Unheard melodies

“When I put my ear to the page, I hear nothing but the sound of my hair against the surface. If I erase the letters, no “sound” remains. Sound is not on the page, even if a graphic transmission allows for its properties to be noted for reproduction’” (Johanna Drucker, in Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, 2009, 239) [my emphasis].

“Sound is what happens in Lyric” (Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard, 2015) [my emphasis].

The word “volume” acquired an acoustic register in the late eighteenth-century, according to OED, a musical sense first recorded in Busby’s Complete dictionary of music (1786) referring to the tone and power of a human voice: “Volume, a word applied to the compass of a voice from grave to acute: also to its tone, or power: as when we say, ‘such a performer possesses an extensive or rich volume of voice’.” (OED, 9a). The first recorded usage of the word volume as “Quantity, strength or power, combined mass, of sound” (OED, 9b) occurs a little later, in 1822, and is attributed to Lord Byron in Werner, (v.i. 134 I heard…, Distinct and keener far upon my ear Than the late cannon's 333) volume, this word—‘Werner!’). This new sense of the word registers a larger cultural and scientific curiosity about the nature and experience of sound in the period, a curiosity which also finds shape in poetry of the period.

Coleridge, too, was intensely curious about the nature and experience of sound in the ear and in print. “Frost at Midnight”, written in Somerset in the winter of 1798, does not use the word “volume”, but records a playful exploration of dynamics and of the various ways (graphic, rhythmic, linguistic and as an effect of tempo) in which sound and quiet could be represented to both eye and ear in a poem. Like other Romantic poets, Coleridge was fascinated by visual codes and patterns for sound and marking emphasis. Julia S. Carlson has shown how Wordsworth drew on developments in cartography and rhetoric in his own shapings in and of sound on the page (Julia S. Carlson, Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print, 2016). Taking this yet further, I suggest that Coleridge was also preoccupied with how to represent sounds and especially volume, and that his imaginative interest in acoustics and in musical forms and notation informed the way he shaped sound into both aural patterns and visual language in his poetry.

ii. pp

Many of our critical terms for discussing lyric poetry are, of course, borrowed from music; for example, as Susan Stewart has explained: “we speak of such features as counterpoint, harmony, syncopation, stress, duration, and timbre” as some of the “ways in which sound is measured as if music and lyric were analogous” (Stewart, 2002: 68). In music, however, there is a system of notation for marking dynamics on a musical score, differences in volume and also in the quality of the sound, pp, f, piu p, poco a poco dim., molto piano and quasi niente, for example. The Romantic period witnessed the expansion of the range of musical notation marks for dynamics; for example, it was during the last decade of the eighteenth century, “that the convention of indicating a gradual increase or decrease of volume by terms such as ‘cresc’ or ‘dim.’, or by ‘hairpins’, became commonplace” (Clive Brown, 1999: 62).

The expressive possibilities of volume became increasingly important to composers and performers in this period. In part, this was enabled by developments and innovations in musical instruments themselves: the pianoforte, invented in the eighteenth century, allowed a much wider dynamic range than had been available to the harpsichord, for instance, and it was during the period 1750-1850 that various adjustments were made to stringed instruments which increased the range of volume they could express. Changes in the way sheet music was produced in the period may also have contributed to this interest in dynamics and its expression on the page as well as in performance: there was an increase in the publication of sheet music in the later eighteenth-century which meant, Brown argues, that the performance of music was no longer always in the direct acoustic control of the composer, since in the later period composers were no longer physically present to instruct performers how to alter dynamics. This is perhaps one reason why composers increasingly marked their scores to indicate these dynamic shifts. Moreover, “Many composers . . . came increasingly to regard accentuation and dynamic nuance as integral to the individuality of their conceptions and were unwilling to entrust this merely to the performer’s instinct” (62). For this reason, he suggests, during the nineteenth century there was “a proliferation of markings, designed to show finer grades or types of accents and dynamic effects, and performance instructions of all kinds were used ever more freely” (62). It is likely that it was a combination of factors to do with the production and performance of music as well as technological innovation in the dynamic range of instruments that led to the development and proliferation of dynamic notation in the period, and that this also registered a wider cultural interest in sound and its expression.

