The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 4 Part 9 docx

Sylvia Adamson

find — Standard English as the medium of discourse in their new worlds,

later examples of the genre offer a range of alternative varieties, such as

Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 (1949), Neanderthal in Golding's The Inheritors

(1955), 'nadsat', the Russo-English of c

space-age hooligans' in Burgess's A

Clockwork Orange (1962) and post-holocaust Cockney in Hoban's Riddley

Walker (1980). Often more is involved than a delight in exotic forms.

Halliday argues, for instance, that the unusual patterns of transitivity in

Lok's language in The Inheritors encode a pre-modern understanding of

cause—effect relations (Halliday 1981: 325—360) and Laadan, the language

constructed by Elgin for Native Tongue (1984), was deliberately designed to

show that

c

if women had a language adequate to express their perceptions,

it might reflect a quite different reality than that perceived by men' (Elgin

1988: 3). The paradigm case for such experiments is to be found, I believe,

in the language of children's literature, the genre which occupied in the

nineteenth century the place held by science fiction in the twentieth.

7.2.7 The logic of non-Standard English

The eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians who were the arbiters of

the emerging Standard were motivated by the desire to make the language

not only stable but rational, and the belief that Standard English is in fact

more logical than non-Standard dialects remains deeply rooted in folk

mythology. As recendy as the 1960s, Labov found it necessary to demon￾strate that a speaker of Black English Vernacular could argue as cogendy

as a Standard speaker (Labov 1969). It was largely the presumption of con￾ceptual gaps and rational deficiencies in low and rustic' speech that made

Coleridge reject the more radical part of Wordsworth's poetic programme

(Coleridge [1817]: ii.52—5). And yet elsewhere Coleridge himself expresses

interest in varieties of language that, in comparison to educated Standard

English, were not simply deficient but deviant in their reasoning. The two

varieties he chooses are Irish English and children's language.

The feature of Irish English that attracted Coleridge's attention was the

kind of self-contradictory statement known as an Irish bull, for example:

(18) a. Follow me, sir, I'm right behind you.

b. No English hen ever laid a fresh egg.

c. I was a fine child but they changed me.

d. Whatever you say, say nothing.

Largely ridiculed by earlier writers, or cited as a sign of the mental inferi￾ority of Irish speakers, the bull was rehabilitated by the Edgeworths (1802),

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who like Coleridge, stressed its affinities with the workings of the poetic

imagination. (18c) for instance exploits the ambiguity of the term /(self￾as-speaker and self-as-referent) to unsetde apparendy rational notions of

the persistence of personal identity. For Coleridge, it is this power to

disrupt norms of reasoning that links the Irish bull to the anomalies and

contradictions found in children's language - in which it is possible to speak

in opposites or issue an imperative in relation to past time (Ricks 1993:

187-91).

The importance of children's language as a model for the Wordsworth￾ian school was noted by contemporaries and Jeffrey coupled it with their

interest in lower-class varieties in claiming that their style was derived from

'plebeian nurseries'. Its virtue, for Wordsworth, lay in combining the

simplicity of vocabulary and syntax which he found in low and rustic'

speakers with a visionary violation of the standard logico-linguistic cate￾gories of experience. The most notable example in Lyrical Ballads is the

'idiot boy' who conflates the categories of night and day in:

(19) The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,

And the sun did shine so cold. (Wordsworth 1798)

but the apparendy rational 'Utile Maid' in We are Seven poses an equal chal￾lenge to the assumptions of her adult interlocutor when she questions the

categorial distinction between life and death by insisting that she still has

six siblings even though two of them have died.

The encounter between adult and child reasoning becomes a recurrent

motif in nineteenth-century literature, but in early examples, as in

Wordsworth's case, the narrating voice is typically adult and employs stan￾dard logic as well as Standard English. It is only towards the end of the

century that children are cast in the role of narrator, as in tjie novels of

Nesbit. But from the mid-century, the non-Standard semantics of chil￾dren's language had been exploited on a large scale in works written for chil￾dren by Lear and Carroll, often subversively parodying the moral and

practical inductions into adult values purveyed by previous children's litera￾ture. Compare, for example:

(20) a. 'Tis the Voice of the Sluggard, I hear him complain

You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again.

(Watts 1715; original italics)

b. 'Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,

'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.'

(Carroll 1865)

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The emergence of nonsense writing as a distinct genre promoted the styl￾isation of semantic deviance: in particular, the use of anomalous combina￾tion, which occurs at the syntactic level in (19) and (20b), extends to the

lexical and phonological level, producing: treacle-well, star-bespringled, slithy,

borascible, ipwergis, and even mhruxian.

