Keith Douglas's .sx Phonetic Rhetoric and Phonetic Lyricism :sx a study of three poems .sx David I. Masson .sx Keith Douglas , 1920-44 , who fought in the tank warfare with the Eighth Army in the North African desert , was killed by a shell in Normandy .sx Bernard Spencer records that Douglas considered himself as in the tradition of Wilfred Owen .sx But his subject was not the pity of war ; rather , the precise nature of the war experience in all its horror and mystery .sx And indeed , many of his poems even after enlistment have quite other subjects .sx As a student in Oxford , Douglas insisted , in a printed symposium on poetry , that " every word must work for its keep " .sx As late as September 1941 he was writing a 'Song' in which a musical refrain strikes an old-fashioned romantic note .sx But by October 1942 the impacts of desert warfare had eroded his lyricism and replaced it by a sharper , harsher kind of poetry .sx He wrote on 10 August 1943 to fellow poet J. C. Hall , who had strongly criticized his new style :sx " My rhythms , which you find enervated , are carefully chosen to enable the poems to be read as significant speech :sx I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present .sx When I do , I shall be so again , and glad to .sx I suppose I reflect the cynicism and the careful absence of expectation ( it is not quite the same as apathy ) with which I view the world .sx ... I never tried to write about war .sx .. [with one exception] , until I had experienced it .sx Now I will write of it , and perhaps one day cynic and lyric will meet and make me a balanced style .sx Certainly you will never see the long metrical similes and galleries of images again .sx " Particular obsessions , however , reveal themselves throughout his all too brief poetical life in certain symbolic words which have been noted in William Scammell's excellent study of 1988 ; and some of Douglas's phonetic patterns may be considered to reflect these thematic obsessions , though in a manner governed by each individual context .sx For Douglas uses both half-rhymes in the structure of his poems ( to be discussed fully below ) , and rich sound-patterning which illuminates his imagery , his vision , and the rhetoric of the poem .sx This sensuous bonding is of course much diluted in his harsher pieces , but it is present in strength in some of his most intense war poems and returns fully again where his personal emotions are most openly shown .sx Douglas found half-rhymes and free phonetic patterning in Wilfred Owen , but handled both differently in a style that is triumphantly his own .sx Ted Hughes , in comparing Douglas and Owen , contrasted the " masculine movement " and " musical structures " of Douglas with Owen's " feminine " timbre , but did not adduce sounds or phonetic patterns .sx My studies of sound-patterning in poetry were made in many articles of 1951-76 .sx The reader is referred particularly to five .sx The difficulties of investigation and presentation in this field are the steering of a course between the Scylla of pedantic over-analysis and the Charybdis of subjectively emotional response ; between a smothering detail and a windy vagueness .sx Fundamentally , a poem is a repeatable utterance for which the written or printed text is merely an instruction ( as a musical score is an instruction for performance) .sx Notwithstanding their complex mental , practical and emotional associations , words are not mere semantic entities .sx They were never meant to be soundlessly logged from the printed page of poetry , at least .sx They are sensuous collocations , articulated , felt in the mouth , uttered , sensed through the ear , and should be embraced in all these sensory associations .sx In our modern conditioning by print , we tend to forget this ( and more recently words have been used in poems without thought for these values ) , but the silent reader can still sense articulation and sound , as a trained reader can pick up from a sheet of music the melody and harmony and in some cases the actual instrumentation .sx Unless the reader is of a minority psychological type devoid of utterance imagery , he must be ultimately capable of response to the poem as utterance .sx Moreover , when word echoes word or syllable syllable , or a sequence of speech sounds is repeated or even varied , such echoings have a synergistic effect .sx They create a sensuous entity which comments on the sense .sx Not only can this embellish , rubricate , become implicated in a given passage or statement .sx If poet and reader be capable ( as in most cases ) of visual imagery , a use of sound-patterns may reflect for both persons the scene as well as the argument , the sense as well as the feeling .sx In many cases the words involved in a particular image or argument are linked together by a particular set of phonetic elements .sx Douglas , with his scorn of the critics , would doubtless have been intolerant of the sort of investigation upon which I am embarked .sx Notwithstanding this , I believe that what I uncover in such work is an often overlooked part of the inner substance of poetry , of the sources of its authority and appeal in so far as these depend on utterance :sx poetry's roots in infantile babbling and primitive chant , and its relation to the poet's personality .sx One may first distinguish broad categories of structural , melodic , and programmatic sound-effects , besides the type of sound-organization that confers generalized authority , authenticity , upon the statements and images that it accompanies , and the more phrase-bound support of syntax and semantic collocations .sx These last two I shall dub 'authenticating' and 'statement-supporting' effects .sx The programmatic effects of sound in poetry are like those in music , in that they do not depend on rigid one-to-one correspondence ; they are suggestive .sx In every musical or poetic context there is only a particular range of possible relevances .sx Any ambiguities in a passage of music within a particular range are supposed to be dispelled by the musical context and totality of the opus , the composer's notes , if any , and the title .sx In poetry , such ambiguities are severely curtailed by the words themselves and their implications .sx No , this is not a mere circular argument :sx it is a statement of facts about relations .sx It is not true that one may find anything one fancies in a given manifestation of sounds or articulations ; theories of Ur -language ( for example ) , such as the gestural and the bow-wow , however unproven they were in themselves , were founded upon natural imitative tendencies , often unconscious , in infants and adults .sx Like the fingers , the tongue and the mouth ape the occurrences of an outside world .sx The principles by which they do so have to be the basis of one's interpretation , anyone's interpretation , of sounds , articulations , and their patterns , in poetry .sx A paragraph below defines such programme effects .sx Douglas was not a merely musical poet , a composer of sounds ; even in a few 'Songs' he has a good grip on meaning ; nor was he an emotional poet in any simple sense :sx he was a poet to whom sounds or articulations came naturally as tools for the propositions that he was trying to construct .sx His work involves both authenticating and statement-supporting sound-patterns , while his truly programmatic effects are subtle , much more so than , for example , those of Wilfred Owen .sx While we may feel some of his various effects , we need to dissect them and to work out how and where they connect with his meanings , and we may also try to guess which were conscious and which not .sx We shall find them to be far richer , more intricate , and more apposite , in certain poems , than can be appreciated in a single reading or hearing , or even in many .sx My three whole-poem examples show to what a pitch of excellence he could attain in this art , and one must wonder how he might have dominated the poetic scene if he had survived .sx In my principal encyclopedia article I distinguished the following types of effect , which often merge and overlap :sx Structural Emphasis , Underpinning ( more subtle ) , and conversely Counterpoising :sx these structural devices do sometimes appear in Douglas ( notably in my first whole-poem example ) ; Rubricating Emphasis ( of words or images ) , Tagging/Labelling ( precise punctuation of syntax or thought by placing of sounds ) , Correlation ( indirect support of argument by related echoes ) , Implication ( more involved interconnexion of sound , meaning , and feeling ) , and Diagramming ( the abstract pattern symbolizes the sense) :sx all these may be found in Douglas , even diagramming , and it is in rubrication , correlation and implication that authenticating effects frequently reside , while labelling and diagramming may be separated off as statement-supporting ; Sound-Representation :sx used by Owen but virtually never by Douglas ( I do not count 'BANG' , etc. ) ; Illustrative Mime ( mouth movements recall motion and shape ) , and Illustrative Painting ( articulations , sounds , or their patterns , correspond to appearances or non-acoustic sensations , in a variety of synaesthesia) :sx these two occur in Douglas ; Passionate Emphasis :sx not in Douglas ; Mood Evocation ( tone colours resemble vocalizations natural to the emotions) :sx hardly perceptible in Douglas ; Expressive Mime ( mouth movements ape the expression of emotion ) , and Expressive Painting ( sounds , articulations , or their arrangement , correspond to feelings or impressions) :sx both can be found in subtle forms in Douglas , but are not prominent ; Ebullience ( pure exuberance in sound ) , Embellishment ( superficially musical ) , and Incantation ( profoundly musical or magical) :sx Douglas got rid of embellishment , shows no ebullience , and incantation is alien to him ( I do not count repeated song-refrains ) , except in one place , in 'Simplify me when I'm dead' ( May 1941 ?sx ) , the lines " when hairless I came howling in | as the moon came in the cold sky " .sx Douglas's type of occasional magic , less awe-inspiring , more transfixing , is that of a conjurer ; his statements suddenly produce a marvel or a paradox , usually a totally comfortless one , which his phonemes in their man oe-ligature uvres help in one way or another to bring about .sx Correlation and implication , frequent in Douglas , often confer authority upon a given statement or image .sx Douglas , who had read Auden as well as Owen , developed during his short poetic life a habit of employing half-rhymes or , as Scammell ( like others ) sometimes calls them , pararhymes , and in forms which are even more free than those of these two poets , in fact now and then barely perceptible , as for instance 'scenery' :sx 'tracery' in 'Landscape with Figures 2' , 'laughter' :sx 'whisper' in 'Gallantry' , or 'cont e nt' :sx 'equipment' in 'Vergissmeinnicht' .sx His metrical schemes are often , and increasingly , irregular , with intervening short lines and long syllable-crowded lines .sx This was partly his response to the pressures of war , as he makes clear to J. C. Hall in the letter of 10 August 1943 .sx Some of the scansion does jar ; not , however , as badly as in the earlier poem ( still in England ) , 'Simplify me when I'm dead' , at the 'type and intelligence' sesquipedalian line 11 ; though it is hard to know how Douglas could possibly have civilized this prosy obstinate misfit of a line .sx The richness of his free phonetic patterning compensates for those irregularities , though this richness does not exceed that attained by many writers of all ages and languages who were more conventional as craftsmen .sx Such bonding through articulation and sounds is free indeed of the bone-structure of a poem , but offsets his irregular structures by internal-external rhyming or consonances , as well as by its attachment to the sense , feeling or implications of the words , and the way in which it more broadly enhances the authority and power of the poetry .sx How far these phonetic bonds were consciously worked out is doubtful :sx the accomplished poet should probably , and in most cases seems to , work subconsciously from a feeling of rightness in his final choice of words , though undoubtedly some of the more plangent and rhetorical sound-echoes will be fully recognized and acknowledged by the poetic craftsman ( and his readers) .sx Poetry can be considered from the point of view of its density , tension , or concentration ; and these , in various aspects such as reasoning , imagery , or utterance of sound .sx Dilute , relaxed , or rarified poetry exists , but there is little of that in Douglas , except a certain relaxation in a few 'Songs' including perhaps 'Sanctuary' ( 1940 ) ; but even in such pieces the imagery tends to be fairly densely packed , while their phonetic linkages are quite marked even where they are relatively simple .sx