The Spell of the Song: Letters, Meaning, and English Poetry

The Spell of the Song: Letters, Meaning, and English Poetry
John Powell Ward

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John Powell Ward opens The Spell of the Song: Letters, Meaning, and English Poetry with a question: what are poems made of? His answer and thesis : the physical medium of poetry is the alphabet. In the process of developing that thesis, Ward elaborates a complete abecedarial poetic theory, demonstrates its interpretive power in analysis of five poets’ works, including Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, and champions the collected letters of the alphabet—their shapes as well as their sounds—as the key elements of an aesthetic appreciation of poetry. The book is divided into four parts: in part one, Ward considers the origins of the alphabet and attitudes towards writing in the West from Plato through the reformation; in part two, he lays out six characteristics of the alphabet, which he uses, in part three, as tools for analyzing specimens of the work of his selected poets; and in part four, he considers the relationship between the alphabet and the mind from linguistic, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic perspectives—and speculates about its futures in an age of electronic text production and transmission. Throughout this ambitious project, Ward keeps the alphabet’s bewilderingly mercurial essence in focus, following its transits from writing to speech, from the spatial domain to the temporal , from object to thought, so that by the end, Ward arrives at an inevitable yet astonishing conclusion: the alphabet—this human invention that “seems to hang half-way between its own contraries” (417)—is indeed an artistic “medium” like no other.

The alphabet’s core indeterminacy becomes apparent as soon as one tries to talk about it. For instance, how does one refer to letter individually? In discussing the alternatives in his introduction, Ward rules out a policy of referring to letters individually? In discussing the alternatives in his introduction, Ward rules out a policy of referring to letters in quotation marks—as “a” or “m”—in favor of referring to each of them by some kind of name but opines, in turn, that phonetic names—such as “bee”, “tee” or “aitch”—may be imprecise. The late-antique grammarian Priscian would have sympathized with Ward’s dilemma and may also have approved of his ultimate solution, for Priscian taught that along with the shape and the sound each letter represents, each one also has a name. With Priscian’s theory of letters in mind, referring to the last letter in the alphabet as ‘z’ is simply to display its shape, and while a term like ‘zee’ is word-like and could thus function as a name, it stresses a sound even as it paradoxically uses other letters to do so. Ward’s solution is to give each letter a name that consists of that letter repeated five times; using this nomenclature, the last letter of the alphabet becomes zzzzz. Along with its elegant if slightly eccentric functionality, Ward’s naming policy is theoretically sound, for these pseudo-words prevent a letter’s being reduced either to its shape or to the sound it contributes to a pronounceable word. Beyond the problems of how to refer to individual letters, there is also the question of how to discuss a word as a collection of letters rather than as a lexical item freighted with meaning. Ward tackles this problem with the neologism rolle, “a (feminized) acronym for ‘row of letters’” (28), useful in sentences such as “the rolle sequoia uses every vowel.” Other terms Ward defines in his introduction, etaison, distance-double, and microbillion, in turn point to further issues that arise when speaking or writing of the very medium through which one writes and speaks.

In the course of his historical overview in part one, Ward makes use of these terms and begins to introduce the six characteristics of the alphabet that comprise his abecedarial poetic theory, each of which gets cheaper in part two. As Ward explains in those chapters, letters are few, stable, equable, physical, virtual, and distributive. The alphabet’s distributive quality, Ward explains, enables its “general mode of operation” (214): that is, that its letters may be arranged in countless combinations, thereby forming meaningful texts. But alphabetical distribution is not simply a matter of letters being broadcast across a linguistic terrain; distribution has many modes. First there are what Ward calls the “general dispositions” of letters: their arrangement in rolles of varying length that convey meaning (also known as spelling) and their horizontal and vertical distribution on pages and page-like spaces. In addition, there are modes of distribution that pertain to individual words, to semantics, syntax, and, finally, modes that show the limits of the distributive aspect of the alphabet. Among these, the modes with semantic implications are especially intriguing. One such mode of distribution makes words with diverse linguistic roots look related: for instance, “imp/impious, gala/regalia…a disheveled dishcloth, a huge deluge” (220). In contrasting mode, semantic stability may persist even as words lose letters: perambulator becoming pram; public house, pub; facsimile, fax. Is this linguistic efficiency, Ward asks, “or is it an urge to make the Latinate feel Saxon?” (220).