Modernism brought a diffusion of such techniques to adult genres,

most notoriously in the wholesale adoption into Joyce's Finnegans Wake

of portmanteau words coined on the same principles as slithy and boras￾cible (e.g. athemisthued, blasphorous). The element of nonsense-technique

has also been noted in Hopkins (Sonstroem 1967) and critics have

argued for the influence of Carroll and Lear on Eliot (and hence on

surrealist poets of the 1930s, such as Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas) and

for the influence of the Irish bull on Beckett (and hence on the absurd￾ist novel and drama of the later twentieth century) (Sewell 1962; Ricks

1993: 153-203). Many of these later writers make explicit the challenge

to established categories of thought and social ordering which are

implicit in earlier practice. Auden, for instance, who celebrates Lear's

nonsense as a land of escape from the "Terrible Demon' of bourgeois

adult reality, adopts the techniques of nonsense - nursery rhyme stanza

and semantic anomalies - to create a scenario that threatens the comforts

and conventions on which that 'reality' rests.

(21) The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

Where the beggars raffle the bank-notes,

And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-White Boy is a roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back (Auden 1937)

7.3 Breaking the pentameter

7.3.1 Introduction

(22) a. When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a

Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare &

all writers of English Blank Verse, derived [i.e. detached] from

the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and

indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth

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of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as

much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a

variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables.

Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place:

the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts the mild &

gende, for the mild & gende parts, and the prosaic, for inferior

parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the

Human Race. (Blake 1820)

b. (to break the pentameter, that was the first heave)

(Pound 1948)

For both Blake and Pound* poetic revolution begins with a revolution in

metre, a repudiation of the syllabo-tonic tradition of versification estab￾lished in the Renaissance. Both epitomise this ancien regime in the iambic

pentameter, the verse-form that, in the period since 'Milton and

Shakespeare', had come to occupy the position of a metrical norm in

English poetry.

Eighteenth-century metrics were essentially mathematical, as seen in the

common use of the term 'numbers' for rhythm and in Johnson's definition

of versification as 'the arrangement of a certain number of syllables accord￾ing to certain laws' (Johnson 1755: sig.Nl^). The laws generally prescribed

for the iambic pentameter were that an abstract pattern, for which 'the

ingenious Mr Mason' devised the now familiar schema:

(23) ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM ti-TUM

should be realised as transparendy as possible in linguistic material - ideally

as a sequence of ten syllables with stressed syllables occurring only in TUM

positions, though not necessarily in a/trvM positions. This conceptualisa￾tion profoundly influenced the way in which the iambic pentameter was

composed and performed in the eighteenth century. Writers aiming at a

verse-style^that would be judged 'harmonious' produced a high proportion

of lines like (24), in which the distribution of stressed syllables falls natu￾rally into the pattern of (23):

(24) the CURfeu TOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY (Gray 1751)

and the more irregular practice of earlier periods was often re-interpreted

to fit the same pattern. When we see the scansion that Monboddo pro￾posed for the first line of Paradise Lost.

(25) of MAN S first DISoBEdience AN D the FRUIT

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we can understand why Blake in (22a) describes Milton's cadence as

'monotonous'.

One indication of changing attitudes appears when Joshua Steele draws

on his study of English intonation to contest the scansion of (25). He pro￾poses instead:

(26) of MAN S FIRST disoBEdience and the FRUIT

and justifies his analysis on the grounds that poetic rhythm reflects the

natural emphases of speech and that 'our sense of rhythmus [is] much

more instinctive than rational* (Steele 1775: 76—8,166-7). From the turn of

the century, these ideas were taken up more widely as Romantic writers,

rejecting the calculation implied by mathematical models, looked for met￾rical theories more consonant with an ideal of poetry as a form of dis￾course organised by passion rather than reason. Coleridge was an

influential spokesman:

(27) Physicians assert that each passion has its proper pulse. — So it

was with metre when righdy used. A state of excitement

produced is, in truth, an analogy of the language of strong

passion — not that strong passion always speaks in metre, but it

has a language more measured than is employed in common

speaking. (Coleridge 1811)

Here metre is organically related to the speaker; it imitates the regularities

of passionate speech. Later theorists developed the implications of

Coleridge's medical analogy and there have been many attempts to ground

metre in the regularities of human biology — the tempo of the heartbeat,

for example, or the rhythm of breathing.