iii. Voicing and Volume

A range of new terms emerged for indicating the dynamics of performance in music but also in the fields of literary performance and rhetoric. It was not only on musical scores that dynamic markers appeared: a number of eighteenth-century literary critics also annotated reading texts to indicate volume and dynamics, the levels or the qualities of quiet or loudness for performance; some adopted musical notation, others used different terms. Discussing reading aloud, late eighteenth-century critics of rhetoric such as James Beattie associated different volumes with different emotional states and intensities of feeling and indicated in their annotations how readers might vary the volume and intensity of their voices to best express the affective range and qualities of a piece of writing. Varying the dynamics of reading, reciting or speaking, he explains, could also engage the listener and be more persuasive. In Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Beattie argues that: ‘In describing what is great, poets often employ sonorous language. This is suitable to the nature of human speech: for while we give utterance to that which elevates our imagination, we are apt to speak louder, and with greater solemnity, than at other times" (I, 629). The word “sonorous” here conveys a sense of volume as well as suggesting a particular style, meaning, “Of spoken or written style: using imposing language; having a full, rich sound; imposing, grand; harmonious” (OED, 3a). The first recorded instance of the word to describe language is recorded in 1650, and derives from an earlier usage of the word to mean, more generally, “That makes a loud or resonant sound; capable of producing a loud sound, esp. of a deep or ringing character” (OED, 1a). The concept of linguistic volume Beattie’s comment suggests invites further investigation: certain words might be considered “sonorous”, others quiet depending, perhaps, on semantic associations, others because of onomatopoeia. The possibility that writers of the period considered the volume of words when selecting and composing a poem, for example, and that readers were attuned to the possibility of linguistic dynamics opens up another dimension for literary critics.

In his Lectures on Elocution, Thomas Sheridan uses musical terms to distinguish between loud and soft, and high and low: “Loud and soft in speaking, is like the forte and piano in music, it only refers to the different degrees of force used in the same key whereas high and low imply a change of key” (83). Joshua Steele’s Prosodia rationalis: or, An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech, to be expressed and perpetuated by peculiar symbols stresses the importance of modulating the voice, and sets out symbols for accent and emphasis, loud and soft (24), which he applies to a number of literary examples, including a speech from Hamlet (40).

Gilbert Austin, writing in Chiromania, or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, also uses symbols, including some musical notation such as the hairpin to indicate shifts in loudness as well as a number of other symbols, such as the zigzag line to indicate uniform loudness or forte, explained in “Symbols for Noting the Force and Rapidity or Interruption of the Voice in Delivery” (367). He advises readers and performers that these symbols were “to be marked in the margin near the commencement of the passage which they are to influence” (367).

Figure 1. Symbols for Noting the Force and Rapidity or Interruption of the Voice, Austin, Chiromania (1806).

It is important to note that this kind of notation was not usually deployed by poets themselves; it was added later to mark up a text for performance, to encourage emphasis for dramatic and rhetorical effect. There were perhaps stylistic cues in the writing itself which these notations and marginal indications were responding to and amplifying. It was not necessarily only the subject matter or emotional tone of a piece of writing that suggested a particular volume; it could also be an effect suggested in the rhythmic and linguistic texture of the poem itself. Lyric poetry has its own language and codes for communicating volume and dynamics, and these effects do not depend on performance or vocalisation, on the timbre and grain and pitch of a reader’s voice, but can be experienced even when we read a poem in silence. There are other ways that a poem might register and express shifts in volume, not just in performance, but also during silent reading. If onomatopoeia denotes a shared code or language to represent certain sounds, like a cat purring or a dog barking, what are the linguistic, formal and rhythmic codes and cues of quiet? Shhhh, hush, ellipses . . . what else?

