The Poetry Toolkit by William Harmon

Author:William Harmon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

A chorus of Peers responds:

A shepherd he!

Of Arcadee!

Writers may as well shape their acoustic designs to their native soundings. Readers and performers, on the other hand, may want to learn some historical and regional information, so that Pope, say, in the eighteenth century may have sounded “tea” to rhyme with “obey.” Through the seventeenth century, writers often pronounced the verb “character” (meaning “inscribe”) with the accent on the second syllable, as suggested by the scansion of a passage from Hamlet: “These few Precepts in thy memory/See thou Character” and another from Two Gentlemen of Verona: “The Table wherein all my thoughts/Are visibly Character'd, and engrau'd.” In Sonnet CVIII, however, which may be earlier than either of those plays, another sounding prevails:

What's in the brain, that ink may character

Which hath not figur'd to thee my true spirit?

What's new to speak, what new to register,

That may express my love, or thy dear merit?

Somewhat later, in 1634, John Day's Parliament of Bees suggests a scansion like that in Shakespeare's plays:

The Author in his Russet Bee,

Charrecters hospitallity.

Some peculiarities of spelling and sounding can be blamed on what is called the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT, unique in English, which differentiates Modern from Middle English as well as Modern English from most other Indo-European languages. The shift involves a more or less systematic change in long vowels, with inconsistent results for later speakers. It is especially important for rhyme, which we shall get to in time. The letter “a” in English often represents a sound /eI/, which in other languages is represented by the letter “e” (as in “Beethoven”). The letter “e” in English often represents a sound /i/, which in other languages is represented by the letter “i” (as in “Lima” in Peru, not as “lima bean”). The letter “i” in English often represents a sound /a/, which in other languages is represented by the letters “ei” or “ey” (as in “Einstein”). The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that libido is currently unsettled, with one choice representing values before the shift (/l′bi:d/), another those after (/l′baId/). (There is humorous exploration of fluctuations in the libidinal drive and the word itself in Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing.)

We may also notice that some languages distinguish front and back vowels: the former represented in general by e and i, the later by a, o, and u. The letters c and g represent different sounds before front vowels, but this effect is inconsistent. Gerrymander and margarine have two pronunciations: The letter “g” can represent either the /g/ sound in get or the/d/sound in gem. But usually these things behave themselves. In some word formations, change of vowel alone can affect meaning, as between singular and plural (foot/feet, goose/geese, man/men) or various forms of a verb (sing, sang, sung). In the case of the verb read, the present and past forms sound different but look the same. Later we shall look at how vowel quality can change with change in accentuation, but this is enough for now.

Consonants on the whole remain more constant

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