Go out to the yard of death, look at those who sleep there, and be ashamed and abashed
See there bodies covered with stones, whereas the dust is their bedding and [protective] shadow
This became their repose and lot, while the world and their houses [stand] forever
The sounds [lam] constitute the rhyme at the end of
the three verses. In nikhlam, the [l] and [m] belong
to the root, while the vowel belongs to the conjugation
of the verb; silam is composed of two morphemes: the
first three phonemes are a transform of sel (shadow),
while the last two phonemes [am] constitute an inflection
meaning "their". leolam is an adverb
meaning "forever". Such semantic and grammatical
sophistication is rather rare in eleventh-century Hebrew
rhymes, but is by no means accidental.
What can we learn from these results? First, that eleventh-century
Hebrew poets made sometimes considerable efforts to
rhyme the roots of words and avoid suffix rhymes, in
spite of the explicit licence to use them in contemporary
poetics. Second, that there were considerable individual
differences among the various poets, and that the past
is not homogeneous in this respect. And third but not
least, that they may have had strong intuitions in
respect of the differences between these kinds of rhymes,
even though their preferences may have been at variance
from each other.
Thus, far from relying on the responses of "an
abstract reader 'in general'", Cognitive Poetics
discerns fine individual differences between poets
of a certain historical period, and, as we shall see,
also offers tools to account for individual differences
between readers. It avoids a vision of homogeneous
past, without allowing for chaotic idiosyncrasies.
One of its basic assumptions is that the effects of
poetic texts are not perceived in a way in which the
effects of, say, touching an electric wire are perceived.
The latter are perceived on mere exposure to the wires,
whereas the former presuppose a certain kind of cooperation
on the perceiver's part. Different perceived effects
of the same piece of literature presuppose different
kinds of cooperation. Perceptual qualities of texts
arise only when they are performed in certain ways,
that is, when the reader discriminates certain elements
and realises certain relationships between them. When
readers discriminate other elements, or realise different
relationships even between the same elements, one may
expect that different perceived qualities will arise
(Tsur, 1992 b: 29). Anti-grammatical rhymes, as described
in the foregoing paper, require a different kind of
cooperation on the reader's part than grammatical rhymes
do. The resulting perceived quality is different too.
In the case of grammatical and anti-grammatical rhyme,
for instance, we should take into account two kinds
of variables: information-processing activities and
familiarity. It is the activity of the information-processing
mechanism that determines the relatively vigorous or
tame character of rhyme. Unexpectedness may heighten
the effect of this activity, familiarity may blunt
it. Returning now to my reviewer's comment on Chaucer's
original audience, it may be construed, in terms of
the present paper, as follows: the rich precategorical
sensory information reverberating for a very short
period of time in short-term memory behind the abstract
categories of speech sounds is exploited and enhanced
by rhyme; the memory traces of two words considerably
apart in time may be fused and perceived as if simultaneously
present. In certain conditions, such fusion of auditory
information may be perceived as if spread over the
intervening section of the poetic passage. Chaucer's
contemporaries may have had increased sensitivity to
this kind of intense and diffuse sound texture, since
it was so innovative to them. This, however, should
not have prevented them from perceiving additional
tension in rhymes that arouse heightened semantic information-processing
activities.
It would appear, however, that the details of my discussion of rhyme allow us to say much more precise things about what is going on in the Mediaeval reader's head when confronted with Chaucer's rhymes. What of the mechanisms described in the foregoing paper can we safely attribute to Mediaeval readers? We may assume that their recourse to phonetic and semantic coding is not greatly different from that of present-day readers. There would be some readers who would easily rely on both semantic and phonetic coding, and some who would feel less at ease with the latter. Perhaps both groups would handle the verse-endings in the ensuing lines in the way we have described, following Wimsatt, the response to homoeoteleuton:
Under his belt he bar full thriftily,
Wel coude he dresse his takel yemanly ...
That is, each has the same meaning, or is the same morpheme,
and each supports the logic of the sentence by appearing
in a certain place in the structure; they seem to come
fairly to the aid of logic; readers or listeners do
direct increased attention to the similar sounds as
well, but use this similarity merely to reinforce the
similar meanings. But, perhaps, readers who make more
efficient use of phonetic coding would "take the
cue" from the occurrence of the like endings at
the end of verse-lines, and use their newly-acquired
sensibilities to release the sound information from
its attachment to meaning, and direct some attention,
however faintly, to the relatively unconstrained reverberation
of the rich precategorical auditory information.
