Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

SOME words are simply pleasing in themselves: pleasing because of their intrinsic musicality and aptness for what they describe. I was in a café in North Carolina one evening when the word “murmuration” came up. My friend had never heard it, and, just as I explained it, by an extraordinary coincidence, a murmuration of starlings rose from the trees near by, and swirled and made those mysteriously suggestive dark cloud shapes as hundreds of birds turned and returned together and settled again in the trees. It was very satisfying.

I was tempted to try out the word “susurration”, just in case, at that moment, a breeze would come from nowhere and give us that delicate whispering sound of wind in the leaves; but I thought I’d better not push my luck.

The sheer sound of words themselves is, of course, one of the ways in which poetry aspires to the condition of music. T. S. Eliot reckoned that Tennyson had the finest ear for the music of English, and the greatest skill in playing it against the meaning of what he had to say. This is not just in the famously rich and luxuriant passages like this one from The Princess —

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

 
— but also when he needs language to toll for the dead like a muffled bell, as in the “Dark House” section of In Memoriam, his elegiac sequence on the death of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose house, he confesses, he visits in vain at dawn:

And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

And then comes the stanza that closes that section with a line of eight bleakly tolling monosyllables:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Needless to say, Eliot quotes those last two lines with savour and approval, since they wouldn’t be out of place in “Prufrock” or The Waste Land.

This kind of skill with sound itself seems less common in contemporary poetry, unsurprisingly, since most of it has abandoned the two most musical elements in our poetic tradition: metre and rhyme. Seamus Heaney was a master of it, though, as in his evocation of the sound of a downpour, itself evoked by upending a rain stick:

In a cactus stalk
Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through.

(“The Rainstick”, 1993)
 

Those lines have, in their rhythmic and repeated “w” and “sh”, the very sound of the water sloshing and washing as it runs down and backs up against itself; and then the new half-line that ends the sentence — “come flowing through” — itself expresses the sudden clearing of a channel or passage that lets the water flow through smoothly and quietly again.

My love of these musical effects is at the heart of my own vocation as a poet; and when I wrote “Singing Bowl”, a poem about writing poetry, the key line was: “Stay with the music, words will come in time.”