essay
The Sound of Things in Alice Oswald’s Woods etc.
Judging poetry is not always an exact art – the poem invites approximate readings, and we read tentatively, as though thinking and feeling at the back of one’s mind “That might be true of these lines, by the sound of things”, and aware that “then again not” has to be held in mind too. This has partly to do with the fact the form of the poem is only an artificial construct that sustains a loose analogical relationship to the suppositions being made by the language. And of course formal shadowing in the expression reveals, too, the artificial construct that is language itself. And yet the tentativeness is still sustained by the eye and ear of the reading mind as it entertains the more magical meanings of the chance occasions of the language as constructed. This becomes such a feature of the lyric in particular that any close reading has to account for the superstition of readers as they half-consciously enjoy the analogies being built up by the poem’s felicities. The lyric constructs itself out of ephemeral and arbitrary material, the phonemes and graphemes of the language, and makes little networks out of them that not only grace the lines but suggest connections between the network and the semantic and syntactical web of the things that get said in the poem. It is the lyric that seems to be doing this not the poet – as readers we attend to the poem on the page more than to the supposed ghost-author and her summoning voices. Alice Oswald has made an art out of the sounds of her words that serve as fertile ground-music first and foremost, and then begin to suggest connections between the animate life of the phonemes and graphemes on the page and the animate lifeforms her poetry attends to in the natural world. Woods etc. takes a step beyond what one might expect of environmental poetry that listens to the natural web of sounds by focusing less on the organic lifeforms of plants and animals, turning instead to the inanimate matter of the natural scene, the rocks, waters, moon and stars as the collection’s signature theme. It is as though the poems addressed to the inanimate world and which quiver with energies in the poem were confessing how inanimate language is too, by analogy; and yet the inanimate matter of words give out a comparable energy-field buzzing in the lines, alive with the energy of the sound of things.
Oswald opens her collection with ‘Sea Poem’,[1] consciously connecting the poems to the previous collection, Dart, by beginning with the theme of water; and addressing the inanimate-animate conundrum in the first stanza:
what is water in the eyes of water
loose inquisitive fragile anxious
a wave, a winged form,
splitting up into sharp glances
The lyric seeks to understand water from water’s point of view, as though the seawater had eyes – at the edge of these lines are eyes watering, reminding us that the eyes we use to read the line can cry, can water, are 98% made of water. The riddling question, what is water in the eyes of water, balances the two readings (what is water when understood through water’s own eyes; what is water, when seen by our eyes made of water) by withholding any commas (they emerge as little mini-waves in the third line only) that might decide between the options, allowing a loose inquisitive form to emerge in the first two lines that matches the seawater’s restless movement. The adjectives of the second line are surprising, surprising enough to act as challenges that confess their own anthropomorphic projection, but also in ways that change the manner in which we understand those specific adjectives to mean, making them loose, fluid, changeable. ‘Fragile’, for instance, is not a word associated with water, but rather of vessels that contain water, or float on waters at best: it means breakable, and its root meaning is from the Latin for to break. How does water break? And then the answer comes, as breakers, as waves, and we are moved restlessly, inquisitively to that very answer in the third line. The very fluidity of the medium is being inhabited by our own loose inquisitive parsing of the lines: and we begin to sense the analogy emerging between water as a material substance in the world and the liquid medium of language in the metamorphic world of lyric.
The wave that breaks in the third and fourth lines has winged form and splits into sharp glances; we have to work hard to make these make any kind of sense. The wave just before it breaks does resemble a wing, a gull-like curve before it splits into the ‘sharp glances’ of the aftermath of the breaking. The glances must be the light that dazzles, the million photons glancing off the chaos of the foam and surge of the breaking wave. The semantic puzzle, in being explored, makes the emerging analogy between sea and language suddenly very much more specific: what in the poem is like the wave that breaks? The alliteration in ‘wave’-‘winged’ give us one answer; the assonance in ‘sharp glances’ another. ‘Water’ is a word that begins with the letter w: the letter breaks into consciousness, into the soundscape of the poem in that third line: suggesting that phonemes are what make up the wave of poetry’s language. The sounds are the rhythm. The two ‘a’s of ‘sharp glances’ point back to the three ‘a’s of the first line: but not as the same sounds this time, but the same shapes on the page – graphemes are the analogy to the scattering light on the crashing wave’s form. Other felicities emerge: the ‘eyes’ that water or the ‘eyes’ of the sea become little ‘i’s in the word ‘inquisitive’, a word that connects on the page the ‘i’ of ‘is’ and the ‘i’ of ‘in’ that sit above it in the first line – so two i’s and two e’s in ‘eyes’ become the four ‘i’s of this long word. They only appear if we become inquisitive ourselves, if we notice the fragile presence of both a and i in the word ‘fragile’, for instance, that so precariously contains the two key graphemes of the opening line. It is as graphemes that we connect the wave-like shape of the three words ‘fragile’-‘winged’-‘glances’ on the page through the grapheme ‘g’ with its wave-like looping tail. Similarly, the wavy letter ‘s’ that features in the key pair ‘eyes’-‘inquisitive’ comes into its own as it breaks into three glancing appearances in the last line of the stanza.