The state of twentieth-century literacy and schooling
may have, though, affected the relevant cognitive faculties.
Longitudinal studies of pre-school children well into
the lower grades of elementary school suggest that
the use of phonetic coding by some poor readers may
improve with the years; researchers disagree, whether
it is a matter of slower cognitive maturation, or the
result of practice gained in the cognitive skills acquired
at school. In the former case, we may assume that differences
of schooling would have little affect on the deployment
of these cognitive faculties in Chaucer's age and in
ours. In the latter case, the differences between present-day
and Mediaeval educational methods may have affected
the differences between the readers' responses in the
two ages in the direction opposite to the one suggested
by my reviewer. There will be a smaller proportion
of Mediaeval than modern readers who would have acquired
in course of their education to literacy the skill
or willingness to attend away from semantic to phonetic
coding in such like endings as in this quote, and perceive
their sound texture as especially vivid.
The historical approach quoted above assumes that when
readers are exposed to certain kinds of poetic stimuli,
certain kinds of poetic responses may be expected,
without asking questions about what is going on in
that black box, the reader's head. Cognitive Poetics,
by contrast, is much interested precisely in those
"mediating structures and processes" that
may systematically relate poetic structures to (sometimes
conflicting) perceived effects reported by competent
readers. By the same token, it provides systematic
tools for distinguishing and describing perceived effects,
and avoids homogeneity, without allowing for chaos.
Further, the reviewer comments: "I would say, in
opposition to Professor Tsur, that the couplet rhyming
aabb is not inherently 'witty' or 'clever', but is
associated, for the modern reader, with the Classicists'
poetic tradition, with the rationalism of the eighteenth-century
poetry, while the abab rhyming scheme is associated
with the Renaissance and Romantic themes and style".
Cognitive Poetics maintains, by contrast, that a rationalist
quality is not conferred by readers upon couplets through
repeated exposure to couplets in eighteenth-century
Classicist poetry. Rather, there is a huge bulk of
independently established empirical evidence obtained
by gestalt psychologists and the Rorschach ink-blot
test, suggesting that predictable good shapes and good
form realisation typically go with rational or intellectual
qualities; and, according to well-established experimental
criteria, the couplet rhyming aabb has a better, more
predictable shape than the abab rhyming scheme (Herrnstein
Smith, 1968; Arnheim, 1957; Meyer, 1956; Rorschach,
1951). Moreover, an acceptance of my reviewer's position
has rather serious consequences: that rather than contributing
to the perceived affect of a poetic style, versification
receives its perceived affect from the poetic style
with which it is regularly associated. This leaves
us with an additional troubling question: what are
the immediate exponents of perceived affects? Cognitive
Poetics assumes, with gestalt psychology, that there
is a mutual dependence between part and whole. The
parts contribute to the character of the whole, but
the whole is a system that determines the character
of its parts; perceived affects are characteristics
of wholes. As far as I know, the historical approach
has no conception concerning this issue.
The same holds true of the reviewer's misgiving: "Why
is rigorous iambic verse associated with 'witty, intellectual'
style, and a looser form of iambic verse (with numerous
accentual 'deviations' from meter) with a more emotional,
less 'witty' style? The answer, in my view (based on
my experience as a metrist) lies again in the tastes
and themes of the epoch that produced such variants
of iambic meter in the English tradition. The modern
reader associates the first type of rhythm with the
Classicism (that valued order), and the second with
Romanticism (that valued deviation from order)".
Cognitive poetics maintains that the attribution of
intellectual or emotional qualities to certain metrical
styles based on regular association with "the
tastes and themes of the epoch that produced"
them is not unlike the way in which Pavlov elicited
responses from his dogs. If, on the other hand, this
attribution is based on regular association with certain
poetic styles as a totality, then we are faced, as
I have suggested above, with a mere phantom: these
qualities are perceptual qualities of the wholes of
which metre is an important part; in other words, the
less or more regular metre is one out of several, but
very important, perceptual conditions of the respective
emotional or intellectual qualities. Predictable metre
has a simplifying, or intellectual affect (in certain,
highly marked conditions, a hypnotic affect); less
predictable, deviant metre has an emotional quality.
