The Poetical Alphabet

A jury of common-sense men might well be excused for a verdict, over their book oaths, that there is no important sense in what follows here; but the same jury, asked if they had ever heard

would probably make some haste in the protestation that they never had. Common-sense men as such are not philosophers, and they are not concerned with the fact that logical truth is held to the arbitrament of language, the production and determination of which are therefore of prime importance in philosophical explanation.

It was on a June morning in 1854 that I entered the publishing house of James Munroe and Company of Boston (and Cambridge) with a manuscript which soon evoked a discussion as to why the word icicle was not a fit name for a tub. That it is not was promptly agreed, but its unfitness grew into so many varieties of discrepancy which no single principle would account for that the seeming levity of the question sank under considerations of philological interest and importance.

Something in the natural sound of the spoken words was the first relevant suggestion; when you set down a tub it responds to that name. The shapes of the two things are also responsive: the tub is short and stubby, while the icicle is spindling and slim.

These points were very well taken—i. e., the differences of sound and form; but numberless other characteristics appeared. The icicle is delicate, it is clear, brilliant, fragile, with at least a suspicion of moisture, while the tub is merely fibrous and dry. All this goes without saying, in a certain æsthetic appreciation, which does not yet generalize the genius which vulgarizes the tub. To illustrate this, consider the use of the words entrails, reins, bowels—all good in scientific and social discourse, but for some unmentionable reason classic culture draws the line at guts!

“Well, what is the trouble with guts?”

I expounded here that they were vulgarized by the absurd genius of u flat. And did a letter have a genius? and would I refer to my manuscript and oblige with the genius of u flat? I responded as follows, to wit:

“U, guttural, or flat, is a humorous savage, best described in his own words: a huge, lubberly, blundering dunderhead, a blubbering numskull and a dunce, ugly, sullen, dull, clumsy, rugged, gullible, glum, dumpish, lugubrious—a stumbler, mumbler, bungler, grumbler, jumbler—a grunter, thumper, tumbler, stunner—a drudge, a trudge; he lugs, tugs, sucks, juggles, and is up to all manner of bulls—a musty, fussy, crusty, disgusting brute, whose head is his mug, his nose is a snub, or a pug, his ears are lugs, his breasts dugs, his bowels guts, his victuals grub, his garments duds, his hat a plug, his child a cub, his dearest diminutive is chub or bub or runt; at his best he is bluff, gruff, blunt; ‘his doublet is of sturdy buff and though not sword, is ‘cudgel proof’; budge he will not, but will drub you with a club, or a slug, nub, stub, butt, or rub you with mud—for he is ever in a muss or a fuss—and should you call him a grudging curmudgeon he gulps up “ugh, fudge, stuff, rubbish, humbug” in high dudgeon; he is a rough, a blood-tub, a bummer, and a “tough cuss” all around; he has some humor, more crudity, but no delicacy; of all nationalities you would take him for a Dutchman.”

It is rather remarkable, in so far as the muscular effort of utterance might be relevant, that the continuous or long u serves for the very opposite effect, as we see it in the true, the pure, the sure, the beautiful, the gude. “True blue” is a proverb of the highest worth.

As for the Dutchman above, it may be recalled that formerly we had a religious association called the Dutch Reformed Church. For a long and struggling time its sturdy independence clung stoutly to the name Dutch, but with assured prosperity came a more amenable style, and the Dutch prefix was omitted from what is now called the Reformed Church.

Yet it was not wholly the u flat in Dutch that disqualified it for devotional suggestion, but the tch was exceptionable: itch, bitch, pitch, all defile; but when the bard of natural history congratulates himself that

we realize a manly poetry which the tea-table would resent.

