CC BY
30PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOLOGY
THE EXPRESSION OF SOME POETIC TERMS IN MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARIES
Saidova M. U.
Senior English Language Teacher, Bukhara State University
Abstract. The significance of poetic terms and information about the numerous methods of arranging words in poetry were investigated.
Keywords: Alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia, rhyme and rhythm.
Poets are limited in the materials they can use in creating their works. All they have are words to express their ideas, emotions and feelings. These words need to be precisely right on several levels at once: they must sound right to the listener even as they delight their ears; they must have a meaning which might have been unanticipated, but seems to be the perfectly right one; they must be arranged in a relationship and placed on the page in ways that are at once easy to follow and assist the reader in understanding.
The English language contains a wide range of words from which to choose for almost every thought, and there are also numerous plans or methods of arrangement of these words, called poetic devices, which can assist the writer in developing cogent expressions pleasing to his readers. Even though most poetry today is read silently, it must still carry with it the feeling of being spoken aloud, and the reader should practice "hearing" it in order to catch all of the artfulness with which the poet has created his work. Below we would like to look through some poetic terms of the sound of words in dictionaries of literary terms in order to have a better understanding of them, it is interesting to look at their definition and examples:
Alliteration: A figure of speech in which consonants, especially at the beginning of words, or stressed syllables are repeated. It is a very old device indeed in English verse and is common in verse generally. It is used occasionally in prose. In OE poetry alliteration was a continual and essential part of the metrical scheme and until the late Middle Ages was often used thus. However, alliterative verse becomes increasingly rare after the end of the 15 th century alliteration like assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia - tends to be more reserved for the achievement of the special effect: Five miles meandering with a mazy motion. Alliteration is mostly common in nonsense verse, tongue-twisters and jingles[23;2]
Assonance: Sometimes called 'vocalic rhyme', it consists of the repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together, to achieve a particular effect of euphony. There is a kind of drowsy sonority in the following lines from Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters which is assonantal:
The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: The Lotos blows by every winding creek: All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone, Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown [58;2].
Consonance: The close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels. For example: slip-slop; creak-croak; black-block [176;2].
Cacophony: The opposite of euphony. Harsh sounds are sometimes used deliberately by writers, especially poets, to achieve a particular effect. A well-known example occurs in Tennyson's Morte D 'Arthur:
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels -And on a sudden, lo! The level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon [103;2].
Euphony: The term denotes pleasing, mellifluous sounds, usually produced by long vowels rather than consonants; though liquid consonants can be euphonious. The almost voluptuously drowsy vowel sounds in the following lines from Keats's Hyperion soothe the ear:
As when upon a tranced summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,... [292;2].
Onomatopoeia: The formation and use of words to imitate sounds. For example: dong, crackle, moo, pop, whizz, whoosh, zoom. It is a figure of speech in which the sound reflects the sense. It is very common in verse and fairly common in prose and is found in many literatures at all times. As a rule it is deliberately used to achieve a special effect, as in these lines from Eliot's Dry Salvages:
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters (And those who saw them off have left the platform) Their faces relax from grief into relief, To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
The whole passage is subtly onomatopoeic, the rhythm of the second line is a beautifully skilful evocation of the clickety-click of wheels on rails [614;2].
Repetition: An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. Hoarding by Rogar McGough contains some ordinary repetitive elements:
all too busy boarding
thirty year old numbskull with a change of dirty coats every single day gets porridge but never gets his oats
all too busy boarding the xmas merry-go-round
old lady sits by the firegrate knitting a pudding with twine dreams of brandy sauce drinks methylated wine
all too busy boarding the xmas merry-go-round hoarding, hoarding, hoarding[742;2].
Rhyme: The formalized consonance of syllables, rhyme probably originated in prehistoric ritual, but only in the last millennium has it come to dominate verse architecture. Most classical verse blank (unrhymed), and old English verse uses assonance and alliteration; but the Humanist dissemination of Italian stanza-forms prescribing rhyme established rhyme as, for many people, a defining feature of both verse and poetry. In the 20th century prescribed rhyme-scheme have often been disavowed, but rhyme has remained a feature of much elite poetry, and continues to dominate popular verse [750;2].
Rhythm: In verse or prose, the movement or sense of movement communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables and by the duration of the syllables. In verse the rhythm depends on the metrical pattern. In verse the rhythm is regular: in prose it may or may not be regular [753;2].
While investigating poetic devices which express sound of words, we have faced some other interesting terms in the Dictionary of literary terms and literary theory as: melopoeia, phanopoeia,
28
№ 5(9), Vol.4, May 2016
WORLD SCIENCE
logopoeia, internal rhyme, cross rhyme, vowel rhyme, eye-rhyme and half-rhyme that we haven't met in other literatures. Below we can distinguish them and the examples given to each of them:
Melopoeia: (Gk 'song making') The musical element in Classical Greek tragedy. Clearly, from its form, it is related to onomatopoeia, but refers more to the tune and music of the verses, rather than to the specific sounds for certain effects [504;2].
Phanopoeia: (Gk 'making something visible') A figurative or verbal device by which the writer conveys the image of the object to the visual imagination. Ezra Pound discusses this in ABC of Reading (1934). In these lines from Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings the rhythm and stress sequences skilfully suggest the physical motion of the train and produce visual image:
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; [662;2]
Logopoeia: (Gk 'making of words') A poem both means and is. In ABC of Reading(1934) Ezra Pound discusses language as a means of communication and finds three ways in which language can be charged with meaning: (a) by throwing the object, be it fixed or moving, on to the visual imagination; this is phanopoeia; (b) by inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of speech; this is melopoeia; (c) by inducing both of this effects, thus stimulating the intellectual or emotional associations which have remained in the receiver's consciousness in relation to the actual words or groups of words employed; this is logopoeia [477;2].
As we have seen above that there are different poetic terms of expressing sounds of words in poetry. These words need to be precisely right and must sound right to the listener even as they delight their ears. As we have seen above that Dictionary of literary terms and literary theory by J. A. Cuddon gives detailed information about terms that we could not find in other literatures.
REFERENCES
1. Baldick Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary terms. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
2. Cuddon J.A. Dictionary of Literary terms and literary theory. - Fourth edition published in Penguin Books, 1999.
