Thou, trumpet, there's my purse,

Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
Blow, villain, till thy spherèd bias cheek

Out-swell the colic of puff'd Aquilon ;

Come stretch thy chest.

-Troilus and Cressida, iv., 5: Shakespear.

This last quotation suggests that not only the chief guttural consonants, but b and also, though in a less degree, may represent effort. This will not seem strange from our present point of view, when we notice that they are both produced by compressing the lips precisely as we do when we are making a strong muscular exertion:

And him beside sits ugly Barbarism,

And brutish Ignorance, ycrept of late
Out of dred darkness of the deep Abysme,

Where being bred he light and heaven does hate.

-Tears of the Muses: Spenser.

L and r, like the other consonants just mentioned, are formed by interrupting the flow of the breath; but in these it is not checked even for a moment, but passes outward at either side of the tongue. Both, therefore, are felt to be appropriate for imitating sounds of flowing waters or liquids, or other objects having this motion; for example:

For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

-Macbeth, iv., I: Shakespear.