In his analysis of Tintern Abbey, Ward uses many of these modes of distribution to account for the stirring beauty of the poem. He begins with a word count—1237, of which 514 are different from each other—and then sorts out the distribution of the poem’s 5252 letters: the most prevalent is eeeee (681), tying for the least are qqqqq, xxxxx, and zzzzz (4 each). A look at the distribution of letters into words reveals that a large proportion of the poem’s lines begin with words of only two or three letters contributing, Ward argues, to the sense of constancy and fluidity the poem conveys. Having examined this phenomenon—the poem’s horizontal and vertical disposition of letters—Ward devotes the largest part of this chapter to a study of the effects of individual letters—all twenty-six of them. I shall summarize his analysis of the mmmmm-effect with the aim of illustrating the promise of this kind of particle-level approach to a poem. The pattern of mmmmm’s distribution, Ward argues, works as an undercurrent, or ‘under-voice’—a murmur or hum—that lends the poem a welling self-aware presence that carries along the sense of its words. The mmmmm-effect is particularly strong in some of the poem’s most memorable lines—“Not for this / Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur” is an especially striking example—but it is also heard in the high proportion of lines with mmmmm in the final: “a remoter charm,” “a sense sublime,” “a mansion for all lovely forms,” “from thy wild eyes these gleams” are just a few (2 86-87). And the mmmmm-effect is visual as well as aural: Ward observes that the letter’s “imprint” is especially visible in the phase “nor mourn nor murmur,” and serves as a graphemic analogue to the sonorous undertone of mmmmm in the poem (286). As this description will have suggested, abecedarial analytics draws a reader’s attention to a poem as a material object and beyond that—and more importantly—to the virtual objects a poem may create: in this case, the emotive current of the wandering river Wye.

As a work that deals with the alphabet as the physical medium of poetry, The Spell of the Song builds a bridge between literary theory on the one side and textual scholarship on the other. For this reason practitioners of either camp may take issue with some of its methods and claims: literary critics may object that some of the abecedarial effects Ward points are ‘merely’ accidental while textual scholars may decry his decision to work with modern editions in his poetic analyses, which often do not replicate original spellings. Anticipating this latter objection, Ward argues that contemporary editions are the forms in which older poems are present in contemporary culture—a defense that focuses on the look of the alphabet—and then asserts that variant spellings can in any case yield the same sounds—a defense that draws upon letters’ phonetic value. This is to simplify greatly Ward’s thoughtful discussion of his methodology, but I describe it to exemplify one of the book’s many strengths: that is, that it never resolves the alphabet’s internal contradictions and in so doing defamiliarizes the alphabet in a most wonderful way, rendering it visible and audible as proto-poetry in its own right.

Martha Rust, The Wordsworth Circle, Autumn 2005

This is a remarkable achievement. Despite seeming narrowness of his topic, Ward (Univ. of Wales, Swansea) has produced an important study notable for its scope and depth. He focuses on the alphabet, which has been treated in such excellent studies as Richard Firmage’s The Alphabet Abecedarium (1993), David Diringer’s The Alphabet (1948), and Georges Jean’s Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts (1992), but never with more vigor and thoroughness than here. His approach is at once anthropological, philosophical, linguistic, sociological, and literary. Especially valuable are his incisive and perceptive discussions of five major poets—George Herbert, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot—in relation to abecedariumism. He also delves into psychological and post-modern theories of the literary mind as they apply to his topic. Ward calls the alphabet “a major halfway case between history and theory, the diachronic and synchronic.” This statement obviously guides him throughout his work and undoubtedly accounts for its breadth and focus. This is a pioneering study. Summing up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

R.B. Shuman, emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Choice, December 2004