The analysis we semi-consciously respond to in this opening stanza is given sustenance by the theme of the second: ‘what is the sound of water’. The answer to that question, after the analogy has already been set up so fragilely in the first stanza, is as attention to the phonemes and graphemes of the poem within the rhythmical wave of the lines as vocalized and read. The second line reads ‘after the rain stops you can hear the sea’, and we are alerted to both the phonemic play (the s-repetition in ‘stops’-‘sea’ emerging from the question’s ‘sound’) and graphemic play (the ‘a’ and ‘e’ of water rearranged as ‘ea’ in ‘hear’ and ‘sea’). Once we stop hearing the distracting sounds of the world and begin to listen to the poem and note the abstract shapes and repetitions of the letters, the poem’s shapes and sounds emerge like a sea to eye and ear. This is thematized in the poem as ‘washing rid of the world’s increasing complexity’, which is rather a laborious phrase until we notice the sound and look of ‘sea’ in ‘increasing’, the ‘w’-repetition pointing back to ‘water’. What the sound of water does is to make ‘it perfect again out of perfect sand’: and if we’re not quite sure what ‘it’ refers to, the world or the sea, we are pretty sure by now that the ‘sound of water’ is there in ‘perfect sand’. The perfecting of sound is the aim of the poem’s audacious claims about the sea and its effects. The world is given full form by the sea’s rhythm and ‘oscillation endlessly shaken / into an entirely new structure’: the changeability generating these fragile loose forms that have differing structures at every entirely new turn: and it is through sound that the poem as (shore)lines is shaped. The word ‘sea’ is visible as disseminated among the graphemes of ‘perfect sand’. It is there too as the sound of the letter ‘c’ (‘you can hear the sea’) in ‘complexity’-‘perfect’-‘perfect’: we are being invited to hear those c’s. It is there as the phoneme ‘s’ as well, sounding twice in ‘increasing complexity’ and of course in ‘sand’. The lyrical soundscape is not simply mimicking the sea’s swell and hiss and breaking: it is suggesting a connection between the animation of the sea as lively with energy, flow, power and the animation of language in the oscillations of the sounds and shapes of the letters in the words in the lines on the page of the poem, registered by the ear and eye together as lively medium, loose inquisitive fragile anxious perfect sound.
Perfection is a suspicious concept, associated with perfectibility of the species, with dubious notions of progress, and art idolatry too, the perfection sought by classical art. But within the restricted world of the lyric poem, all that is sought is perfect sound, defined by the poem in practice as sight and sound of the words-as-things on the page animated by interconnections that have liveliness. That animatedness is there in the wave-like form as various and combinative sounds and shapes of language in play: as phonemes breaking into the air of the poem if we stop and listen; as graphemes arranged to call and respond to each other through repetition and recombination; as lines that have rhythm that surges and breaks (at the line-breaks most of all); as blocks of structure, sometimes as regular as stanza, that change their sense and meaning at every turn; as the interplay of syntax and lineation, the semantics of phrase and sentence. The perfect sound implied by ‘perfect sand’ nudges us towards the phrase ‘perfect rhyme’, that is the correspondence of all the vowels and consonants in two rhyme words. What is meant is not a holy perfectibility of the world; but rather a maximal correspondence of the sound of things in the world that allows for free play and fusional interconnectedness of being and energies.
