Sound-Symbolism of Close Vowels in the Sonnets of Garcilaso

ELS IN THE SONNETS OF GARCILASO q THOMAS MONTGOMERY ' The harmony of sound and sense which is essential to most poetry is usually studied and appreciated as the individual, personal achievement of the poet. His medium, the language in which he composes, is taken as a given entity, from which he selects and orders to produce the linguistic sub-form known as his oeuvre. But his creation must ultimately derive from the everyday language of his society. Even if it is highly artificial, even if in a lately-acquired language, it is conditioned by his childhood experience with a mother-tongue which gave him his first awareness of the communicative power and the acoustic resonances of speech. His art does not emerge from a void, or independently from his consciousness; the fact that poetry can be written implies poetic qualities in language itself. Those qualities are difficult to isolate and define. Any effort to do so involves mechanical operations which are not easily reconciled with the subtleties of language. Superficially interpreted, they can appear to disprove the very harmonies they set out to discover. Yet it is general knowledge that each language has its own poetic potential,' and the fact is quickly confirmed by any attempt to translate poetry. Existing sound-patterns provide a wealth of possibilities, and are also inescapable. English, for instance, offers a wide variety of consonantal groups which cause variations in syllabic length. They have been put to many uses; consider the cadences of Paradise Lost, Latinate though syllabic duration was often independent of consonants in Latin. Such an effect is not available to the Spanish poet, but the very simplicity of Spanish vocalic and consonantal structures leads to echoes, repetitions, and contrasts of sounds, allowing a great diversity of acoustic effects. The poet cannot fail to use them

Acoustics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Physics · Poetry · Sonnet · Sound symbolism · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Mythological Studies · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Philosophy