Lyric Listening

Abstract

This essay examines representations of quiet in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to ask broader questions about the ways Romantic Lyric can register and express volume and sound dynamics. It offers historical contexts for understanding the poem including the development of musical and rhetorical notation for volume as well as accounts of shifting reading practices in the period. It demonstrates how “Frost at Midnight” offers a rich nexus for thinking about the experience and the representation of volume, and of silence, in Romantic Lyric. The poem invites further thinking about the semiotics of sound and silence through a playful interplay between eye and ear. Coleridge was fascinated by visual codes for sound and the ways in which patterns of sound can be seen as well as heard, and his poems are full of accounts of different kinds of sound, which complicate the distinction between silent and vocalised reading. Coleridge provides an especially interesting case study not only because he was writing on what has been described as the cusp between reading aloud and silent reading, and during an era of scientific discovery and innovation in the realm of acoustics, but also because he was deeply interested in musical forms and in the science and semiotics of acoustics. The essay demonstrates how shifts in volume can be expressed and experienced in a poem’s own acoustic, rhythmic, and verbal textures and suggests that the representation of sound and quiet in “Frost at Midnight” challenges and extends what is understood by ‘silent’ reading. More broadly, it proposes that volume, a term which acquired its current acoustic sense in the Romantic period, is a significant figure in Lyric studies which has gone unacknowledged. It proposes that volume was not only important to Romantic poets such as Coleridge, who, as this essay shows, found subtle ways of modulating and expressing shifts in volume in his poetry, but also that, more broadly, volume should be understood as part of a critical discourse about genre. The essay explores the ways in which volume is figured and expressed in Coleridge’s writing, and especially in “Frost at Midnight,” and considers the critical language we might use to describe volume and dynamics in poetry more generally. Arguing that Coleridge’s lyric poetry has its own playful modes and codes for communicating degrees of sound, the essay proposes that volume is a neglected but significant figure in Lyric studies.