That maximal correspondence may have positive or negative force: there is no way of knowing. Her stone series of poems in Woods etc. explores some of the range of correspondences possible. There are the Blakean myth-chains with ‘Song of a Stone’ that track the dream of a stone picked up by ‘a woman from the north’ as it modulates into a series of metamorphotic identities.[2] Each manifestation accumulates contradictions of feeling and affect. The associative effects are complex as so chancy and aleatory; as when the stone turns into a lark then a heart then the sea then the conscience:
the lark singing for its life
was the muscle of a heart,
the heart flickering away
was an offthrow of the sea
and when the sea began to dance
it was the labyrinth of a conscience
What is motivating the move from ‘lark’ to ‘heart’ seems to be arbitrary yet they share a heart, the phoneme a: and the graphemes ‘ar’ side by side. Similarly the shift from heart to sea has logic because the lark was singing ‘above a cliff’, but the two words share the grapheme pair ‘ea’. And might the reason ‘sea’ when it begins to ‘dance’ turns into the conscience be because it has turned into ‘c’ (the ‘s’-sound in ‘dance’ is ‘c’): in the labyrinth of the shapes of the letters on the page of ‘conscience’ are those three c’s. These sound- and grapheme-repetitions are associated in the Blakean form of the poem with lyric (the lark singing), with rhythm-making in animals and nature (the heart and dancing sea), and also with inwardness of mind, what is referred to later in the poem as ‘fugitive’ thought. ‘Fugitive’ is a key term for the Romantics, sign of their love and passion for the ephemeral, the momentary, for transient feeling. The ‘man lost in thought’ in Oswald’s poem is ‘like vapour twisting in the heat’, creating fugitive connections back to the two instances of ‘heart’ in rhyme-word positions on the page. What is fugitive are these signs and sounds signalled by the letters on the page: if heard, if sung, if listened to with passion, they have rhythm, they are the rhythm, they are the poem’s heart.
‘Sisyphus’ is another of the stone poems; it enters into the mythologem of the stone Sisyphus must push, his ‘dense unthinkable rock’, and discovers it to be some kind of material Id, but alarmingly ‘closed’ and ‘abstract’, with strange consciousness and form ‘like a foetus, undistractedly listening’, yet hostile and alien to the human too.[3] What emerges is that it is his very struggle to understand the ‘black rock’ in relation to his task and identity that breaks down, and the pushing turns him into a kind of stone. Oswald is exploring the material otherness of the world of matter to the spirit chained to being, but less as a philosophical question than as an urgency of locked being struggling to emerge. This Hughesian myth-making is a questioning, too, of the relation of the poet to the recalcitrant and heavily inanimate densities of language: this is suggested early on when Sisyphus has to endure the pain of gravity: ‘and every inch of it he feels / the vertical stress of the sky’. The four-three rhythm of ballad that the opening lines set up (‘This man Sisyphus, he has to push / his dense unthinkable rock’) returns here as the formal equivalent to the gravity that is the force that shapes his punishment. The stress of poetry become a weighing down, a raining of blows, the ‘clashing and whistling and tapping of another world’, the alien world of inanimate matter.
‘Autobiography of a Stone’ gives the lithic matter a voice, and Oswald discovers that the story corresponds to Satan and his fall (‘I, Stone, fell into affliction’), but understood as a radical withdrawal into bone and skull, excluding all, becoming ‘Stone-in-hiding’.[4] That concentration into withdrawn solitary unnamability is mimed by listening to the stone’s voice as cry: ‘hearing myself being shouted for oh’. The caesura break and blank before the cry enacts the moment of listening, and transforms ‘Stone’ into the core vowel-phoneme ‘o’ that is heard on the wind if the word is shouted. The oh-sound is visible as grapheme on the page as Stone speaks of the deep geological time he inhabits: ‘but I am moving only very slowly’. The Beckettian predicament speaks to the problematic of sound as both phoneme and grapheme in poetry: it is only in very slow close reading that the motif connections can emerge from the stony silence of print. Stone begs for voice and connection (‘if the wind were a voice I could contend with…’) but knows his cry, the central sound in his name, may remain ‘under darkness’, concealed in the black rock of ink on the page.
The final stone poem is ‘The Stone Skimmer’ and it dramatizes the problematic further by staging the act of anthropomorphic appropriation of stone-matter as humanoid with a little parable of a man walking through fields towards a river, afraid of the side of his being that connects to ‘restless thistles’ in the fields ‘brimming flowering dimming diminishing’, that is with the ephemeral lifecycle of organic lifeforms.[5] He fears his own mortality, but more than that he fears becoming thistledown, diminishing of mind after death locked into frightening and endless cycles of time:
he can almost feel
the spent fur of his flesh, a seed-ghost on a gust
condemned to float in endless widening circles.
