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Sounds Broken: a study of auto-reflexive rhythm in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Derek Walcott’s Omeros.

Erick Ramalho

A similar rhythmic conception through a postmodern (de)construction can be observed in Omeros. Similar to Milton, alcott produces a synthesis [4] of past and present metrical theories and conceptions (alongside with the formal and thematic synthesis of a text that relates a Greek tragic form to a Biblical account) – Greek metrics being a past common to both Milton and Walcott– as a rhythmic disposition that does not represent the meaning of the poem, having a meaning of its own, that is, constituting the auto-reflexivity explained above. Walcott makes of the awareness of auto-reflexive rhythm another segment of his postmodern synthesis, deconstructing the Hellenic tradition not only thematically, but also rhythmically.

Thus, in the sea of significance (“O-mer-os”) that does not privilege reality or fiction, given that they are one and the same, past, present or future, the grandiose of the Iliad is brought to daily Caribbean life in sound and shape. Nevertheless, Helen is not a present image, but a shadow (“the duel of these fishermen/was over a shadow and its name was Helen”, 17) that indicates the presence of an absence like the lack of a prominent dactylic construction, as ound in the Iliad, dissolved into different rhythms.

Simultaneously, the plot constructs images of different places and times, for instance, Ancient Greece, Scotland and the Caribbean Islands through elements whose meaning leads to these assumptions, respectively a solemn poetical rhythm, bagpipes and kettledrums and a tropical landscape. Yet, the rhythm is all and none of these at the same time:

The dawn was coming up like thunder

through the coconut palms. Bagpipes and kettledrums

were the only thing missing. Plunkett smiled under his martial, pensioned moustaches. (256)

What has started as the typical iambic rhythm of the English language (“the dawn was coming”) is abruptly broken in a construction that, occupying different lines, constitute a rhythm sequence itself (“thunder through”, which is more than a traditional alliteration) that, contrastingly, starts an Iliad-like dactyl (“through the coconut palms”). The two dactyls are, however, abruptly broken by the full stop followed by the heavy anapaests “bagpipes and kettledrums”, namely two sequences x x – are followed by two – x x. The aim of the insertion of dactyl lines is not a mere quotation of the Iliad in rhythmical terms, but the dissolution of a solemn privileged high style into a sea of sounds that is simultaneously all and none of them. It has different and apparently coherent rhythms that are all the time dissolved into a flux of sounds constituted of different sequences. Homer, therefore, becomes a shadow also in rhythmical terms, the Iliad being absent, but indicated through different senses and rhythmical sequences.

Walcott not only makes use of the auto-reflexivity of the rhythm but also corroborates in the words that enable such rhythmical existence the negation of representation by recalling the image of Ancient Greece –Homer and the Iliad– only to dissolve it in the particular rhythm of his poem, in which they become the presence of an absence as memories forgotten, “Just as the nightingales had forgotten his lines” (290). The rhythm comprise past and present, and, given that “Time is the metre, memory the only plot” (129), its mo(ve)ments that do not represent meaning, but produce a sense in its own, thereby also allowing the waning of the figure of the poet diluted in the rhythm of its text, as well as in the theme of its words:

A wind turns the harbour’ s pages back to the voice

That hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros” (13)

and blackened pillars. These are the only ruins

left there by history, if history is what they are.

The twisted logwood trunks are orange from sea-blast; (20)

Rhythm is no privileged means of expression, since it often becomes smoke and vanishes, or condenses itself as the synthesis of a moment. At any time, it is possible “[...]to give those feet a voice” (76), although simultaneous to the singing the fate of Oedipus, swollen-feet, the ordinary path walked by fishermen’s sandals are also part of the trails of smoke that vanishes in the sea of sounds of literature. In fact, this process could be related to what Kristeva describes as “these rhythmical, lexical, even syntactic changes” that “disturb the transparency of the signifying chain and open it up to the material crucible of its production” (457). In this case, however, the rhythm is not covered by syntax, but co-exists to it in the simultaneity of sounds and senses that make of smoke its own existence and reference. [5]

In postmodernism, Homer is not the hero-like figure of the Classical author that has gained new contours from century to century, but, as Homer and the Homeric question arise in the fact that the Iliad may be the weaving of different poets rather than the personal creation of one based on the previous accounts of many. The past with shades of master narrative is thus conveying in the rhythm of the Iliad, the word being produced in the large scale of dawn, “O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros,/As you did in my boyhood, when I as a noun/Gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise (12)”, a sequence whose rhythm and choice of words “quote” the Iliad just to deny its privileged existence given its possible authorlessness, since “as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,/swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,/as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a door?” (274).