iv. Silent reading

Coleridge was well known for reading his own poems aloud, and of course when a poem is voiced, the reader can vary the volume as well as the pitch and tone, but usually there is no direct verbal cue or instruction for this in the poem itself (as there sometimes is, say, in a play script, which often gives the actor or reader performance and stage directions). When he read his own poems aloud, Coleridge could of course vary the volume as he thought fitting. But how could he communicate the appropriate dynamics to his readers? And might they experience these shifts in volume during silent reading? Although, as Lucy Newlyn has shown, “the practice of ‘reading aloud’” was “a thriving one at the end of the eighteenth century” (355), so too was silent reading. Laura Mandell points out that Romantic poets expected their poems to be read in silence, and that despite Wordsworth’s “love of reading-and-writing aloud and performing his poetry, nonetheless Wordsworth knew that most would encounter it as silent and graphic. Blake, too, could not mistake the essential noiselessness of his prints” (220). She goes on to argue that “their poems thematised their own soundlessness while offering compensatory images”(220). And yet the poems, read in silence, are not, perhaps, entirely soundless.

Effects or impressions of sound and volume can be experienced when a poem is read in silence. There is also the possibility of an imagined listening. Lyric poems can have their own inscripted codes and cues for volume and dynamics, ways of suggesting and registering shifts between loud and soft, sound effects which we experience even when we read in silence. And these differences in volume are expressed or suggested in various ways, in and through rhythm, vocabulary and lineation. The question of what volume means in relation to a poem is worth exploring further. If, according to the Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, certain colours were “quiet” (313), perhaps a poet could also produce effects of quiet or loudness in words, rhythms, and spatial patterns on the printed page. And this experience of sound puts pressure on the very idea of ‘silent reading’ itself.

The expansion of print, according to Walter Ong’s well-known thesis, produced a shift from oral reading aloud to quiet and then silent reading. Print, he claimed, was one factor in the creation of privacy in modern society, and, he argues, the production of books that were “smaller and more portable than those common in manuscript culture” set the stage “psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and eventually for completely silent reading” (131). It should be noted that silent reading in the West long precedes the invention of print, and is recorded by 400 CE, in Augustine’s famous comments on Ambrose, archbishop of Milan, in Confessions 6.3.3. And that Ong’s description of print as a kind of silencing medium does not account for the various kinds of sound which print can embody. Perhaps, as Steven Connor suggests, “the move from sounded to silent reading” was not, "simply a move from noise to quiet. Rather, perhaps, it is a move from one kind of sound to another … The increasing commonness of silent reading is to be regarded therefore, not as the simple turning down of sound, but as the creation of a more complex space of inner resounding. (106, 109)" To push this further we might ask whether these “spaces of inner resounding” might vary according to genre. Perhaps Lyric enables and produces distinct kinds of aural and acoustic “spaces," distinct possibilities for inner resounding. We might ask whether Romantic lyric is quieter than other genres or sub-genres, than declamatory neoclassical lyric, say, or than epic or satire. Perhaps the intimate occasion of certain lyric poems itself implies a dynamic of performance, that they be read in a quieter voice than a poem in another genre. Lyric, I want to argue, invites a particular kind of listening, and in the Romantic period this listening was inflected by historical contingencies in musical notation, book publication, and reading practices. The way volume was heard, and indeed the volume of poetry was recognised and interpreted, changed in the Romantic period. And perhaps one reason for this was that during this period a historical juncture between oral and silent reading was especially significant and pronounced.

v. Listening to Quiet

Coleridge was a great talker, musical, oracular, entrancing, and his eloquence has been rightly celebrated. At times, his talking could be challenging; he was not as sensitive perhaps as he might have been to his own listeners: Wordsworth could not understand “one syllable” of his friend’s oration despite listening attentively for two hours, according to Samuel Rogers’ report (308). There are many accounts of people listening to Coleridge, fewer of Coleridge himself as listener. And yet although he didn’t always attend enough to his listeners when he spoke, he could be an acute and sensitive listener: his poems, as well as his notebooks, are full of great moments of listening.