There appears to be an isomorphism between certain
kinds of verse structures and certain kinds of mental
processes: convergent metrical structures and mental
processes are perceived as typically logical and intellectual,
divergent metrical structures and mental processes
as typically creative and emotional.
At this stage of my argument, I wish to make a comment
concerning the psychological reality of poetic rhythm.
Poetic rhythm is not merely a series of observable
facts on the paper, amenable to large-scale quantitative
investigation; it is also a mental phenomenon, active
in the poets' and readers' minds. Cognitive Poetics,
with its tools derived from the various branches of
cognitive science, has quite a lot to say about these
processes. One precondition for poetic rhythm to have
psychological reality requires the reader to perceive
not only a sequence of more or less regularly alternating
stressed and unstressed syllables; but also a higher
unit (e.g., line); obtaining a larger unit divided
by a sequence of smaller units. This idea is not invented
by Cognitive Poetics, and has been familiar for long
to such structuralists as Chatman. Thus, when I speak
of deviant metre as being perceived as typically emotional,
I always imply a constraint: assuming that it is not
so deviant as to prevent the reader from perceiving
the regularly alternating weak and strong positions
and the units above at one and the same time. Now what
is the exact limit beyond which deviations prevent
the reader from perceiving the unit above is not, and
perhaps cannot, be theoretically defined. However,
the quantitative range of deviations between the rule-obeying
Spenser, Thomson, and Pope, on the one hand, and the
rule-violating Milton and Shelley on the other, is
rather narrow. I performed a quantitative and qualitative
analysis of deviations in these five poets. The overall
results were as follows: Spenser: 124 deviations per
100 lines, Thomson: 147, Pope: 156, Milton: 180, and
Shelley 191 (Tsur, 1977: 59). This means that the quantitative
difference between the most deviant and the least deviant
poet in this corpus is no more than 67 deviations per
1000 positions. What is perhaps even more surprising
is that the difference between Pope and Milton is no
more than 24 deviations per 1000 positions. Nonetheless,
readers tend to have very strong intuitions concerning
substantial differences between these poets' metrical
styles. The reason seems to be that the small quantitative
differences are enhanced by considerable qualitative
differences. I have established a variety of qualitative
scales of markedness (Tsur, 1977: 26-48, and passim).
Concerning these qualitative scales of markedness one
should make five observations. First, they have been
established on statistical grounds (relative frequency
of items), and on cognitive grounds (relative difficulty
of processing); the two criteria are significantly
related. Second, there is "solidarity" (Roman
Jakobson's term) between the items on a scale: poets
will not resort to some more marked option, unless
they have recourse to less marked ones on the same
scale. Third, the poets who have a greater number of
deviations are the ones who typically resort to the
more marked deviations. Fourth, poets seem to draw
the upper limit of their own metricality on each one
of these scales; and there appears to be a tendency
for consistency between these upper limits: poets tend
to aim, intuitively, to similar degrees of markedness
on the various scales; but the scales are independent
variables. Fifth, most poets have a negligible number
of verse lines which violate the utmost limit of their
own metricality. Hence, there are marked kinds of deviations
which would be counted as metrical in Milton or in
Shelley, but not in Pope or Thomson. (An example of
how these markedness scales work will be considered
below, with reference to the placement of caesura).
Against this background I would like to consider the
reviewer's following comment: "But what about
the looser verse of the English Baroque of the seventeenth
century? What about Donne's 'witty' and unquestionably
'intellectual' Elegies and Satyres written in the loosest
iamb in the whole of English poetic tradition?"
Indeed, according to my own findings, in the first
one hundred lines of "Satyre II", there are
292 deviances, about one hundred more than in Shelley.
Donne also has here recourse to an unprecedented number
of the most highly marked options on the various qualitative
metrical scales (Tsur, 1977: 225). I suggest that this
overwhelming deviance may have passed that theoretically
undefined limit beyond which deviations prevent the
reader from perceiving the regularly alternating weak
and strong positions and the units above at one and
the same time, resulting in a degree of deviance in
which metre cannot be perceived as typically emotional.