All the reading of my serious years has been attended by this side consideration: that each of the sounds represented by the several letters of the alphabet is specially effective in conveying a certain significance; and wherever language is popular and happy it is so in accordance with these early intuitions. That I was not singular in this sensitiveness I was assured by hints dropped by Swedenborg and the poet Burns; but I had not as yet chanced upon the “Kratylus” of Plato when I anonymously issued a characterization of the meanings of all the alphabetic sounds. The subject of that essay came up to me again, some years afterward, on the occasion of Mr. Stephen Pearl Andrews’s issuing his theory in the Continental Magazine. Seeing his article therein, I sent him my essay, and received in return his cordial astonishment at the fact that I, an unread tyro, had come by nature or instinct upon mainly the same results which he claimed to have deduced as scientific necessities. He said his next article in the Continental should include the gist of my essay; but, sadly enough, the magazine had come to its final end. In 1868 I made some extracts from my essay for Putnam’s Magazine, and that periodical also soon after went under in the current of literature. In all this time I knew nothing of the “Kratylus,” and I do not know even now whether Mr. Andrews was better informed than myself. These statements are to be considered—and, fortunately, it is the custom of gentlemen to believe one another—otherwise what follows might seem at best only a lesson improved; but when it truly appears that as a youth of inconsiderable reading I in English unknowingly concurred with Plato in Greek, in the interpretation of the sounds of a half dozen of the letters, the fact has philological value as an unprejudiced approval of Plato’s observation. For my own part I can cheerfully forego the originality for the comfort of the coincidence. There is good assurance that Plato did not borrow from my list, in the fact that in any case he left several of the more significant letters behind him; and even those meanings which he did express seem to have only a brawny immediacy which would be useless in the far and fine suggestions of modern poetical art.

The use of words of mere onomatopy—buzz, hiss, wheeze, sneeze, splash, slush, hum, roar, jingle—requires little or no skill; but the meagre and savage art which produced these imitations was precursory and prophetic of a later and more delicate and more complex suggestiveness, reaching beyond mere sounds to the faintest modes and qualities of fibre, surface, lustre, distance, motion, humor, solemnity, contempt—characters won out of all the phenomena of life, and answering to the fullest knowledge, or intuition, or inspiration, of all the mental phenomena of the world at the moment of its use—to the true estimate of the comparative age and æsthetic value of thought and things—in brief, to the universality of experience. The essence we would precipitate rises as an aroma out of the process of the growth and decay of all things, and it is effected by considerations the faintest and most remote, in the attenuations of which a great poet may transcend the apprehension of his less devoted readers.

I give here my alphabet as at first printed, with a few merely abstract sketches taken from my quite elaborate essay—little known and long forgotten. The reader shall judge whether or not it deserved its fate.

MAN’S NATURAL ALPHABET

Diphthongs:

As the compositor locates his types before him in his case for his own convenience rather than as following the conventional order of the alphabet, so we must treat firstly the five vowels, on which all the other letters expend their force.

ā.—“Far, far away, over the calm and mantling wave”—so begins the boy’s first romance—the poetry of the ocean, of vastness, space, plane. The word ocean, is used only for rolling and dashing effects; the wave, the main, vast waters, watery waste, or plain, are the poetical synonyms of ocean. Lake, vale, straight, chase, race, trail, trace, away, give distance and plane. Near at hand, long a gives effect to slate, scale, flake, plate, cake, etc. Waver, shake, quake, show horizontal vibration.

ă.—The flat a shows its effect in mat, pack, strap, slap, platter, flap, pat, flat, clap, etc.; dash, splash, thrash, give flat and lowdown effects. A stone much broken, yet retaining its bulk, is said to be crushed, but if its form is borne down it is mashed, smashed, etc. Burns, in his poem, “The Vowels,” calls a “a grave, broad, solemn wight”; this character belongs to a only as in ah, or o flat.

e.—Swedenborg said that the angels who love most use much the sound of o, while the more intellectual and penetrating use more the sound of e. Burns’s notion of e was that of intense grief, as in “greeting” (that is, in Scotch, weeping). The general use of e is for concentration and convergence, or intensity, the bringing of thought to a focus. All the pet names and endearing diminutives end in e—the wee things—the lee-tle, tee-ny things. The child dwells on the e in pe’-ep, or pe’-ek, and in me’-an, ke’-an, sne’-aking, etc. Not so the baby when he gives you his rattle-box; he opens his mouth and his heart with the instinct of the dative case, and says “tah!”—outward and away. So when he gets the wrong thing in his mouth his mother cries “Ka! spit it out”; whence possibly, the Greek kakos—bad, as applied to things. The introspective Hamlet says, “making night hideous and we fools of nature,” instead of us, the objective case. Zeal, squeal, screech—to be, to see, to feel, are strong by the use of e.

ĭ—I, short, as in pin, has a stiff, prim, thin, slim, spindling effect, as of the “bristling pines”; or when “Swift Camilla” “skims along the main.” It has a thinning, perpendicularly attenuating effect. A “light skiff” is well mentioned; and a “thin whiff.”

O hark, O hear, how thin and clear!

Short i has a very lightening effect in sounds: as in tinkle, clink, link—thin metallic sounds of a perpendicular vibration. But flat, or horizontal vibration uses ă, as in clank—as of a sheet of zinc slapping the floor; how different from the clang of a bar of steel! Tin is a good word for that metal in the thin shape most commonly known; but in the native bulk and volume we call it block.