Coleridge was writing on the cusp between reading aloud and silent reading. This is perhaps one reason that he was interested in the space between thought and address: in “Frost at Midnight,” for instance, he is addressing his babe, but in silence. This intimate occasion might also account for the poem’s interest in quiet sounds and sounding quiet. The volume of a poem perhaps depends on occasion as well as on genre, so that the intimate occasions of certain kinds of Romantic lyric poem might be productive of quiet, or at least be quieter than more declamatory or public modes. Like other Romantic poets Coleridge was thoughtful about the sound of poetry, and about shaping sound and silences—especially because he was writing in an age when poems were very often read in silence.

Mandell’s notion of sound focusses on the idea of the voice and voicing; but poems offer other kinds of sounding and other patterns and articulations of sound. Coleridge understood poems to be musical forms, and his poems are full of accounts of other kinds of sound, which further complicate this distinction between silent or vocalised reading. Indeed, his poems seem to invite a play between eye and ear, not just by varying the typographic forms of letters such as the “s.” They invite us to think about the relation between seeing and hearing not only in terms of voice but also in terms of music and pattern.

Notwithstanding the need for further exploration of Mandell’s claim about the cognitive processes involved in reading aloud and reading silently, it is clear that poets writing in this period were keenly aware that reading practices were shifting, as Mandell and Newlyn have shown. It is also worth considering whether, and how, these and other cultural, technological and scientific changes might have shaped and influenced the representation of sound and dynamics in their poetry. Their poems invite further thinking about the semiotics of sound and of volume through a playful and dynamic interplay between eye and ear.

vi. "O that I had the language of Music!"

Coleridge was keenly aware that poets did not use the “language of music” itself, and that included musical notation, to indicate the dynamics of a poem. And yet, as he instinctively understood, somehow certain poems or lines in poems can suggest different dynamic qualities, with some moments seeming louder or quieter than others. Coleridge’s poems are especially rich in dynamic effects. It is striking how many of his lyric ‘Conversation poems’ not only meditate on sounds heard, but themselves describe and also communicate changes in volume. Consider the following shifts: from the owlet’s cry which comes “loud” (l.3) to the quieter sound of the fluttering soot on the grate (l.15) in “Frost at Midnight;” from the silence of the stream (l.6) to the happy song of nightingales in “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem;” from “green and silent spot” (l.1) and “small and silent dell” (l.2) to the crescendo in Invasion’s “thunder and the shout,/ And all the crash” (l.36-37) in “Fears in Solitude;” from “the stilly murmur of the distant Sea,” that “Tells us of Silence” (ll.11-12), to the music of the breeze as it plays over the lute strings in “The Eolian Harp” (l.15). Coleridge offers a descriptive vocabulary to describe a range of dynamics, a shifting scale of volume from loud to quiet to silence. But his poems not only name and describe these dynamics but also perform these shifts in their verbal, acoustic and rhythmic textures.

Coleridge was interested in how gradations of sound were experienced by the listener and also by the reader, and he was thoughtful about how that might be represented on the page and in a poem. His poems are often intensely musical and sensitive to acoustic shiftings. Changes in linguistic register, tense, shifts in metre, pauses, punctuation marks, and the sonic texture of a line, the distribution of phonemes, all contribute to how a poem shifts dynamics between loud and soft. Pitch and tempo, genre, pacing and tonal register can contribute to a poem’s dynamics and Coleridge takes full and subtle advantage of all those means. Here in these lines from the 1796 version of “The Eolian Harp,” for instance he creates a quietening effect rhythmically, by slowing the pace of the poem:

That italicized word so stands out, typographically more emphatic, but not, somehow, louder, than surrounding words. The word “so” (l.9) was italicized in the 1796 version of the poem (which appeared with the title “EFFUSION XXXV. COMPOSED AUGUST 20th, 1795, AT CLEVEDON, SOMERSETSHIRE”) and the word was also italicised in the version of the poem published in Poems (1803), entitled “Composed at Clevedon Somersetshire." We know that this emphasis was intended by Coleridge because he underlined the word (“so”) in the manuscript version of the poem he sent to Cottle for publication in 1796 (Rugby MS). However, the version of the poem published Sibylline Leaves in 1817 does not have the word “so” italicised.

The italicisation (or its omission) is significant in terms of how we hear the line, and also in how the line represents volume. The use of italics can create shifts of vocal tone but it can also contribute to shifts of pace and rhythm, which in turn suggests a dynamic effect, in this case, a quietening. Here, the italicization alters the rhythm of the line so that instead of the iambic pattern of “the WORLD so HUSHED,” that word “so” gains a stress, to the WORLD SO HUSHED. These three stresses in a row slow us down and the change of pace creates a feeling of intimacy—drawing us in, as it slows us down: together these contribute to the effect of diminuendo. There is a sense of quieting as we reach the word “hushed,” a slowing down which puts emphasis on the quiet it denotes, a quiet which fades to the silence of the white space at the end of the end-stopped line. The word “hushed” conveys the sense, still current, of “Reduced to silence; silenced, stilled, quieted” (OED): in slowing the pace of the line by emphasizing the word “so,” Coleridge creates a stilling effect rhythmically, and this contributes to the quietening of volume described and enacted.

The change in register in the line “the stilly murmur of the distant sea” also contributes to a sense of historical distance, and to a related sense of acoustic distancing or quietening, diminuendo. The line, “the stilly murmur of the distant sea,” sounds archaic with its balanced pairs of adjective and noun- stilly murmur, distant sea- in which the st sounds chime with stilly and distant. The word stilly, in itself archaic, denotes not moving, and so the slowing down effect of the previous line, the world so hushed, leads to this articulation of stilly-ness. A still sea, is, of course, a silent sea, and, as we might expect, another sense of the adverb “stilly”, recorded in OED, bears this out; “In a still manner; silently, quietly; in a low voice; †secretly.” The sea is very quiet and therefore tells us of silence. It is an odd thing to say, that it tells us of silence. That of is intriguing. It’s not that the sea is silent, it tells us of – about - silence, a story of silence, perhaps. This is a playfully indirect, and perhaps we could say a quieter way of telling us that the sea is silent, a syntactic distance opens up into a deeper silence.

Figure 2. Figure 2. ASL illustration by Oliver Barrett, which readers are left with as a closing image in Antrobus' poem "Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris," (Penned in the Margins, 2018).

Coleridge’s hand sign is not ambiguous and its clarity is part of its own expressive poignancy.

In “Frost at Midnight,” composed and published in the same year as “The Nightingale: A Conversation”, this interest in signs and sounds and their correspondences is richly played out, from the very opening lines:

The poem’s very first lines signal an interest in the relation between eye and ear in a visual rhyme, or ‘eye rhyme’ between “ministry” and “cry.” This silent eye rhyme is part of the poem’s play with the way sound is codified or represented in visual form, in the semiotics of sound in print. The sound of that “cry” is picked up later in the half-rhyme with “side” and later “life.” Perhaps it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that t the long I sound, or “eye” rhyme, is registered to the eye but not to the ear in “live.” Nonetheless, in these lines Coleridge invites us, in different ways, to move in and out between eye and ear, between rhyme seen and rhyme heard. Throughout the poem eye and ear work together and askance in unexpected ways.