Without going into details, anybody would agree that
the metrical style of Pope's "An Essay on Man"
is "witty" and "intellectual" in
a different way from that of Donne's Satyre.
The foregoing excursus may perhaps answer the following
criticism too: "And what about Surrey's and Sidney's
[and Spenser's, we might add] emotional sonnets, written
in a very rigorous iambic pentameter?" The point
of my argument is, precisely, that one should not try
to match "emotional metres" with "emotional
contents". Metrical style is a variable independent
from, e.g., rhetorical style. In the sonnets in question,
metre has a simplifying effect upon the emotional tone
generated by their figurative and rhetorical structures;
some readers, indeed, perceive a kind of naive charm
in some of these poems (I would agree with the reviewer,
who would no doubt argue that this naive charm may
exist only for a reader who knows Shakespeare's, and
Donne's, and Milton's, and Keats's sonnets).
Further, the reviewer comments: "The hemistich
form 4 + 6 of the English iambic pentameter has been
derived from the pattern of the French decasyllable;
it is characteristic of the periods of a more rigorous
iambic canon in the English literature. In the works
of later Shakespeare, in the verse of Romantic and
Post-romantic poets the 'hemistich boundary' moves
to the right, positions 6/7. What makes the 4 + 6 form
unmarked? The fact that it appears in a more rigorous
variant of the English iambic pentameter? I wish Prof.
Tsur would at least explain". I am going to do
just that, and, in fact, I have so done in Tsur (1977:
74-82).
Consider the comment "The hemistich form 4 + 6
of the English iambic pentameter has been derived from
the pattern of the French decasyllable". This
statement attempts to refute my argument concerning
the perceived affects of the English iambic pentameter
by relying on its putative origin. I don't exactly
understand what this may mean, or what light this can
throw upon an understanding of the perceived affect
of the caesura after the fourth position.2 At any rate, I too
have found that Villon and Baudelaire overwhelmingly
place caesura in their decasyllabic verse lines after
the fourth position. I have found that in English iambic
pentameter there is an overwhelming tendency to place
caesura after the fourth position. I have also found
in three Hebrew (Avraham Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg, and
Shim'on Halkin), and two Hungarian poets (Árpád
Tóth, and Attila József) a similar tendency
to place caesura after the fourth rather than sixth
position in iambic pentameter lines. This I have taken
for a quite interesting finding, that calls for an
explanation, namely, that there is an overwhelming
tendency to place caesura after the fourth rather than
sixth position of decasyllabic lines in languages as
remote from each other as English, French, Hungarian,
and Hebrew, and in such different versification systems
as syllabic and syllabo-tonic meter. I concluded that
this is an instance of a wider linguistic principle,
mentioned by Jakobson as an example of the poetic function:
"'Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet
never Margery and Joan? Do you prefer Joan to her twin
sister?' 'Not at all, it just sounds smoother'. In
a sequence of two coordinate names, as far as no rank
problems interfere, the precedence of the shorter name
suits the speaker, unaccountably for him, as a well-ordered
shape of the message" (Jakobson, 1960: 356-357).
This seems to hold for "precedence of the shorter
hemistich" as well. This, in turn, I have taken
as an instance of an even wider linguistic principle,
that can be accounted for with reference to the limitations
of short-term memory, constraining many speech-processing,
and rhythm-processing activities. Geoffrey Leech formulated
it as follows: "There is a general tendency for
the weight of syntactic structure to occur later rather
than earlier in the sentence, so as to avoid strain
on a person's short-term memory in the course of constructing
and interpreting sentences" (Leech, 1974: 197).
This enables a person to handle the preliminary processing
of the first part of a linguistic unit while new information
is still presented to him by the speaker. This principle
can also be formulated as "the item hardest to
process comes last", and can account for a wide
range of phonetic preferences too, among others, the
preference of such expressions as sing-song and ding-dong
to song-sing and dong-ding, of trick or treat to treat
or trick, or walkie-talkie to talkiewalkie, etc. (Tsur,
1992 a: 84-86).
