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The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

1985; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1985.0014

1938-6133

William Bowman Piper,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village WILLIAM BOWMAN PIPER There are four formal aspects of any musical setting of an English poem: number; stress; duration; and pitch. Since the audible pitch of poetic developments is formalized only in actual songs and, perhaps, chants; and since both number and stress have been traditionally for­ malized in English discursive poetry at least since the Renaissance: the measuring of duration is the one formal concern of anyone who would consider the musical quality of such a discursive poem as Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. I posit a thesis, then, that such a poem is musical to the extent that the durations of its syllables, feet, and lines are or seem to be formally measured. A discursive English poem approximates song, that is to say, to the degree that its ele­ ments are felt to constitute a system of temporal ratios and equiva­ lents. By way of prophesy, I suggest that The Deserted Village can be proven to be the most musical of any extensive heroic-couplet or, indeed, iambic-pentameter poem in our language ("Lycidas" being, in such a survey as I have made,1 its only close rival for this distinc­ tion).2 The unstressed syllables of English poems, broadly speaking, have been traditionally rendered in song settings one-half as long as the stressed syllables—and thus worked into systems of durational ra­ tio—or exactly as long—and thus worked into systems of durational equivalence. In the first of these cases, as Elise Jorgens has recently explained, temporal discrimination was being used in music to rep259 260 / piper resent stress determination in verse; in the second case, musical ac­ cent was adjusted to do so.3 Professor Jorgens has quoted a setting by Campion to exemplify the first of these two musical practices (fig. 1). The measuring of the verse syllables in this song, "I care not for these ladies,"4 is not mechanically exact, of course; but, generally speaking, the unstressed syllables are set to half-notes and the stressed to whole. Professor Jorgens has quoted the following song by Cam­ pion, "Tune thy Music,"5 to illustrate the second kind of musical ad­ justment (fig. 2). Here, as Professor Jorgens has pointed out, both stressed and unstressed syllables are set to half-notes and "stress [is] correlated with musical accent."6 Such musical practices, which Professor Jorgens has recognized in j i » i - -J . J ; I care not for these la - dies that must be Give me kind A - ma - rvl - lis. the wan - t.>n woo d and pray'd; coun - try maid Na - ture Art dis - dain - eth. her XT • XT Figure 1: Thomas Campion, "I care not for these ladies," from The Songs from Rosseter's Book of Airs (1601); The English Lute-Songs, Series 1, Vol. 4/13, ed. Edmund H. Fellowes, rev. Thurston Dart (London, and New York: Stainer and Bell, Ltd., and Galaxy Music Corp, 1969), pp. 6-7. Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 261 f ? | J J ,j . J ! 3 Tune thv Mu - sicke to thv hart Sing thy joy with J. itC' si- 4 T 4 M J- 19nJ £ £■ 19-1- /i. -*•------ o- - & <9—---- 35E thankes. and s<» thv sor - row: Though I)e - vo - lion needes not Art, =8= Al. zn: f • f - f,: bor row Some-time of the poore the rich may nr 3 I w 3=2 ■j »-j j j ii Figure 2: Thomas Campion, "Tune thy Music," from The Works of Thomas Cam­ pion, ed. and with Introduction by Walter R. Davis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1967), p. 67. English songs composed between 1597 and 1651, persisted undimin­ ished up to and through the time of Goldsmith. In this quotation from that remarkable eighteenth-century smash, The Beggar's Opera (1728), for example (fig. 3), the iambic verse is accommodated to mu­ sic in a virtually invariable durational ratio of 1 to 2. In this song from Thomas D'Urfey's popular Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20), again (fig. 4), it is anapests that are durationally adjusted, being set in a ratio of 1 to 1 to 2. There is a powerful tendency in these and, indeed, in all songs to regularize, not only the metrical feet, but the longer spans of poetry as well. In "The first time at the looking glass" above, for instance, each of the four lines we have quoted has been fit into two musical measures. 262 / piper The first time at___ the look - ing glass The moth-er sets her elaugh - ter, The i - mage strikes the smi - ling lass With Figure 3: John Gay, "The sun had loosed his weary teams," from The Beggar's Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Edward Smith (Lincoln: University of Ne­ braska Press, 1969), p. 148. The MOHOCKS. A Sclng. T HERE’s a new set of Rakes, Entitled Mohocks, Who infest Her Majesties Subjects ; He who meets ’em at Night, Must be ready for flight, ()r withstanding he many a Drub gets. Figure 4: Thomas D'Urfey, "The Mohocks," from Pz'ZZs to Purge Melancholy (171920 ); facsimile reproduction of the 1876 reprint of the original edition (New York: Folklore Library Pub., Inc., 1959), 6:336. Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 263 Songs in which verse syllables, as well as feet and lines, have been made equal in duration are just as common as those in which the syllables have been discriminated. In this song from D'Urfey's Pills (fig. 5), every one of the syllables (except those at the ends of lines 2 and 4, by the exaggeration of which the larger elements of the song have been emphasized and regularized) has been given an eighthnote , and the stress system of the verse has been realized, as in Cam­ pion's "Tune thy Music," by musical accent. Similarly, in this beautiful Restoration song by Dryden and Purcell,7 which was also published and thus broadcast by D'Urfey in Pills (fig. 6), the stresses of the dactyllic verse have been set in accordance with musical accent, the sepa­ rate syllables having been made equivalent in duration. Consider, finally, this song from The Beggar's Opera (fig. 7). The syllables of the first and third lines, which are iambic in verse, have been set into a system of durational ratio, 1 to 2; whereas the syllables of the second and fourth lines have been made equivalent in duration, their anapestic system of verse stresses having been accommodated to the musical accent. Such examples, although sixteenth- to eighteenthcentury songs are various in their handling of verse—and Dowland at the turn of the sixteenth century often quite reconstituted the verses he set8—are typical of the songs Goldsmith must have known, and himself often performed, throughout his life.9 A seventeenth- or A New Song, upon the Robin-red-breast s attending Queen Mary’s Hearse in West­ minster Abby. A LL you that lov’d our Queen alive, Now Dead lament Her fate; And take a walk to Westminster, To see Her lie in State. Figure 5: Thomas D'Urfey, "A New Song . . ." from Pills to Purge Melancholy, 3:76. 264 / piper Bright Nymphs of Britain, with Graces attended, Let not your days without Pleasure expire ; Honour’s but empty, and when Youth is ended, All Men will praise you, but none will desire : Let not Youth fly away without Contenting, Age will come time enough, for your Repenting. Let not Youth, &c. Figure 6: John Dryden and Henry Purcell, "How blest are shepherds," from King Arthur (1691); D'Urfey, Pills to Purge Melancholy, 3:290-91. Goldsmith's The Deserted Village I 265 A maid is like the gold - en ore, Which hath guin-eas in-trin-si • cal Figure 7: John Gay, "Of all the simple things we do," from The Beggar's Opera, ed. Roberts and Smith, p. 102. eighteenth-century English songwriter, to generalize, could easily es­ tablish verbal systems of durational ratio or equivalence—or of the two combined, as in "A maid is like the golden ore"—and thus com­ pose larger systems of formally measured duration. In his own way, as I must now argue, Goldsmith has done just this sort of thing, without the benefit of pitch or any musical notation, to the syllables, feet, and lines of The Deserted Village. Sometimes he has composed patterns or, more accurately, suggested optional patterns of durationally equal syllables, sometimes of syllables in a 1 to 2 du­ rational ratio; and with the extensive if incidental introduction of such patterns—of such options—he has infused his poem with this one musical quality, that is, the formalization of duration, thus drawing it into a significant approximation with song. By the use of close-coupled assonance, first off, he has provided many options for quantitative spondees, that is, for feet of two du­ rationally equal syllables.10 He has used many spondaic words: not only such showy proper names as Pambamarca and Altama, but such terms as murmur, mingling, sedges, cumbrous, feebly, maintained, wretched and relieve, each of which, having two adjoining syllables with the same or virtually the same vowel sound, more or less strongly sug­ gests a pair of durational equivalents. By using such words he has composed lines with spondaic options such as these: Unwieldly wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose (66); The mingling notes came softened from below (116); 266 / piper Up yonder hill the village murmur rose (114).11 Every one of these lines presents sounds beyond the coupled asso­ nance that I have mentioned which intensify and extend its effects. In line 116, for example, "notes," which immediately follows "min­ gling," is strongly echoed by the line's last syllable, "-low"; it is im­ mediately followed, moreover, by the obviously long syllable "came," so that the spondaic option focussed in "mingling" reaches virtually throughout the line. The mingling notes came softened from below. In this line, again, Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride (163), there are two spondaic words, the one with a rising the other with a falling stress pattern. The inverted first foot of this line dignifies the first syllable of "relieve," enforcing the optional equivalence in dura­ tion between its syllables; and the alliterating r in "wretched" and "pride" provides a kind of linkage the other way, so that, once again, a possible quantitative measure has been spread across the whole line: Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride. Such closely linked assonance is sometimes extended, as in this line, And still as each repeated pleasure tired (23), in which, first, three like syllables, "each repeat-," are yoked together and, then, immediately afterwards, another pair, "-ted plea-." The first three syllables of this line, moreover—since the second one, "still," has naturally some temporal scope and since the first and third, both of them schwas, chime together—further support the formal mea­ surement of syllabic duration: And still as each repeated pleasure tired. The spondaic effect is rendered both more pervasively and more subtly in The Deserted Village with assonantally paired syllables that occur in