“A Sense of Being Linked with People”: Poetry, Listening, Intonation

Abstract

Peter Elbow muses, “Intonation doesn’t just give us the sound of meaning; it also gives us the sound of people.…We tend to hear personal traits like honesty, untrustworthiness, arrogance, open mindedness.” Readers of W.S. Merwin’s poetry, especially “Yesterday,” one of his best-known texts, might naturally think of that speaker, whose regret, self-awareness, and reverie well up in what is, by turns, a choral and individual response. This poem, characterized by the turn-taking and interlacing of voices characteristic of speech, tumbled against the container of verse that controls lineation and stanzaic measures, is, in comparison with a “passage of spontaneous speech” that Peter Elbow cites from a corpus, instructive of the force of intonation that plays through much twentieth-century verse. Brief comparisons to William Carlos Williams’s “Tract” will showcase what this poem shares in common with other poems in using intonation as a counterforce to some other form of measure. I compare Merwin’s “Yesterday” with a passage of spontaneous prose, which, as it is analyzed—based on a method of linguistic transcription—into lines representing separate intonation units, is unnervingly similar. Using those discoveries, I explore how Merwin’s use of syntactic constructions that always phrase as separate intonation units (e.g., reporting clauses, yes/no statements, interjections), along with a tendency to proliferate intonation units every time one syntactic unit interrupts another, heightens the sensation of an immediate and presently unfolding speaking voice.