Another striking feature of these opening lines is the dramatic dynamic shift from the “loud” cry of the owlet outdoors to the quiet of the indoor scene, a shift which produces a sense of intimacy and interiority and the accompanying illusion of diminuendo. That word “loud” primes our listening ears for a certain pitch of sound, which emphasizes in contrast the subsequent lines’ account of quiet. The poem’s shifting dynamics depend on and produce shifts in intimacy as it records a shift from outside to inside, from loud noise to quiet. The word “secret” in the very first line suggests both quiet and intimacy, since “secret” carries the suggestion, now obsolete, but current when Coleridge was writing, of reticence, or quiet: “Of a person: †Reserved or reticent in conduct or conversation (obsolete); not given to indiscreet talking or the revelation of secrets; silent as to any matter, uncommunicative, close.” (OED, 2 a). By giving the frost a curious sense of human agency, it “performs a secret ministry,” Coleridge draws out association of “secret” with quiet and closeness

The poem creates this sense of closeness dramatically, too, so that the reader feels as though we are standing with the poet, listening with him. This is expressed in the shift from the past tense “came loud” to the present tense “hark again!,” from the temporal distance of the past tense to the sense of immediacy suggested by HARK which instructs the reader, now, give ear, listen! The reader imaginatively is listening but also aware of being a reader, something of which the poem deliberately reminds us.

If we put pressure on the poem’s acoustic language, its imaginings and figurings of sound, and think not only of the vocal cadences but also other forms and shapes of sound, abstracted from a notion of voice, pattern takes on a new significance. According to Marjorie Levinson, attending to visual pattern is a neglected key to understanding the poem. In a recent study she “seeks to shift the sensory register of criticism of the poem from its traditional emphasis on the acoustic to a new appreciation of the visible” (“Parsing the Frost”, online version). She emphasizes the poem's visuality, rather than the acoustic qualities and expression. I would push this further and argue that Coleridge is deeply interested in the relation and the dynamics between the visual and the acoustic but also between the visual and the aural. Patterns can be heard as well as seen. Throughout the poem, Coleridge plays with the way visual and acoustic dimensions are intimately related. This is in part because the poem is written with a sense of its own mode of reception in mind: that is to say, Coleridge was keenly aware that it might be read in silence, and so was especially thoughtful about how sound might be represented in print patterns, on the page.

There is a curious play between eye and ear, for instance, in the poem’s concluding lines:

The beautiful and strange description of a moon shining quietly prompts a question, an imagining, of what a loud shining might sound like. On the one hand, the idea of a “quiet moon” is a folk idiom to describe a new moon, and indeed the poem was written at the time of the new moon. And yet the image is so much more suggestive. It is “quietly shining to the quiet moon”: that quiet repeated in quietly, emphatically. An icicle can be silent by imagined contrast: its silence remembers the sound of dripping water before it has frozen into an icicle, or after it thaws.

Another example of Coleridge’s interests in the play between eye and ear is the visual analogy to musical form described by Levinson: the fluttering soot on the grate, she argues, and suggests visually (in her fig. 7, reproduced below), can be read as a visual representation of a stave with a musical note. And to take this further, it is the semiotics of music, the semiotics of sound, that interest Coleridge here.

Figure 3. 18th-c Fire Grate, Journal Page, Musical Staff, Window Frost, Aeolian Harp. Fig. 7 in Levinson (2018).

vii. “the embryo science of acoustics”.

“Frost at Midnight” is a poem which explores the edges of silence. Coleridge has, as Susan Wolfson notes, an “ear for such limits, of sound suspended” (Wolfson, 2008: para. 3). There is an intriguing richness and, at times, an opacity to the poem’s acoustic language which rewards attention, and which, in turn, invites new readings and imaginings of the poem itself, and new possibilities for thinking about the quietudes of Romantic Lyric. The poem generates thinking about what it might it mean to shine “quietly”. And about how we might listen to the moon. And about the audibility and inaudibility of dreams. Setting the poem’s sonic and aural language in the context of Coleridge’s wider thinking about sound dynamics and acoustics and its imaginative possibilities, gives us some hints.