different words. The last line above reveals two cases of this; or consider now: Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 267 And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray (180). The effect of the spondaic option offered here by "fools, who" is con­ tinued, if with diffused force, by the remote assonance, "came . . . -mained . . . pray" and by the balancing infinitives, "to scoff ... to pray." The fact that the recurrent "to" chimes with "fools, who" strengthens the spondaic quality of these phrases and of the whole line: And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray. Please notice, I am not denying the persistence of stress and number in Goldsmith's poetic formula; but, rather, arguing for the enrichment of these normal elements of English discursive verse by a third, an incidental but nevertheless widely evident, formal element. It may be worthwhile to notice an oddity about this tendency toward the for­ malization of duration in The Village. Normally the details of verse, the immediate words and rhythms, draw away from the form: this is as true in Virgilian quantitative poetry as in Milton's blank verse com­ positions. But in The Village certain details in words and rhythms, although they no doubt draw away from the normally English formal system of stress and number, creatively draw toward a system of mea­ sured duration, indicating a new form even as they modify the old. In a subtle case of this formal enrichment, The sober herd that lowed to meet their young (118), the assonantal pair, "-ber herd," is strengthened by the obvious assonantal bracket, "so- . . . lowed," and, perhaps, by the balancing spondaic pair, "that lowed . . . their young." The sober herd that lowed to meet their young. In other cases Goldsmith's practices are more evident, more insistent. In this line, for instance, Farewell, and O where'er thy voice be tried (417), the immediately joined pairs, "where'er" and "thy voice," extend in their effect to "tried," which echoes the second of them, and reach back to the naturally long "O" and to the naturally spondaic "Fare­ well": 268 / piper Farewell, and O where'er thy voice be tried. This line thus rivals in apparent musicality such obvious quantitative systems as Tennyson's famous line, On thy cold gray stones, O sea, and Jonson's still more finely measured line, Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears. In this line, again, Silent went next, neglectful of her charms (377), the five successive short e sounds, especially as these are alliteratively reinforced, suggest an equalling of syllables that can hardly be ig­ nored, but Goldsmith's practices are often both impressive and subtle at once. In this line, The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth (279), although a first assonantal pair, "that wraps," is immediately fol­ lowed by a doubled pair, "his limbs in silk-," there is sufficient variety in the consonants to make the movement fluent and easy. The flow of the line is augmented, moreover, by the remote chime, "robe . . . sloth," which brackets the interior spondees, so that one enjoys the measured sweep of the line without being troubled by its machinery: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth. In this line, likewise, Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain (251), the effect of the emphatic opening spondee is diffused by a variety of sound patterns none obtrusive but all contributing to a system of finely delineated spondaic pairs: Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain. There are well over one hundred lines (among the four hundred and thirty that make up The Vz’ZZflge) containing such close-coupled asso­ nance as I have been describing, virtually all of which are strength­ ened as durational measures by bracketing assonance, alliterative def­ Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 269 inition, or some other sound effects. This number of lines, more than a fourth of all those in The Village, might almost by itself prompt a reader, it seems to me, to conceive of a formal measuring of duration throughout the poem. An equally considerable category of incidents, one that suggests primarily durational ratios rather than equivalents, further encour­ ages such a conception. This category, the anapestic option, compre­ hends incidents of two elided syllables, which, as the elision itself strongly suggests, must wedge into a time span equal to that filled by one long syllable, and of one long syllable. Such an incident pre­ sents a ratio of a half to a half to a whole, but it resolves into a verse foot of two equal durational spans and thus harmonizes with the op­ tional spondee, the many cases of which we have already surveyed. More than a hundred lines of The Village—almost as many lines as those offering assonantal spondees—present the reader with this op­ tion, which is dramatized by occurring in every one of the first seven lines of the poem. In line 3, for example, Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid, one faces not only a virtually inescapable anapest, but two cases of close-coupled assonance as well, "-ing spring" and "visit," and the definitive alliteration of "spring" and "paid." "Its," moreover, to touch a further point, is echoed especially by the second syllable of "visit": so that the line reverberates with optional patterns of durational ratio and equivalence: Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid. Consider another clustered system, one that seems to