Now, to complicate things, Cooper and Meyer (1960: 61)
have found that this principle of the longest item
comes last works outside linguistic communication,
in music, too. I have already referred to Woodrow's
experimental finding that durational differences tend
to give rise to end-accented rhythms.3
Among a variety of explanations,
Cooper and Meyer (1960: 61) appeal to this finding
in order to account for their finding that musical
sequences tend to divide into a shorter followed by
a longer group. "As lengths of the rhythmic groups
increase, the ability of stress to act as an effective
organising force diminishes and the role of durational
differences in determining grouping necessarily becomes
more important". Considering that greater length
is usually perceived as greater accent in speech perception
as well as in music, it would be but reasonable to
expect that whenever a pentameter line is divided into
segments of four and six, segmentation into 4 + 6 would
be more natural than 6 + 4.
Now let us have a closer look at the numbers characterising the individual poets. I have assigned the caesurae, according to a procedure described elsewhere (Tsur, 1977: 72-74), in the first one hundred lines of Shakespeare's sonnets, Paradise Lost, "An Essay on Criticism", and the first one hundred decasyllabic lines in Faerie Qvene and "Adonais". The following table shows the number of lines in which caesurae occur after the fourth, fifth, or sixth position; "double" indicates lines in which two approximately equal major syntactic boundaries occur within the region of balance (which is not the same as indeterminacy). The difference between "total" and 100, in each poet, indicates the number of lines in which either syntax overrides caesura, or the assignment of caesura would have reflected personal inclination rather than an objectively assigned property of the line.
Shakespeare Milton Pope Spenser Shelley after IV 33 25 42 47 39 after V 32 24 32 18 15 after VI 14 23 9 27 18 double 1 1 6 -- 1 total 80 73 89 92 73
All the poets examined have more lines in which the
caesura occurs after the fourth position than after
the sixth. Pope has almost five times as many, Shakespeare
and Shelley only somewhat over twice as many, and Spenser
somewhat less than twice as many. The exception in
this context is Milton; there is no significant difference
in the number of caesurae after positions IV, V and
VI. We have to conclude, then, that the unmarked form
is the caesura after position IV. Had a similar distribution
occurred in Pope, we should have had to conclude that
caesurae after positions IV and VI are equally unmarked.
Within the present constellation we have to conclude
that the unmarked form is, beyond doubt, caesura after
position IV. I have distinguished above between convergent
and divergent poetry. In Milton's divergent poetry,
contrasts are typically blurred (as, for instance,
by stressed syllables in weak positions and unstressed
ones in strong positions, and by divergent patterns
of alliteration). As I have suggested, the divergent
effect of Milton's poetry cannot be accounted for merely
by the number of deviating stresses, but only by his
having recourse to the marked options in a wide range
of versification devices, of which stressed syllables
in weak positions are only one and marked caesura appears
to be another. He has recourse, not infrequently, to
such marked forms as strings of stresses that end in
weak positions, compounds whose first stress occurs
in a weak position, bisyllabics with their stressed
syllables in weak positions, and last but not least,
stress maxima in weak positions, which are all virtually
non-existent in Pope. So we should not be surprised
that in respect of caesura, too, Milton resorts to
the marked form more frequently than some other poets.
Another feature needs explanation. In other respects,
Shelley's style is as divergent as Milton's (in some
respects even more). In this particular respect of
caesura, however, he deliberately prefers the form
which we have decided to be the unmarked one. This
would suggest, what is quite reasonable to believe,
that the aspects in which there is an opposition marked/unmarked,
are independent variables (within the range of solidarity
I have established between them). We seem to categorise,
intuitively, a certain passage as divergent or convergent
according to whether the marked or unmarked forms outweigh
the others. The absence or scarcity of any particular
unmarked form in a passage may not be criteria for
judgment. High occurrence of unmarked forms is to be
taken for granted in divergent style too (by definition,
the frequency of a marked form is smaller than, or
equal to, the frequency of the corresponding unmarked
form). Furthermore, I have shown in my book (Tsur,
1977: 200-203), by comparing the use of Spenserian
stanza by Spenser and Shelley, that Shelley, who is
one of the most deviant poets in my sample, may become
more regular than Spenser at certain points--one of
the most regular poets of my sample. This is most conspicuous
in the sixth position of the dodecasyllabic lines which,
not as in Faerie Qvene, in "Adonais" is invariably
followed by a caesura and which is the only metrical
position in which no deviation occurs throughout this
deviant poem. The explanation offered for this remarkable
regularity in the sixth position of the dodecasyllabic
lines of this poem may probably account for Shelley's
preference for the unmarked caesura. Shelley's deviance
is anything but chaotic; unlike Donne, he takes deliberate
(though inconspicuous) measures to keep his highly
divergent verse cohesive.
