Turnings of the Breath

Abstract

‘Yes, as I knew you then’ — as we have just seen, Hardy’s mellifluous triple measure and polysyllabic rhymes are unsettled by the syntactical and prosodic weight placed on ‘then’, just after the reanimation of past memory had irrupted into the scene of address with the exclamation ‘yes’. ‘Then’ at once figures the irretrievability of the past and embodies the present moment of discourse. But, we saw, its temporality is radically forward looking, as its attempt to bring this voice into presence becomes it an exploration of its possibilities of voicing as the modalities of a future presencing. On the one hand, this means that the drama of utterance transposes into a drama of prosodic texture; and yet, this prosodic texture is not straightfor-wardly sonorous. Indeed, the demonstrative ‘then’ sounds within, and against, the metre and rhyme scheme only as a barely perceptible tremor, its rising cadence surfacing from the poem’s undersong fleetingly, one detail among many competing, and mutually excluding, demands for voicing. Eric Griffiths gives a characteristically eloquent summary of this predicament: ‘the intonational ambiguity of a written text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative possible voicings, and are led by such vision to reflect on the inter-resonance of those voicings’.¹