World Class Poetry Blog

The 7th Appeal Of Poetic Voice (And Notes On The Spiritual)
15 June 2008, the poet @ 7:41 pm

Thanks to Jim Murdoch for asking the question about the ’spiritual’ on my post on the 6 appeals of poetic voice a few days ago. I have a few words to say about that, but first I’d like to mention a 7th appeal of voice to add to the previous 6. I don’t know why this one didn’t occur to me before, but it makes sense given that poetry began as an oral art and many people today believe that poetry is mostly auditory in nature. That is, it should be heard as much as read.

I don’t know that I’d say that every poem is better as a hearing experience than as a reading experience, but I do believe that most poems can be better experienced through both a visual reading and by hearing the poet read it in his or her own voice. I prefer to hear a poet read first then experience the reading of a poem afterward, but it can be just as effective the other way around.

That said, the 7th appeal is auditory. A poem that appeals to its audience in an auditory way is relying upon the sounds of words more than their visual appeal. The poem must be heard to be enjoyed. This type of poem could rely upon musical accompaniment, background noise and effects, or simply be a poem that is read without any kind of accompaniment. But whichever type of poem it may be, it is intended to be experienced as an auditory art primarily.

So What About The Spiritual?
The question could be framed this way, “How does the spiritual fit in with the 7 Appeals of Poetic Voice?” It’s a very good question and thanks to Jim for bringing it up.

Before I move on to answer that question I’d like to review the 7 appeals. Here they are again:

1. Emotive
2. Intellectual
3. Grammatical
4. Orthographic
5. Visual
6. Auditory
7. Anthropological

That is the order that I prefer them in. So how does spirituality fit into all of that?

It’s really simple. Spiritual concerns are important to a large part of humanity. One could be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Wiccan, New Age, Occultic, Pagan, or any variety of these ranging from liberal to mystical or orthodox, or one could fall into one of many thousands of other minor religious categories. The persuasion is unimportant. With regard to poetry, whatever your religious beliefs, they are sure to appear somewhere in your poetry. And they could show up as any of the above appeals or through any combination of them.

An emotive appeal would be when John Donne penned “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” That’s a pretty powerful statement. And there is no logic to it. It’s just a statement of permission based on an emotion that the poet is trying to convey or have his audience feel. It is based, presumably, upon a feeling that he himself has and is trying to communicate through the poem. By contrast, T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” is a passionate appeal to the intellect. Consider the following lines:

                                     And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

The poem is too long to reprint here in full, but I think you’ll get the gist. Eliot is making intellectual appeals with his repeated use of “because” throughout much of the poem. The theme is spiritual, but the appeal itself is intellectual.

Gerard Manley Hopkins can be understood on so many levels. I suppose that is why I am so drawn to his poetry. Even if I didn’t share the same faith I’d look on Hopkins for inspiration. His poetry is rich in so many ways and he makes use of all the appeals quite effectively in any poem he wrote. “The Windhover” is a good poem to use as an example for almost all of the appeals. Here it is in full:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The form is a sonnet, but you can see by the rhyme and the rhythm, Hopkins’ own creation which he called “sprung rhythm”, that he makes appeals on the grammatical, auditory, and visual levels very easily with this poem. The use of alliteration and the hyphens illustrate grammatical and orthographic appeals, respectively. The accented words “sheer” and “plod,” which would normally not appear as accented in normal linguistic usage, give forth an unusual grammatical appeal as well. You can’t read this poem without wondering at the language and imagery he uses matched with the rhythm - how the words just fly off the tongue!

While “The Windhover” makes visual and auditory appeals, it also makes an anthropological appeal by showing the power of God’s beauty as seen from the passive observation of man. The relationship between Christ and his salvific beauty and the man that he saves is the core of the poem and everything else - the language, the imagery, the rhythm, the mix-match of appeals - flows forth from that relationship.

While poets often make spiritual appeals in their poems, those appeals are more often related to theme. The voice of the poem, however, is separate from theme. The voice involves style and tone, language elements, rhythm, word usage, punctuation, and a host of other philological concerns that appeal to the reader’s senses. These concerns are the essence of the Appeals of Poetic Voice.

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