By essentially the same procedure, I have assigned the caesurae to a random number of iambic pentameter lines by three Hebrew and two Hungarian poets (ibid., 82):
Shlonsky Goldberg Halkin József Tóth
after IV 54 123 13 28 30
after V -- 25 4 51 34
after VI 2 76 11 14 10
double 4 9 1 3 3
other -- 5 3 2 3
total 60 238 32 98 80
The same tendency is visible in some decasyllabic verse
outside syllabo-tonic meter. In French syllabic poetry,
decasyllabic lines are relatively rare. I have checked
two of Villon's ballades (65 lines), and all the decasyllabic
poems in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (94 lines).
The overwhelming majority of caesurae in these poems
occurs after position IV (49 in Villon, and 64 in Baudelaire).
By now it may be quite clear that both Cognitive Poetics and the "scholarly tradition of the so-called Russian school in verse study" engage in "quantitative analyses of observable facts" (though the latter does it on a much larger scale). They seem to differ rather in the kinds of explanation they offer for poetic affects. Both kinds of explanations are deeply embedded in twentieth century psychological thinking. The historical explanations offered by both Shavit and the reviewer seem to assume that frequent exposure to certain versification forms associated with certain themes (or certain poetic styles) may condition readers (the author's contemporaries, mainly) to respond to the versification forms as if they were responding to the themes (or styles) with which they are regularly associated. What happens within that black box, the reader's head, does not seem to concern them. Cognitive poetics, on the contrary, focuses much interest on the cognitive mechanisms and processes mediating between exposure and response to poetic structures. It assumes that poetic styles and their perceived affects result from an interaction of a wide variety of norms that exist on a variety of strata of the work, and that these norms do have certain inherent (sometimes conflicting) potentials to contribute to the total affect. These potentials may be (and some of them have been) investigated on independent grounds with, e.g., the tools offered by gestalt psychology and psycholinguistics.4
Thus, for instance, there is an enormous
bulk of experimental literature indicating that many
instances of markedness result from difficulty of processing,
or load on short-term memory. What characterises these
experiments is, that they tap evasive intuitions, the
sources of which are hopelessly subliminal. That is
why, though sometimes quite decisive, they look negligible
to the casual observer.
Now consider, against this short excursus, the following
point of the reviewer. "Probably 'backward grouping'
is hard for perception; but dactylic rhymes are scarce
in English poetry for phonological and historical reasons";
and, again, "thus, the dactyl (and other ternaries)
became scarce, and therefore 'marked', rather than
'marked' and therefore scarce". These comments
seem to be quite typical of the conflicting approaches
lurking, all along, behind our controversy. The reviewer
tends to give priority to statistical and historical
reasons, whereas I am trying to rely on a free interaction
of a wide variety of reasons of different kinds. Thus,
for instance, I am acknowledging the difficulty of
finding dactylic rhymes in English; but I mention it
as one of several reasons. I am quoting myself: "The
dactylic rhyme is highly marked in English poetry,
for three different reasons. One reason is that in
the English language it is more difficult to produce
it than in some other languages, hence its rarity.
The other two reasons seem to be less language-dependent.
The second reason has to do with the grouping of unstressed
syllables with stressed ones. For unstressed syllables
to achieve a sense of stability, they must be grouped
together with an adjacent stressed syllable in a metrical
strong position, and it is easier to group them forward
than backward. Backward grouping is always perceived
as marked. In the dactylic rhyme, the last two unstressed
syllables must be grouped backward since, by definition,
they are not followed by a stressed syllable in a strong
position. What is more, when the dactylic rhyme occurs
in a ternary metre, two weak positions are grouped
forward, and two backward, with the same (last) stressed
syllable in a strong position (as opposed to the binary
metres, in which between any two strong positions there
is only one weak position). This may generate a kind
of uneasy feeling of perceptual ambiguity and confused
directions. The third reason has to do with the acoustic
cues for grouping and stress", indicated by Woodrow's
and Frye's experiments.
