ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
and the pairing of rhymes seems to suggest a type of ‘bond’ or pairing between the
speaker and addressee. These patterns are interrupted in the syncopation of those lines
that keep their meter while being more difficult to read aloud (lines 5-6, 13-14, 16, 1920, 24-25, 38). This tension between a regular meter and the consonantal/alliterative
disruption (in rime and onsetxxiv) creates a level of meaning in the poem which should
grate on the ear of a careful listener. “Onsets and rimes not only define the possible
sounds of a language; they are the pieces of word-sound that get manipulated in poetry and word games” (Pinker, 1994: 170). This disruption and interference on the level
of the message and the rhythmic patterns in contrast to the other more regular stanzas
that convey the more loving and considerate message are compelling in their sound
effects. Auden uses the line and form against the poem’s ‘meaning’ to establish two
levels of rhythmic address in the poem, as a mother might have two levels of address
while singing an infant back to sleep: the spoken voice and the rhythms of the song
sung. Compression of the sound features in Auden’s poem make voicing/reading
aloud (and in the head) subtly difficult. Just as the lullabies play on rhythmic repetition to pre-linguistic infants, so too do poems, like Auden’s, because “features, not
phonemes, are the atoms of linguistic sound stored and manipulated in the brain”
(Pinker, 1994: 175). Poetry necessarily plays with the onset/rime rules in language to
create rhetorical, intellectual or emotional effects, deviating from the conventional
‘spoken’ laws of a language. Auden’s play of metric tension against the onset/rime
pattern in the poem to create another level of meaning has its ground in the human
brain’s delight and sensitivity to rhythm and pattern.
That such sensitivity to rhythm and sound as a form of ‘appreciation’ has been shown
in birds and non-human animals, and that these rhythms can be utilized over a 4000
year time span in vastly different languages, and that the same techniques can be seen
in more complex versions in a modern poem, all point toward the neural capacity or
appreciation of an evolved brain in continuum, and not merely in linguistic relativity
to the meaning of the words of the texts themselves. What one should see if artificial
selection (say, via language) were overpowering natural selection (a case which would
have to be made by social constructivists to sustain a linguistically-oriented nurtureover-nature line of reasoning) is a much wider variation in devices like alliterative and
consonantal form. If language had the titanic shaping power claimed by