ī—Long i gives inclination. “The clouds consign their treasures to the field.” “In winter when the dismal rain comes down in slanting lines.” I long and a give a poetical curve, downward and away:

o.—Plato seems to have done miserable injustice in characterizing for simple roundness the vowel o—the noblest Roman, or Greek either, of them all. Roundness is well enough—although roundness proper is represented by ou diphthong—but roundness is merely the key to volume, solemnity, nobility, and wonder. Read this most solemn sentence in all literature, and see at once the more serious meaning of o:

Not all the trappings and the suits of woe can so pall the sunlight in the homes of men as does the fit reading of this sombre verse. Burns’s idea of o was expressed in “the wailing minstrel of despairing woe.” Swedenborg’s insight was rather one of adoration or devotion. But these comparatively incidental expressions give way before the philological art of more modern writers. All things noble, holy, adorable, or sombre, slow, sober, dolorous, mournful, devotional, or old, lone, sole, glorious, or even bold, portly, pompous, find their best expression in the o sound. Jehovah, Jove, Lord God, exalt the soul. O, ho, lo, are exclamations which nations use with little variance.

Most people think of a boulder as a big, bulky stone; the dictionaries use the word for a class of stones of which one need not be greater than a pea. The o gives the volume, and the initial b gives the bulk and brawn—which make a favorite dictionary so popular as the “unaBridged.” Yet in pebble, which is one third made up of b, we get no bulk at all, owing to e and p.

u.—Burns had some notion of the effect of u; he speaks of it as “grim, deformed, with horrors entering”; but obviously this was only a careless glance of that great genius, who probably had never thought of the character before, and who possibly never thought of it again. But we have had enough of u.

Of the diphthongs, au seems to me effective in vault (to leap or swing), flaunt, toss (taus), saunter, jaunt, haughty, walk, halting, and the like. Ou is the curve of roundness, as in bough, bow down, crown, around, mound, bound (tied around). “Down the shouldering billows borne.” Oi strikes me forcibly in coil. Iou is a favorite curve with the poets.

But the vowels are weak and delicate when compared with the consonants, which give to language its fibre and its nerve.

b.—As a special intensity, b represents the disposition to swell out the cheeks and utter an exaggerating and sometimes contemptuous explosion, such as boo! bah! bosh! bully! bravo! etc. B gives volume in a crude and semi-humorous mode. Thus brawny, brusque, blunt, burly, bulky, big, bully, brazen, besides carrying a certain direct and proper meaning, reject all refinement in favor of a humorous brag, burlesque, and exaggeration of the Brobdignagian, “unabridged” order. It is especially strong in connection with u short—a regular “buster,” a “big bug,” bugbear, Bluebeard, and bugaboo—a bombastic, brazen buck and blower.

c.—This letter is only s and k as convertible, and has little individuality; that little is a kind of slipperiness; ch and tch are used for absurdity as bordering on disgust. This in itch, bitch, botch, kutch, scotch (to haggle or wound), smutch, smirch, screech, etc., a class of words avoided by refined society, because their humor is offensive.

d.—Plato used d and t alike for determination or binding at an end. We see the effect of d immediately in wad, sod, clod, load, rugged, leaden, dead. The short report of a heavily loaded pistol is well caught in the word explode.

As initial, or beginning a word, d shows a resolved or violent disposition, as if the teeth were set: thus in damn, dare, do, dig, drive, dogged, etc. The metal lead is well named; so are iron, tin, and silver. What little effect t has, as apart from h, is certainly similar to that of d, as Plato averred.

f, h, t, and th.—These are the ethereal, softening letters, whose fibre is the most fine and attenuated, as of breath without resonance. Thus in smooth, soothe, breathe, feathery, Lethean, muffled, smothered, far, faint, forgetful, Sabbath, suffocate, froth, stuff, muff, whiff, etc.

g, l, and r.—These are the giant consonants, expressive of unquestionable and unequivocal power. There is no humor, chaff, or nonsense about them, and “baby talk” excludes them. Each has a distinct force, which yet is most effective in union with one of the others. G is the hard letter, r is the rough and vibratory letter, and l is the chilling and polishing letter. Thus gr gives the hard roughness to grit, grate, grind, grained, gravel, grim, grudge, growl, groan, grunt, etc., while gl is effective in glass, glary, glide, etc. R by itself is strong in bur, mar, blur, scar, rude, roar, rush, writhe, scour, crisp, fry, fritter, fragment, broken, gnarled, burly, torrent, etc., etc.

“The crisped brooks,” says Milton, and a hundred poets after him.

Foreknowing that s is the wet or moist letter, note how the brackish wash, the grit of the sand in the brine, is rendered in the word gross above. Tennyson, also, has a quick expression of this briny wash, where the sail-boat is said to “cut the shrill salt,” etc. But how dry and deep-carved is the figure following, of a sleeping poet:

L, by itself, makes all clear, lucid, placid, liquid; it is the polish of glow, gleam, glide, glassy, glance, glitter, etc. The l lends the cold, metallic quality to the solidity of lead; it gives lustre and ring to silver, as the r roughens and darkens iron. “Hear the sledges with their bells.” For the little bells we have “the tintinnabulation that so musically swells.”

k.—K must be taken into all account of fine sounds and lights, usually with i and a; thus in twinkle, tinkle, flicker, sparkle, crackle, link, chink, trickle; so in fibrous attenuations: nick, splick (the quarryman’s name for a chip of stone), skin, skiff, skip, skim, skive, sketch.

This of Poe is comparatively cheap work, but the reader must detect in it the same instinct by which the far-seeing Tennyson makes the steeds in “Tithonus”

I cannot, of course, be sure that the general reader is with me at the insight of these fine distinctions, and I beg him to consider that I might well exchange my confidence in his mutual appreciation for a vindictive and scientific criticism, which should prove my positions out of the preferences (some might call them thieveries) of the poets themselves. Take these letters, k and l. Burns sang:

Both Tennyson and Alexander Smith appropriate the skimming swallow. Or take the word clanging, quoted above. It first appears in the “Odyssey,” applied to geese. Mr. Alexander Smith (who gave promise of poetry) grasped the situation as his own. He sings:

Shelley, in “The Revolt of Islam,” is so beset by this notion of clanging that he uses it twice:

In spite of this repetition the Laureate clangs three times more: in “Locksley Hall” he “leads the clanging rookery home”; in “The Princess,” “The leader wild swan in among the stars would clang it”; and again, in the same, “But I, an eagle, clang an eagle to the sphere.” There may seem little apposition of clanging and mere flesh and feathers, according to the genius of the letters as herein assumed; but if one will consider eagle a hard word, for a hard, metallic bird, fit to fight a golden-scaled serpent in the air, then the clanging may come in with high poetical advantage. So midnights “blue and cold,” with a glitter of crystal stars, and the yelling, and jangling, and mingling of geese, may find voice in clanging.

m.—This is the letter of dreamy murmur and monotony; hum, rumble, moan are onomatopoetic. Memory is the poet’s dearest word.

n.—All nations agree in saying no. There is hardly a language in the world in which n is not the chief element of negation. Plato makes n the sign of inwardness (as translated); intensity of withdrawal were better. It is a nasal sound, which is intensified by drawing up the muscles of contempt at the sides of the nose—as when we dwell upon mean, sneaking, n-asty.

p.—This letter shows the character I have given it in such words as plump, lump, pulp, voluptuous, sleep, dump, ripe, lip, purple.

q.—Queer, questionable, quaint, quizzical, quip, quirk, quiddity, quillet, squeak, squeal, squint, squeamish, squelch, qualm, quit, quash, etc. show q as the organ of the whimsical and outré—the very opposite of o.

s.—Moist, misty, nasty, sticky, steam, slop, slip, slush, dash, swash, drizzle, all suggest water in its different stages; even ice is kept wet by the c. Luscious, delicious, nutri(c)ious, suggest juicy substances.

sh, either initial or final, suggests moist confusion; thus, initially we have shiver, shatter, shake, shrivel, shrink, shred; finally, we have dash, clash, lash, thrash, swash, smash, trash, rush, gush, mush, slush, etc.

v.—Perhaps one tenth of the words which begin with v have an element of vehemence: vim, violence, victory, vanquish, velocity, vigor, vice, vengeance, villainy.

W and y also have general emphasis.

z.—This is a dreamy letter, of hazy, mazy, dry confusion; a lazy, drowsy, dozing, furzy, dizzy, vi(z)ionary atmosphere attends it, in which the genius of Thomson delighted.

There was a question as to a certain Turk: Did he wear the fez?

O. Henry answered: “No, he was clean shaved.”

The most indulgent reader will almost necessarily suspect that as a youth with these prepossessions I occasionally dropped into poetry on my own account; and for purely psychological purposes—where any literary pretension would hardly obtain—I quote frankly a specimen of what then seemed to me poetry of the best:

THE PIRATE