An interesting test case for the assumption that the scarcity of dactylic words in a language is the reason for the markedness of dactylic rhymes would be Hungarian poetry. Hungarian, as it is well known, is a beginning-accented language. Yet, dactylic rhyming is almost non-existent in it. One important reason for this lies outside the scope of the present discussion: for (admittedly) historical reasons, in Hungarian, ternary metres are typically in classical quantitative metre, whereas binary metres are typically syllabotonic.5 This, however, should not have prevented Hungarian poets to write poems in binary metres, with syllabo-tonic dactylic rhymes. When L"orinc Szabó translates "The Bridge of Sighs" into Hungarian, he seems to have no difficulty in reproducing the dactylic rhymes, in quantitative or syllabo-tonic metre. The first two stanzas tend to be distinctly quantitative:
The following two lines from stanza 4 have syllabo-tonic dactylic endings:
But in poetry written originally in Hungarian, it is
almost impossible to find dactylic rhymes.6
One of the
rare instances, György Faludi's "Mercenary
Song", is an ambiguous case. This poem is, in
fact, in iambic tetrameter; but owing, precisely, to
the beginning-accented nature of the Hungarian language,
there is a tendency to override the last stress in
the line, and so obtain dactylic rhymes. Here is the
first stanza of the poem:
In fact, many readers have reported the perception of
a hypnotic affect in this poem. According to the conception
propounded above, this affect can be accounted for
by the "false security" due to the feeling
of security generated by the more than usually regular
metre of the poem on the one hand, and the insecurity
generated by the dactylic rhyme. This affect is foregrounded,
by contrast, precisely in those few cases in which
the dactylic construal of the line-ending breaks down,
and the rhyme becomes unambiguously iambic. The Hungarian
precedent would strongly suggest, then, that the scarcity
of beginning-accented words cannot be regarded as the
only, or even the main, cause for the paucity (and
markedness) of dactylic rhyme in a language.
Finally, I propose briefly to consider a crucial issue raised by the reviewer: "I feel a little uneasy about many instances of impressionistic, subjective statements in Prof. Tsur's work". One way to define Cognitive poetics is to locate it between analytic criticism and impressionist criticism. The former, I suggest, excels in the description of the structure of literary texts, while the latter indulges in their perceived effects. Cognitive Poetics offers cognitive theories that systematically account for the relationship between the two. By the same token, it discriminates between reported effects which may legitimately be related to the structures in question, and those which may not. It should be obvious by now, I hope, that in its speculations on markedness affects, or emotional and witty qualities, Cognitive Poetics heavily relies on systematic knowledge drawn from clinical experience with the Rorschach ink-blot test, and sometimes carefully controlled experiments of the psycholinguists and gestalt psychologists. But I would like to end this Postscript with a few passages, quoted from an analytic philosopher, and a linguist-semiotician. The philosopher Frank Sibley says of "aesthetic concepts":
If we are not following rules and there are no conditions to appeal to, how are we to know when they are applicable? One very natural way to counter this question is to point out that some other sorts of concepts also are not condition-governed. We do not apply simple color-words by following rules or in accordance with principles. We see that the book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said, we just see (or fail to see) that things are delicate, balanced, and the like (Sibley, 1962: 77).
Such a conception is familiar from other areas of poetic
theory as well. The linguist Manfred Bierwisch suggests:
Poetics must explain just which structural qualities form the basis for definite effects. It can and must explicate those consciously or unconsciously followed regularities that lead to the understanding of poetic structure and to a judgment of poeticality [...]; it must accept effects as given and determine the rules upon which they are founded (Bierwisch, 1970: 108).
As I have earlier said, Cognitive Poetics proposes to do just that. It uses quantitative investigations to establish regularities, makes a sustained effort to ascertain what "the specific effects of poetry" are, through introspection, in controlled experiments in the psychological laboratory, by considering statements of professional critics in their published writings, or by collecting casual reports of students in the classroom. It offers hypotheses drawn from the various branches of cognitive science to relate, systematically, poetic effects to poetic structures with which they have been regularly associated. By the same token, it helps further to refine the formulation of perceived affects collected in a variety of ways from a variety of respondents. Far from relying "on a reader 'in general,' or on a modern (and sometimes unsophisticated) reader", it helps to break up a homogeneous past into a multiplicity of related attitudes, but avoiding scepticism, idiosyncrasy, or chaos. While the historical approach encountered here "is based not so much on insight and intuition as on wide quantitative analyses of observable facts", Cognitive Poetics assumes that the readers of past ages had insights and intuitions, no less than present-day readers; that to understand such insights and intuitions one must study the responses of living readers, and then try to find out in what respects can the responses of readers in the past be supposed to differ from the responses of present-day readers; and that to abandon such inquiries is too high a price to pay for "scientific objectivity".