In 1827, Coleridge read Sir Charles Wheatstone’s “Experiments on Audition” and was struck by his account of the microphone, an instrument which, he explained, “rendered audible the weakest sounds” (70). Coleridge describes, in Marginalia, how it sparked a recognition of a “fond and earnest dream project of mine own …with sundry other imaginations in what might be effected in the only embryo Science of Acoustics” (197). The science of Acoustics, that “branch of physics concerned with the properties and phenomena of sound, sometimes esp. in relation to hearing or speech.” (OED,1), was just over 100 years old when Coleridge scribbled these words. As his marginal gloss suggests, Coleridge’s fascination with acoustics was apparent years before he read of Wheatstone’s invention: we find an interest in the properties and phenomena of sound registered in numerous notebook entries and poems.

Figure 4. Illustration of Chladni patterns in Ernst Chladni, Die Akustik (1802)

Coleridge’s own interest in the semiotics of sound and its representation is figured in the Conversation poems and based on his wider interest in science during his stay in Somerset the 1790s. As Tim Fulford has explained, the Conversation poems were influenced by and part of a wider culture of scientific enquiry. Pushing Fulford’s argument yet further, we might understand Coleridge’s Conversation poems as articulations of a growing interest in and curiosity not only about the nature of air, but also about a relate field of enquiry, the science of acoustics, and in particular, the movement and materiality of sound. In “Frost at Midnight” this interest was perhaps modulated by his sense of the poems’ expected mode of reception: he knew that it was likely to be read in silence, heard only in the mind’s ear. But it is also framed by its occasion, spoken to a sleeping baby who cannot hear him, at least not consciously.

The poem’s concluding lines meditate on the sounds and silences of water drops and icicles in a way that puts pressure on the language of listening:

The word “silent” invites our listening. Here, in these lines, or perhaps I should say through these lines, our ears become subtly tuned to the sounds of silence which shifts gently into quiet. The line “quietly shining to the quiet moon,” picks up and resounds the i of silent icicles, recalling the sound of that silence even as it suggests a different sound. It’s worth noting here that the phrase is not, as it might have been, silently shining to thesilent moon – but quietly shining to the quiet moon, and this difference suggests a thawing of silence, since quiet can, but does not always or only, mean silent. Quiet can suggest a low or subdued sound (OED 1A, a, adj, “making little sound”; 2a, “making little or no noise”). That repeated word quietly dims into a shorter quiet, drawing the ear to listen in, to the possibility of the moon’s quiet sound. And the line has only 4 stresses instead of the 5 stress iambic baseline of the poem, so we are left both with a sense of lack- and anticipation - listening out for the last stress.

viii. Conclusion

For Coleridge, the ability to listen was fundamental to being a poet. A great poet, he suggests, writing in July 1802 to his friend William Sotheby, should be able to listen with “the ear of a wild Arab list’ning in the silent Desart” (Coleridge, Letters: ii, 810). We know that the Arab is listening, in silence – but we do not know what it is he listens to or for. The state of listening, of hearkening, for something is the poetic state. But silence also seems important: Coleridge’s test for the poet combines forms of privation – that emptiness, which shares the root ‘desert’: the dryness of deserts, the solitude of the deserted, and the soundlessness of silence. The wild Arab is alert for the slightest sound, listening FOR sound in silence. Coleridge’s words invite the reader too to listen: that word “listening” alerts us to the sound patterns instinct in the lines that follow. The poet, Coleridge goes on, should also be possessed of “the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the Touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling Child” (810). Primed to listen, the reader might pick up a suggestion of sound in the word footsteps (they are footsteps he is tracing, rather than the footprints we might have expected) and the sound of these footsteps resounds in the st sounds of strew and forest. And there is a gentle pathos in that word touch touching in sound the child as the blind man touches its face.