me, for all its effective elements, to work quite subtly: Unfit in these degenerate times of shame (409). The paired "-fit in" and "these de-" are variously disguised: the sec­ ond of them by the rapid progress to the naturally stressed "-gen-" and on to the artificially speeded movement through "-erate times." The bracketing echoes of n and m both extend and diffuse the interior movement and fill out a line which, although significantly musical, also remains safely within the English discursive tradition: Unfit in these degenerate times of shame. I am not at all sure how Goldsmith rationalized his many elisions— or, indeed, that he did so.12 As Professor Friedman's authoritative edition makes clear, the poet clipped very few of his extra syllables 270 / piper with apostrophes. And the interior er (or ur) syllable, which often figures in his elisions, he sometimes preserved in full force: "intoler­ able," "venerable," and "luxuries," for instance, must be reeled out at full length to make lines 348, 178, and 284 (respectively) satisfy the principle of number. And Goldsmith could hardly have insisted on this syllable at these points and simply cancelled it elsewhere. There are, interestingly, several cases—"lingering" (line 4), "whispering" (line 14), and "shivering" (line 326), for instance—in which a strict cancellation of each elided syllable would transform an optinal anapest into the close-coupled assonance wherein I have found an op­ tional spondee. The hard insistence on narrowing such words as "la­ bouring," "wandering" and "ponderous" would surely transform them into optional spondees too. It seems better to me, however, to think of all these cases of elision—as we must think of terms like "loveliest" and "influence"—as strong promptings toward an elided lilt, an anapestic ratio, that is, of a half to a half to a whole and along this track to the resolved equivalence between two shortened syllables and one long. Thus lines like Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn (35), Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey (51), In all my wanderings round this world of care (83), all strike my ear with an anapestic lilt, that is, with a quantitative lilt; and, being usually enriched, like the spondaic options, with sup­ portive sound effects, they emerge as systems of formalized stress and number and duration—all the more apparent since in these cases number and duration are at dynamic odds. The lines in The Deserted Village that reveal either a spondaic or an anapestic option, of which there are over two hundred, are aug­ mented as quantitative or musical events by many others that indi­ vidually present special and diverse sound systems. In this line, Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around (214), the effect of the long a in syllables 2, 4, and 8 is variously enriched and extended: early on by the alliterating z and, perhaps, by the re­ curring schwa in syllables 1 and 3; later by the alliterating r, by the near equivalence of "ranged" and "round" and, more distantly, by the possible echoing of "Amazed" and "around": Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 271 Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around. These effects suggest a primary durational equivalence rather be­ tween feet, or so I hear it, than between syllables within feet. Another such measuring of feet occurs in this line, These far departing seek a kinder shore (73), in which echoing heavy syllables 2 and 4 are interspersed by echoing light syllables 1 and 3—and by the chiming of the light syllables, perhaps, with heavy syllable 6: These far departing seek a kinder shore. A more dramatic emphasis of light syllables, which provides a more apparent equalizing of the quantities of different metrical feet, occurs in this line, He tried each art, reproved each dull delay (169), in which every light foot has the same vowel sound. This effect is disguised by orthographic differences, perhaps, but strengthened by the close similarity of syllables 1, 5, and 9 and the exact repetition of 3 and 7: He tried each art, reproved each dull delay. Such incidental suggestions of durational measure, which variously imply equivalencies between feet, half-lines, and lines, are common, not to say pervasive, throughout The Deserted Village We might now begin to organize and test a full system of quanti­ tative categories and establish a grid or table of varying musical sug­ gestiveness, reaching from the spondaic and anapestic options I have enumerated toward more and more fugitive and peculiar effects. We could distinguish, perhaps with the aid of machines, between the durational implications of spondees stressed on the first syllable ("mingling"; "fools, who") and those stressed on the last ("that wraps"; "-ber herd"); between those coming early in a line ("-lent went"; "Yes! let") and those coming later ("-deared each"; "thy voice"); and cal­ culate the special value of such bunched assonance as "seats be­ neath." I must in fact acknowledge a development in this essay, how­ ever, away from statistically verifiable and hence technically substantial effects toward others more individual and, partly because of this, more 272 / piper impressionistic. This turn toward mere impressions I must pursue a step or two further in order to represent adequately the musical qual­ ity of The Deserted Village. Its many repeated phrases, for one thing, recall more or less strongly the refrains in songs, adjust one's ear accordingly to musical effects, and