That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.A whole essay could be written on the subtle ways these lines enact the “con-
nect[ion]” of “the landscape with the quiet of the sky.” The assonance of
“quiet,” “sky,” the internal rhyme of “steep” and “deep,” “soft” and “loft-y,”
the permutation of “secluded” into “seclusion,” and the relation of enjamb-
ment to the creation of that “soft inland murmur” of line 4: each rhythmic
unit here is carefully calibrated. But the mere choice of meter is obviously
not enough: here, in a poem called “Rough Country,” is Dana Gioia’s account
of coming across a hidden waterfall:
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes—
a hiding place, a shrine for dragon®ies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won’t be owned.Here the dutiful elaboration of the iambic pentameter does little to relate
meaningful units: consider the monotony of “and nesting jays, a sign that
there is still.” Again, word and rhy thm seem to have no necessary connec-
tion: if the ¤rst line read “not half a mile from the nearest highway” and the
second, “a spot so tough to reach that no one comes,” I doubt anyone would
notice.
It is not just that Gioia is untalented; even poets of much greater tal-
ent have found that, as Roubaud suggests in La viellesse d’Alexandre, the re-
cycling of a verse form that had a raison d’être at a particular moment in
history at a particular place cannot be accomplished. The alexandrine, in
other words, can still live, but only when it is understood as what Roubaud
calls a “hieratic rhy thmic entity.” Speci¤c sound patterns change in response
to their time and culture, but the principle that sound structure controls
meaning remains the same.
The Jouissance of Sound
Consider, to begin with, the role of sound in the poetry of ancient cultures,
not just in Greece and Rome but in Chinese and Hebrew, Arabic, or African
texts as well. In the Lianja epic of the Congo, for example, the bards, so we
Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 215