Listening to people reading 233In this version, all the questions in the first two lines have a proclaiming
tone. It seems important for subsequent developments that the speaker simply
doesn’t know what the sound is: it impinges upon her world as something
in no way prepared for. A referring tone, with the ‘making-sure’ implications
it has with questions— ‘Is that what I think/fear/hope it might be?’ —would
suggest, too soon in the poem, that she heard the sound as threatening. By
contrast, the referring tones in the explanatory lines imply that what she has
heard is a perfectly routine matter: she knows about the soldiers—there’s
nothing unusual about what is happening.
The distribution of prominence is more complicated. The first line is
treated in a way which parallels, let us say,
// WHAT’S that NOISE i can hear //or
// WHAT’S that LIGHT that keeps flashing across the sky //In either of these, the fact that the noise could be heard or that the light was
flashing across the sky could be taken to be self-evident to speaker and
hearer alike and is thus justifiably presented as non-selective material. What
makes this parallel slightly less convincing than it might be, however, is the
verb thrills. The associated concept is so much a matter of subjective response
that it is hard to imagine anyone using such a verb in that part of an
utterance which is presented as self-evident background: as presuming, in
other words, that the other’s ear is thrilled also. But attempts to redistribute
prominence and/or alter tone unit boundaries to remove this problem seem
to result in versions with quite inappropriate situational implications. The
most likely, and least odd, alternative,
//o WHAT is that SOUND //p which SO thrills the EAR //does not, in fact, help, since thrills is still presented as non-selective. The
problem is not so serious as it may seem, however. If we say that thrills is
not likely to occur non-prominently in such a context in the real world, we
are saying no more than that the poet has chosen, for his own purposes, to
project an unusual set of conversational conditions. And as so often happens
when everyday expectations are contradicted, the element that contradicts
them takes on a special significance. It is arguable that the obviously ambivalent
connotations of thrills, which subsequent events in the narrative expose, are
given weight precisely because a properly motivated reading of the line
denies selectivity to a word against our expectations.
There is a similar case in the third line:
// ONly the scarlet SOLdiers dear //
Here, the lack of prominence in dear causes no surprise: it accords with the
way terms of address are usually treated when they come after the message.
There is no possibility of selection because there is no one else the speaker