"The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"
he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and conversely a knowledge of the poet's personality and of his governing ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite words—like Marlowe's "black," Shelley's "light," Tennyson's "wind," Swinburne's "fire." Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be adequately felt without some recognition of the particular sensational and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of their own independently of the life breathed into them by living men. I recall a conversation at Bormes with the French poet Angellier. He was complaining humorously of his friend L., a famous scholar whose big book was "carrying all the treasures of French literature down to posterity like a cold-storage transport ship." "But he published a criticism of one of my poems," Angellier went on, "which proved that he did not understand the poem at all. He had studied it too hard! The words of a poem are stepping-stones across a brook. If you linger on one of them too long, you will get your feet wet! You must cross, vite!" If the poets lead us from one mood to another over a bridge of words, the words themselves are not the goal of the journey. They are instruments used in the transmission of emotion.
6. Specific Tone-Color
It is obvious, then, that the full poetic value of a word cannot be ascertained apart from its context. The value is relative and not absolute. And nevertheless, just as the bit of colored glass may have a certain interest and beauty of its own, independently of its possible place in the rose-window, it is true that separate words possess special qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or timbre. Words, likewise, differ greatly in tone-quality. A great deal of ingenuity has been devoted to the analysis of "bright" and "dark" vowels, smooth and harsh consonants, with the aim of showing that each sound has its special expressive force, its peculiar adaptability to transmit a certain kind of feeling. Says Professor A. H. Tolman: [Footnote: "The Symbolic Value of Sounds," in Hamlet and Other Essays, by A. H. Tolman. Boston, 1904.]
"Let us arrange the English vowel sounds in the following scale:
[short i] (little) [long i] (I) [short oo] (wood) [short e] (met) [long u] (due) [long ow] (cow) [short a] (mat) [short ah] (what) [long o] (gold) [long e] (mete) [long ah] (father) [long oo] (gloom) [ai] (fair) [oi] (boil) [aw] (awe) [long a] (mate) [short u] (but)
"The sounds at the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror, and from the trivial to the solemn and awful."
Robert Louis Stevenson in his Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying "tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid consonants and harsh consonants, are unquestionably associated with muscular memories, that is to say, with individual body-and-mind experiences. Lines like Tennyson's famous
"The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees"
thus represent, in their vowel and consonantal expressiveness, the past history of countless physical sensations, widely shared by innumerable individuals, and it is to this fact that the "transmission value" of the lines is due.