thus intensify a reader's susceptibility to the quantitative sugges­ tions I have been describing. Surely everyone is struck by such repe­ titions as "How often" (lines 7, 9, 15); "I still had hopes" (lines 85, 89, 95); "Sweet Auburn" (lines 1, 31, 35, 75, 337); and "No more" (lines 241, 243, 244, 245, 247). The poem is, moreover, as songs pre­ vailingly have always been, a tissue of repeated terms, the very re­ petitiveness of which should, once again, infuse the reader with mu­ sical susceptibilities.13 More than two hundred terms occur at least twice each in the poem's four hundred and thirty lines; more than ninety occur at least four times each; more than thirty-five, seven. Many of these repeated terms, moreover, like the diction of the poem in general, seem to have been transported from the world of song. Among them are lovely (repeated 15 times), play (3), murmur (3), sweet (11), pain (5), cheer (3), mirth (3), smile (8), bower (6), swain (5), sport (8), charm (13), bloom (4), toil (5), fond (4), heart (6), train (5), solitary (5), and woe (6). I cannot catalogue or enumerate the entire diction of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English songs, but I feel pretty con­ fident, nevertheless, in describing the diction of The Village as con­ veying the flavor of this musical literature and thus strengthening its own musical quality. The prominence throughout its course of inten­ sifiers like loveliest, last, brightest, best, earliest, of emphatic terms like even, still, often and many a, and of comprehensive terms like all (which occurs thirty-seven times), each, every, and no: all these further enforce the kinship of The Deserted Village to the literature of song. Such interwoven effects, these primarily impressionistic ones and those I have perhaps been able to encumber with statistical dignity, infuse the discursive qualities of The Deserted Village with a distinctive musical quality. NOTES 1 I have examined several likely poems for the effects that will be described herein in The Village: besides "Lycidas," sections of Paradise Lost; "The Traveller"; The Dunciad; Keats's odes; sections of The Seasons and The Pre- Goldsmith's The Deserted Village / 273 lude; "Tithonus"; and "Sunday Morning"—among others. None of these poems revealed the density of durational suggestiveness that I found in The Village; "The Traveller" had barely half its number of quantitative ele­ ments. 2 This essay is in part a response to the review of my book, The Heroic Cou­ plet, by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Journal of English and Germanic Philology 70 (1971): 312-15. In that review Wimsatt complained, quite justly, as I have come to see, about the vagueness with which I explained "the 'lyric' quality" of The Village. 3 Elise Jorgens, The Well-Tun'd Word (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 97, 122, and especially 134-35. 4 Ibid., p. 123. 5 Ibid., p. 96. 6 Ibid., p. 97. 7 This song comes originally from King Arthur (1691); I have printed Dry­ den's second verse, which reveals the metrical quality of the piece some­ what more vividly. 8 See especially "In darkness let me dwell," from A Pilgrimes Solace (1612), which has been extensively discussed by Jorgens, The Well-Tun'd Word, pp. 231-37. 9 Goldsmith's intense and variously creative concern with music and with song is widely attested in both his works and his biography. He himself acknowledged the persistent popularity of The Beggar's Opera, by the way, with some annoyance (see Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works, ed. Ar­ thur Friedman, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966], 2:345-46). 10 I realize that quantity, especially in English verse, has come under some skeptical scrutiny: recently by Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); earlier by G. L. Hen­ drickson, "Elizabethan Quantitative Hexameters," Philological Quarterly 28 (1949): 237-60. Hendrickson argued persuasively that Elizabethan quan­ titative poetry was composed in observance of artificial syllabic lengths and read in observance of natural English accents—a point Attridge has extensively confirmed. I nevertheless use the term quantity in this essay quite simply as the formal observance of syllabic duration. My argument does not, however, depend on this usage. 11 All my quotations of The Deserted Village are from Friedman's authoritative edition in The Collected Works, 4:283-304. 12 On verbal contraction, see Paul Fussell's excellent Theory ofProsody in Eigh­ teenth-Century England, Connecticut College Monograph, no. 5 (New Lon­ don: Connecticut College, 1954); and, perhaps, the rigid pronouncements in the introduction of his anthology, English Augustan Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 13-17. In opposition to the latter, note the consistently sparse use of apostrophes in Friedman's edition; and Fussell's own sense of the complexity and the fluidity of the prosodic situation in the late eighteenth century in his Theory. 274 / piper 13 To consider the expressive effect of the musicality of The Village, one might consult Mark Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Especially interesting in this connection are Booth's sugges­ tions: that song enforces a "degree of identification between singer and audience," a "fusion" between the two, so that a song's words are uttered "somehow in extension by us" (p. 15); and that song constitutes a "con­ structive and healthful. . . regression into infancy" (pp. 202-6). ...