melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

equeathed to English prosody. Here is the speech at the end of The Tempest, where to
my mind Shakespeare’s own voice as a poet sounds most clearly, where it dominates
the music.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(VI, 1, 148-158)
Here, below the counterpoint of voices, Shakespeare produces a prosodic
counterpoint by juxtaposing lineal periods with grammatical periods. But grammar is a
more formal mode of organization than thought, having less to do with content, and
doesn’t always coincide with it. An argument, whose premises and conclusion are a
good example of a completed thought, often runs over a number of sentences, and
certainly a number of phrases. Small thoughts, like “I do” or “I am” or “Alas” often
form only part of grammatical sentences or phrases. And in a narrative a continuous
thought can be grammatically very broken up, and indeed strung out along many
pages. Thus the counterpoint between lineation and grammar in a poem may itself be
subject to a further articulation, thought, which as its own periods are superimposed
introduces new patterns of reduction and amplification.
Added to this is an aural counterpoint created by repetition of sound. Endrhymed
poems may still include a great deal of alliteration, slant rhyme, and even full
rhyme in the middle of lines. Then our ears register not only the linear period and
alternation of the end rhymes (for example, ABAB) but also the chime that
complicates it: three occurrences of sibilance in one line, for example, or a glottal stop
in the middle of a line echoing another in the middle of the next. And poems that have
no end-rhyme, like Shakespeare’s blank verse here, are often knit together aurally by
frequent alliteration, slant rhyme, and full rhyme set internally in the lines, often
before caesuras; in which case we hear their submerged periods, in connection with
the interplay of line and caesura-unit. Another aural effect created by caesuras in
highly enjambed poems is a counterpoint of the pauses expected at the end of lines
with the pauses that occur mid-line as they frame a completed thought or grammatical
unit, for they often rush over the end of a line like rapids, so that what remains is only
the ghost of a pause, a pause not taken, which we none the less register.
A similar effect is the counterpoint created between the regular metric pattern
of a line and the ordinary patterns of speech. Ordinary speech may demand an
emphasis or temporal extension just where the regular metric pattern demands a brief
light syllable; every poet knows that this juxtaposition of expectations can produce
extraordinary effects, which when successfully accomplished make the reader hear
two, or even perhaps three things at once. We hear the speech pattern (that we know
well from our everyday life) and the metrical pattern (that the poet has successfully
established in the foregoing lines) virtually as aural ghosts behind the resultant
outcome, which is a combination of both and what we “really” hear. Actors
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