In terms of metrical practice, these views ultimately result in attempts

to create verse-forms in which such regularities are structural, as in Frost's

proposal to base metre on intonation patterns ('sentence-sounds', as he

called them) or Olson's claim that his lines (as in (3d)) correspond to

breath-units (Scully 1966: 50-53, 271-282). But for the immediate heirs

of eighteenth-century poetics, the first priority was to break the domi￾nance of the iambic pentameter. What we find in Romantic and Victorian

poets is a variety of formal experiments which have in common the sub￾version of what had become the pentameter's salient features: the iambic

foot; the five-stress line; and finally, rhyme, that 'modern bondage'

resisted by Milton, which eighteenth-century practice, under the influ￾ence of Dryden and Pope, had made central to the ideal of 'English

Heroic Verse'.

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7.3.2 The iambicfoot

The foot as a unit of metre can be seen as a stylisation of the foot of ordi￾nary speech, that is, a stressed syllable associated with a variable number of

unstressed syllables and perceived to occur at roughly isochronous inter￾vals in the utterance. In the case of the iambic foot (ti-TUM in Mason's

schema) the stylisation is a doubly unnatural one, since the foot of

conversational English frequendy contains more than one unstressed syl￾lable and, on the most plausible analysis, the stressed syllable occupies

initial rather than final position. The new naturalism in nineteenth-century

metrics generated experiments that attempted to match metre to speech

rhythm by varying the length of the metrical foot and/or reversing its stress

pattern. A variable foot is in effect the 'new principle' that Coleridge

announced for Christabek

(28) the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular,

though it may seem so from its being founded on a new

principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not

the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve,

yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four.

(Coleridge 1816)

The effects Coleridge was aiming at may be judged from the poem's

opening lines:

(29) 'Tis the middle of night by the casde clock,

And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;

Tu—whit!—Tu—whoo!

And hark, again! the crowing cock,

How drowsily it crew.

The influence of Christabel appears intermittendy through the nineteenth

century, for example, in Shelley's Sensitive Plant (1820) and Browning's Flight

of the Duchess (1845), and towards the end of the century, Coleridge's 'new

principle' was rediscovered by Hopkins as the basis for his own 'sprung

rhythm'. The practice found its major academic theorist in Guest, whose

History of English Rhythms (first published 1838, more influentially re-issued

under the aegis of Skeat in 1878) showed that the new principle was in

effect a reappearance of the old principle of accentual prosody which had

regulated the practice of Old and Middle English poetry and, he argued,

had continued as an underground resistance movement throughout the

period of the syllabo-tonic tradition, which he identified as 'the rhythm of

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the foreigner'. Metre was thus drawn into the nationalist movement in

philology, with the consequence that poets like Morris and Hopkins, who

replaced latinate with Anglo-Saxon in vocabulary (see 7.2.5—7.2.6 above),

also experimented with the alliterative metre of Beowulf (which Morris

translated) and Piers Plowman. The complex and systematic patterns of

these historical precedents are not closely imitated (indeed, before Sievers

1893, they were imperfecdy understood), but the flavour of their versifica￾tion is captured by using alliteration to foreground some of the stressed

syllables in the line (as in (30a—b)). In later experiments, the form is at once

more knowingly and more metaphorically used: by Pound as an indigenous

equivalent of Homeric epic verse (30c), by Auden and Wilbur as a metrical

image of primitive heroism in sardonic counterpoint with modern life￾styles, whether effete as in (30d) or sordid as in (30e):

(30) a. The jails of the Jtorm of £atde adown the dickering Mast

(Morris 1876)

b. Thou art /ightning and /ove, I found it, a winter and ^arm

(Hopkins 1875 publ. 1918)

c. 7bmb hideth /rouble. The blade is /ayed low (Pound 1912)

d. .. . lightning at noonday

iwifdy Jtooping to the .rummer-house (Auden 1948)

e. An axe angles

from my neighbor's ^shcan (Wilbur 1961)

In another strand of nineteenth-century poetics, the practice of the vari￾able foot was justified from classical prototypes. The hexameter was par￾ticularly favoured, Coleridge's experimental Hymn to the Earth (1799) being

followed by large-scale works such as Southey's Vision of Judgment (1821),

Longfellow's Evangeline (1847), Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858) and

Kingsley's Andromeda (1858). The similarity in effect between this and the

experiments in accentual prosody can be seen in (31), an example of what

Clough called his Anglo-savage hexameters':

(31) ARchi/TECtural/BEAUty in/APPli/CAtion to/WOmen

(Clough 1848)

The model is the Virgilian hexameter, which utilises three of the foot-types

of classical metrics: spondee (TUM-TUM), dactyl (TUM-ti-ti) and trochee

(TUM-ti). The Anglo-savage equivalent is created by substituting syllable

stress for syllable length in the realisation of the foot and permitting a

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