The image recalls Claudio in Measure for Measure – ‘imprison’d in the viewless winds, / And blown with restless violence round about / The pendent world’; Wordsworth’s Lucy – ‘Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees’; Yeats’ falcon in ‘The Second Coming’ ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’. To become inanimate yet still organic, like the thistledown, is imagined as a fearful immortality without break or end or consciousness. How the man seeks to counter this nightmare vision of the soul as seed-ghost is through identification with a lapidary endlessness as stone. Again, the stones of Yeats are alluded to here, particularly the enchanted stone in the ‘living stream’ of ‘Easter, 1916’. Oswald’s figure envies the river-stones that persistence in the fluid environment of the moving waters:
Eyeless stones, their silence swells and breathes easily in water,
Barely move in the wombs of rivers
The darker side to this is acknowledged in the adjective ‘eyeless’ summoning Milton’s enslaved Samson Agonistes and in the stillborn foetus image Oswald used in ‘Sisyphus’. At the same time there is liberating potential in that ability to inhabit another medium, the medium of water. The solution the man finds is to skim the stones ‘into the five inch space between heaven and heaven’, in other words between the sky and the reflection of the sky in the river, implying two rival forms of afterlife, the thistledown endlessness in the gusts of the sky and the stony persistence in the endless mutability of the waters. The five inches, one presumes, signal the tiny horizontal slice of space between the surface of the water and the maximum height a skimming stone will normally rise: here allegorised as the narrow space between the two forms of immortality. What ‘keeps lifting up’ the man’s ‘slid-down strength’ in the act of skimming, is ‘just the smack of it / contacting water, the amazing length / of light’. The lines bear thinking about, bear listening slowly to. What the skimming achieves is an ephemeral inhabiting of the five inch space with the deep-time object of the stone, but animated by the throw so that the stone moves over the waters (as opposed to those that ‘[b]arely move in the wombs of rivers’) creating sound as it skips (‘the smack of it’), creating a ‘length / of light’ as the bouncing stone leaves circles behind it along its line of flight. And we return to the analogy of the poem and the inanimate object. The heavy dense language of print that is such a burden and recalcitrance to poets, the black rock of words on the page, is redeemed by energetic movement that skips the words as sounds across the page in loose analogy to the stones skimming across the water’s surface. We can hear the analogy being tested in the sound-repetitions and the grapheme-repetitions: note how the letters (phonemes and graphemes together) of ‘he’s skimming a stone’ are disseminated along the exhilarating sounds in ‘it’s just the smack of it / contacting water’. The sequence s-k-i-m-a-s-t-o-n of the phrase skips through the words as either phoneme or grapheme: t-i-s-t-s-m-a-k-i-c-o-n-t-a-k-t-a-t. It is both as sound, ‘the smack of it’, and as something visible on the page, ‘length of light’, that the phoneme/grapheme complex is signalled; and it generates an analogy between the skimming of the stones and the energetic exuberance of the creation of the lines, in the tiny space between the dead silence of print and ephemerality of voice. By the sound of things, Oswald discovers a way of inhabiting poetry as animate-inanimate language, in the strange and liberating present continuous of the poem-as-liveliness (‘keeps lifting up’), skimming Yeats’ enchanted stone upon the surface of the poem’s page. The skimming leaves along the lines (‘‘length / of light’) of its playful composition the glancing light of the graphemes; and the smack of sound-repetitions is in contact with the fluidity of language and with the potential of lapidary lyric to sustain the momentary flight. By the sound of the things that are the graphemes and phonemes of the language, Oswald revives the dream Wordsworth had in The Prelude, to link feeling to the ‘loose stones’ (‘I saw them feel’),[6] and transforms that dream into a compositional practice that is joyous, lapidary-ephemeral, skimmingly alive.
Notes:
[1] Alice Oswald, ‘Sea Poem’, Woods etc. (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 3.
[2] ‘Song of a Stone’, Woods etc., pp. 14-15.
[3] ‘Sisyphus’, Woods etc., pp. 11-13.
[4] ‘Autobiography of a Stone’, Woods etc., p. 16.
[5] ‘The Stone Skimmer’’, Woods etc., p. 17.
[6] The Prelude (1805) III, l. 126.
Adam Piette co-edits Blackbox Manifold [http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/] with Alex Houen. He teaches at the University of Sheffield and is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson