Rhyme/reason, Chaucer/Pope, icon/symbol. (Alexander Pope; Geoffrey Chaucer)

Since Chaucer and Pope made the most celebrated uses of decasyllabic couplets in English, the comparison of their prosodic effectiveness is natural, and no doubt led William K. Wimsatt to match their rhymes in his well-known essay, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason."(1) In demonstrating Pope's superior use of sound in support of verbal symbolism, the essay implicitly denigrates Chaucer's rhymes in favor of Pope's, but no Chaucer scholar has challenged the presuppositions of Wimsatt's analysis, which perhaps have been seen as self-evident. If one accepts that prosodic effect is indissolubly tied to verbal meaning, as partially expressed in Pope's dictum, "The sound must be an echo to the sense," Wimsatt's arguments are compelling.(2) Pope characteristically achieves the effect of pleasurable surprise as a result of "some incongruity or unlikelihood inherent in the coupling" (VI, 164), as in the rhyme words of The Rape of the Lock that bracket potential dangers to chastity and to porcelain:

Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law, Or some frail China jar receive a flaw.(3)

Chaucer, by contrast, attains variation through "continuous sense and syntax"; his rhymes are likely to be "dullish" or "tame" (VI, 158, 160), as in the description of the Yeoman in the General Prologue:

Upon his arm he baar a gay bracer, And by his syde a swerd and a bokeler, And on that oother syde a gay daggere Harneised wel and sharp as point of spere.(4)

Though the citations may seem extreme, showing Pope at his sharpest and Chaucer at his least colorful, the conclusion is a valid one; Chaucer's rhyme words do not typically present a pointed contrast in meaning, and the contribution of rhyme to "continuous sense and syntax" is tenuous. The conclusion seems inevitable that, since Pope's rhymes undoubtedly have more interesting sound-sense relations than Chaucer's, his rhyming must be more effective.

Yet there is a good basis for arguing that the overriding function of rhyme in Chaucer's poetry, as in that of his Romance and Latin predecessors, is to help organize the sounds to create a sign independent of the particular verbal sense. In the frame of the medieval notion of music as "the science of number related to sound," this may be called a musical function.(5) While the mimetic and affective support lent by Chaucer's rhyme sounds to the sense are comparatively unimportant, the systematic effects of his music, in which the rhymes are integral, are sufficient, and only measurable in part against Pope's, whose prosodic system is descended from Chaucer's, but with substantial changes.(6)

I posit that separate, independent sign systems underlie the sound and the sense in poetry, and for my argument here about rhyme it will be necessary to consider the larger point about sound and sense. In this matter I rely on the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. The sense of an utterance is created by the grammar and lexicon of the language, the sound by segmental and suprasegmental phonemes whose qualities do not bear on the linguistic meaning. This sound, organized in poetry by both the grammar and the prosody, is commonly referred to as the music.(7) The notion that two separate sign systems operate in poetry is contrary not only to Wimsatt, but also to the contention of most recent theorists, especially certain New Critics and continental structuralists at midcentury.(8) Essentially, they apply to the sounds of poetry what has been maintained about words and language from at least the time of Plato, that the physical properties are connected with--express, mime, emphasize, or play off against--the symbolic meanings.(9) Though the idea has been just as persistently controverted, beginning with Plato's Cratylus, and most notably by Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of the sign, it recurs in various forms.(10)

Recent theorists do not openly attribute "mimologism" to language in general, but they do insist that in poetry sound depends for its effects on verbal meanings. By discounting the independent value of the sounds, Wimsatt emphatically asserts the dependence of poetry's phonetic content on the sense.

The music of spoken words in itself is meager, so meager in comparison to the music of song or instrument as to be hardly worth discussion. It has become a platitude of criticism to point out that verses composed of meaningless words afford no pleasure of any kind and can scarcely be called rhythmical--let them even be rhymed. The mere return to the vowel tonic (the chord or tone cluster characteristic of a vowel) is likely to produce the emotion of boredom. The art of words is an intellectual art, and the emotions of poetry are simultaneous with conceptions and largely induced through the medium of conceptions. In literary art only the wedding of the alogical with the logical gives the former an aesthetic value. The words of a rhyme, with their curious harmony of sound and distinction of sense, are an amalgam of the sensory and the logical, or an arrest and precipitation of the logical in sensory form; they are the icon in which the word is caught. (VI, 165)

For Wimsatt, rhyme is one element of the artifact that is held together in tension by its semantic elements, creating what he calls a "verbal icon." Russian formalists, on a somewhat different theoretical basis, also maintain adamantly that rhyme and reason cannot be divorced, that the "musicality" of poetry is indissolubly linked to semantic content. Jurij Lotman admits that musical meanings may exist; he even grants that "we can imagine, however conditionally, a strictly musical meaning formed by relations of sound series without extra-musical bonds."(11) He insists, however, that poetry's sound systems serve verbal meaning, since language is its material. As forcefully as Wimsatt he denies independent sign value to rhyme and other elements of poetic form.

No matter how we attempt to separate sound from content, whether to exalt or denounce the author suspected of isolating the sound of poetry from its meaning--we are faced with a hopeless task. In an art form which uses language as its material (verbal art), sound cannot be separated from meaning. The musical sound of poetic speech is also a means of transmitting information, that is, transmitting content, and in this sense it cannot be set in opposition to other means of transmitting information which are characteristic of language as a semiotic system. (Lotman, 120)

My claim is precisely that we can separate systems of verbal sound from those of meaning. When poets divide their statement into lines and stanzas and impose a rhyme scheme, they are providing an independent pattern of sound that can attract the other phonetic aspects, which are of minor use to verbal sense. The "musical sound of poetic speech" indeed transmits semiotic content, but this content is not necessarily linked to the verbal message: it primarily serves musical rather than verbal sense. In Chaucer's poetry the sound-sense relation has limited importance. While the importance of this relation increases in the course of the Renaissance, as I will discuss later, the independent significance of poetry's music never is subordinated.

As Saussure taught and literary theorists constantly repeat, the meaning of words is made possible by a differential system. For lexical meaning, the inherent quality of the phonemes /i/ in "pit" and /o/ in "pot" is not important, nor is the openness or closedness, the highness or lowness. Only the difference between these phonemes, or graphemes, is significant, marking the distinction between the deep hole, the pit, and the container, the pot. A multiplicity of comparable contrasts produces the precise meaning of the words. The advantage of a vocal sound system comes from its endless possibilities for simply produced variety, allowing communication with a great economy of signals. Other systems, such as hand signs, signal flags, and Morse code, are comparatively awkward and cumbersome.

A further salient feature of phonetic symbols is of paramount importance for poetry. Not only can spoken language distinguish meaning efficiently, but in addition, after the differential system has done its work, the words have "left over" a great body of sound qualities that ordinary communication only marginally employs for rhetorical effect. While the liquid flow of /l/ and /r/, the hiss of the /s/ and /z/, and the explosion of the /p/ may assist the symbolic sense in flow, hiss, and explosion, for the most part they serve in the irrelevant semantic contexts of larkspur, prose, or cuspidor. Nor do the qualities of grammatical intonation in phrase and sentence--the suprasegmental phonemes--operate semantically beyond the system of differences; the rising curve of the question, or the descending pattern of the statement, are of little use in signifying the flight of the bird or the depression of Monday morning. Here again, the differential, the gap, is where the symbolic significance lies. In ways beyond support of the sense, prosodic patterns in poetry capitalize on the leftover qualities that ordinary language neglects. By imposing an independent system of sound that has only "musical" import, the prosody provides an organizing framework for the material qualities of sound. The phonetic features that serve a rhetorical purpose in assisting semantic meaning--the "ah" of approbation, the emphasis achieved in anaphoric repetition (o tempora! o mores!), the ironic rhyme--at best make partial use of the wonderful music of language. It takes the sound system of the poem, the full "music," to exploit the phonetic qualities.

Peirce's semiotics clarifies how in producing its effects a poem incorporates two kinds of signs, linguistic symbols and musical icons. In his scheme, most semiotic entities embody different kinds of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols.(12) The "stop" sign on a road, for instance, is iconic in its hexagonal shape and any aesthetic quality it might have, indexical in its particular placement and condition, and symbolic in its verbal message. The three types are conveyed in a single glance. The experience of the poem is roughly similar; the symbolic signs of the words and the iconic signs of the sounds exist and are apprehended simultaneously, both gaining their force through the systems that organize them. The comparison does not do justice to the poem, in which the two kinds of sign are welded more integrally than in the case of the signpost, but it does suggest how diverse signs may be perceived and combined simultaneously in the interpreter's sensibility.(13) I will come back to this matter after discussing objections that theorists like Wimsatt and Lotman present.

Those who vehemently deny that sound in poetry may have significant independent value find two main problems: sound in language, they say, cannot be separated from content, and in any event the sounds of poetry divorced from the meaning have little musical value. Wimsatt's …