Rhythm conspicuously displays the impossibility of representation, since if the dactyls are attributed to a solemn mood in Ancient Greek and rhymed iambic represent curtains in Elizabethan drama, how would be the rhythmical representation for postmodern poetry? Since representation itself is broken in Samson Agonistes, Walcott demonstrates his awareness of such impossibility through the rhythm of a poem that deconstructs, in sounds, what is simultaneously deconstructed through words, the impossibility of enveloping sense in words: “Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms/Shielding a candle’s tongue, it is the language’s/Desire to enclose the loved world in its arms” (75). As wisps of smoke in mid-air, the author has vanished, if he ever existed, the book itself becomes smoke, and rhythm, all that remains, re-veiling reality in its sounds: “just as the faith led gone out from every hymn,/till only rhythm remained; and what was rhythm/if over their swinging arms there was not passion” (101).

In conclusion, both Milton and Walcott have, in the texts analysed, a relation towards the word thus described by the former: “I hear the sound of words, their sense the air/Dissolves unjoint ere it reach my ear” (Milton 1375). While sense collapses in front of the reader/listener, sounds exist, are heard, which enables them to an existence similar to mirroring images without an original, echoes coming from no originating voice or smoke that exists from no prior fire. Sounds that do not construct continua, but a flux with beginnings and a synthesis of past, present and future in their own beating, which is not punctual, but broken, fragmented, fluid. A rhythm that can be heard independently from the meaning of the text, but which is not to be privileged, thereby existing to be listened together and at the same time with the development of the plot. Above all, rhythm is to be understood in its brokennes as a process not to be made static in metrical representation.

Works Cited

ALLEN. W. S. Vox Latina–A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

REGINA, Roberto de. Johann Sebastian Bach – 16 Concertos para Cravo Solo. São Paulo: Paulus, 1995.

BROADBENT, J.B., Milton: Comus and Samson Agonistes. London: Edward Arnold, 1964.

BUSH, D. John Milton –A Sketch of his Life and Writings. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965. Campion, T. Observations in the Art of English Poesie/1602. G. B. Harrison (ed). London: Dutton, 1925. <http//:www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/poesie.html>

FRYE, N. Five Essays on Milton’s Epics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

HALPORN, J., Ostwald, M. & Rosenmeyer. Thomas G., The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1963.

KRISTEVA, J. Revolution in Poetic Language. In Rivkin, Julie & Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: an Anthology.Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

MILTON, J. Samson Agonistes. In: KERMODE, Frank & HOLLANDER, John (eds.). The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

OVID. P. N. Amores, Epistulae, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris. R. Ehwald. edidit ex Rudolphi Merkelii recognitione. Leipzig. B. G. Teubner. 1907. <http://www.perseus.tuft.edu> Ramalho, E. Sounds on the Stage: An Analysis of an Experimental Phonetic-Based

Translation of Shakespeare into Contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. Belo Horizonte, 2002. (paper presented at VII National Congress of Phonetic and Phonology and I International Congress of Phonetics and Phonology, Belo Horizonte, 2002).

THORPE. J (ed). Milton Criticism – Selections from Four Centuries. London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1962.

WALLCOT, D. Omeros. London: Faber & Faber, 1990.

Notes

[4] For synthesis I mean the simultaneity of techniques, themes, theories, concepts or forms regarding past and present models, whereas dismissing the notion of model itself as to produce a flux not of references, but of signifiers and signified that have no privileged position, in past, present or future, in relation to themselves or to other discourses. Synthesis is, therefore, a process that reveals/re-veils itself in the writing/reading.

[5] I deem rhythm differently from Mallarmé’s view: “this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax” (Kristeva 456). I would think of the notions of anterior or underlying occurrence as a simultaneous occurrence of rhythm and syntax.

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