1. In Pagis' critical edition of Al-Tabban's extant poetry, there are 12 five-line-long or shorter poems with pure suffix rhymes, 3 with mixed rhymes, and one with pure root rhymes. In addition, there is one six-line-long, and one ten-line-long poem with root rhymes, with distinct anti-grammatic sophistications. Still the number of purely suffix-rhymed poems in this poet's corpus is overwhelming.
2. This is a good example of what Wimsatt and Beardsley called "The Genetic Fallacy". I shall not recapitulate here the arguments for and against it (they have been reviewed and criticised by Wimsatt, 1968).
3. Woodrow's experimental findings seem to be in harmony with some of my other cognitive assumptions governing my argument. That durational differences tend to give rise to end-accented rhythms can be interpreted as 'whenever durational differences arise, the longest segment comes last'. His finding that differences in amplitude tend to give rise to beginning-accented rhythms can be explained, first, by assuming that, other things being equal, greater amplitude at the beginning of a sequence more efficiently arouses the alertness of the perceiving system than at the end; and second, with reference to the finding that greater amplitude does not constitute a greater load on short-term memory.
4. As a matter of fact, the so-called Russian school does not seem to be that homogeneous either. Roman Jakobson, and some other Russian Formalists explicitly embrace mentalistic approaches, and some of their assumptions considerably overlap with the assumptions of gestalt psychologists, and I have learnt from them an enormous lot. One of my favourite quotes is from Victor Erlich:
Works of art are knowable objects, accessible only through individual experience. Consequently, the mechanism of aesthetic response is a legitimate concern of an "objectivist" art theoretician, provided that the emphasis is placed not on the individual reader's idiosyncratic associations, but on the qualities inherent in the work of art and capable of eliciting certain "intersubjective" responses (Erlich, 1965: 178-179).
5. These historical reasons too appear to have linguistic and cognitive reasons. In Hungarian, both length and stress create phonemic differences. This would allow both for quantitative and syllabo-tonic metre. Since, however, phonemic contrasts based on length are relatively rare, quantitative metre is less natural in Hungarian. While syllabo-tonic metre is congenial to Hungarian poetry, the classical quantitative metres were imported to Hungarian by a deliberate classicist effort in the eighteenth century. (In French, by contrast, which is a syllable-timed and not stress-timed language, a deliberate classicist effort to import iambic verse failed).
6. Following the present discussion, I have pursued this issue of Hungarian dactylic rhyme in a Hungarian paper (forthcoming in Literatura)
PostscriptReuven Tsur
References
Arnheim, Rudolf
1957 Art and Visual Perception. London: Faber &
Faber.
Bierwisch, Manfred
1970 "Poetics and Linguistics", in Donald
C. Freeman (ed.), Linguistics and Literary Style. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 97-115.
Cooper, C. W. and L. B. Meyer
1960 The Rhythmic Structure of Music. Chicago: Chicago
UP.
Erlich, Victor
1965 Russian Formalism, revised ed., London:
Jakobson, Roman
1960 "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics",
in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT. 350-377.
Leech, Geoffrey
1974 Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Levy Ibn Al-Tabban
1967 The Poems of. Critical edition by Dan Pagis. Jerusalem:
The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (in Hebrew).
Rorschach, Hermann
1951 Psychodiagnostics. Bern: Huber.
Schirmann, Jefim
1961 Hebrew Poetry in Spain and in Provence, 4 vols.
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Bialik Institute and Dvir
(in Hebrew).
Wimsatt, W. K.
1968 "Genesis, a Fallacy Revisited", in Peter
Demetz et al. eds., The Disciplines of Criticism. New
Haven and London: Yale UP.
Tsur, Reuven
1968 Studies in Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry. Tel Aviv: Daga
(in Hebrew).
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