Musical Shifts

In music, there is a definite joy and optimism to pieces written in major keys, and there is despair, gloom and loneliness in music written in minor keys.

Can the same be said of the tonal quality of poetry written with full, traditional rhymes as compared to those penned with slant or partial rhymes?

In her book “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme,” Judy Jo Small reasoned that “partial rhyme is more ambiguous than full rhyme.”  As a result, partial rhymes are more likely to obscure the reader’s “feeling of tonal center,” and this “creates ambiguity of expectation, disrupts a secure sense of acoustic progression, and…arouses suspense and tension.”

She asserts that Dickinson’s own proclivity for the minor mode and her “peculiar sensitivity to such acoustic shifts” is not only evident frequently in her poetry, but it is suggested by this passage in an 1872 letter to Higginson:

“When I saw you last, it was Mighty Summer – Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadow stucco, and ‘Still Waters’ in the Pool where the Frog drinks.

These Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music – shifting when it ease us most.”

The complete letter is HERE. 

A few comments: 

1. For me, the “Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music” called to mind the fourth and fifth lines of “There’s a certain Slant of light” (the “Cathedral tunes” and “Heavenly Hurt”), the poem I included in yesterday's post.
2. Don’t you just love that idea of “these Behaviors of the Year”?  
3. More from Small: This idea of Nature’s “musical shift” from Dickinson’s letter does not provide a “full-fledged rationale for the phonic shifts of her rhymes, but it does indicate at least her intuitive grasp of their affective value.”
4. By the way, this letter opens with a very famous line from Dickinson: “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room” – for anything else! 

Tomorrow I’ll continue this discussion and focus on Dickinson's poem “The earth has many keys.”