Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 549–556, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00618.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOLiterature Compass1741-41131741-4113© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd61810.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00618.xDecember 200800549???556???The VictoriansInvoluntary Metrics and the Physiology of MemoryInvoluntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

Ashley Miller*Indiana University

AbstractThis article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conferenceMetre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introduc-tion by Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whoseaim was to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form acrossthe long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it.The papers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic andVictorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by theUniversity of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.The cluster is made up of the following articles: Jason David Hall, ‘Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster’.Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s “ThereWas a Boy”’.Ross Wilson, ‘Robert Browning’s Compounds’.Margaret A. Loose, ‘The Internationalism of Ernest Jones’s Dialectical Prosody’.Nancy Jiwon Cho, ‘Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn-Writers’Use of Metre, 1760–1900’.Ashley Miller, ‘Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory’.

Summer Star, ‘“For the Inscape’s Sake”: Sounding the Self in the Metres ofGerard Manley Hopkins’.

***

Metre has played a prominent role in the recent turn towards embodiment incriticism of nineteenth-century poetry. The regular rhythms of poetry have aneffect on the reader’s body, both echoing the rhythms of the heart and assistingin the process of memorization. But what happens when metre is missing ordisrupted? This paper examines the relationship between poetry and physiologicalmemory, extending our understanding of poetry’s impact on the body. In theoriesof the physiology of memory and hallucination, poetry becomes irregular butautonomous, subsuming the reader’s body to its own textuality. Similarly, irreg-ular metre (as in Coleridge’s Christabel) promotes a kind of involuntary repetition– which is tied, in these studies, to the materiality of print.

In the nineteenth century – when, as Catherine Robson has demonstrated,‘poetry was experienced in and through the body and when the iamb

550 Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 549–556, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00618.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

connected to the heartbeat’ (160) – metre mattered, to be sure: ‘Whenpeople learn poetry by heart, their relation to measured language – andespecially to regular meter – carried a distinct, corporeal difference fromthat experienced by readers of other, alternatively disciplined ages’ (157).But what happens to the body when metre is missing, or disrupted? If wetake away the physical pulse of poetry, its regular rhythms that would seemto fix it in memory, what kind of mnemonic power does poetry have? Inthis paper, I examine two surprisingly similar theories of poetry as mnemonicpossession: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on metrics (both in theory and inpractice, in his Christabel) and early century scientists on the physiologyof memory and hallucination. In these theories, poetry in memory issurprisingly disruptive, and it drives a kind of compulsive repetition – andinvoluntary recitation – that reveals poetry’s corporeality to extend beyondthe regular heartbeat of metre and into the hallucinatory interaction ofeye, page and memory.

This project began with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria – with a tinypassage in which Coleridge critiques the poetic theory of Wordsworth,his former friend and partner. To be sure, Coleridge spends rather a lotof time critiquing Wordsworth’s poetic theory; in particular, he does notagree with Wordsworth’s theory of language, the ‘language really used bymen’ (392). But near the end of Chapter 20, Coleridge takes a sideswipeat Wordsworth’s theory of memory, or at least his idea of how languagerelates to memory. Wordsworth wants to claim for his poetry the powerof what he famously calls ‘recollect[ion] in tranquillity’, which impliesvolition in the act of remembering (407). But Coleridge disagrees.Instead, he suggests that Wordsworth’s poetry functions within a completelydifferent mnemonic system: that of the isolated mnemonic unit. Coleridgereports that readers of Wordsworth’s poetry have been subject to a kindof strange mnemonic possession in which certain passages ‘started upanew’ in their minds, arising ‘without reference to the poem in whichthey are found’ (2:106). But is this oddly fragmented, oddly autonomousquality a symptom of Wordsworth’s poetry alone? Coleridge suggestsotherwise by linking this problem – the problem of poetry in memory –to a historical shift in media. Before the introduction of printing, hewrites in Biographia, ‘metre . . . possessed an independent value as assistingthe recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truthsor incidents’ (2:67). Print, according to Coleridge, is responsible for shiftingthe mnemonic emphasis of poetry away from rhythmic regularity andtowards the newly detachable unit, which privileges the irregular anddisruptive unit over the consensus of the oral ‘series’. Rather than assistingin the recollection of a larger whole, these passages are recalled involuntarily,replicating themselves within memory – and thus disrupting its supposedlytranquil and recollective processes.

Coleridge’s theorization of the newly disrupted mnemonics of printedpoetry shares its fundamental understanding of physiological memory


Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory 551

with an unlikely partner: late Romantic and early Victorian research intothe physiology of hallucination. For medical doctors and physiologists inthe early nineteenth century, one of the most pressing questions about therelationship among body, mind and memory was the question of visualillusions. A series of well-respected scientists took up the problem, insistingthat such illusions could be explained away by a materialist understandingof vision and memory as physically imprintable. Hallucinations, according tothese theorists, are merely sensory images decontextualized and involuntarilyreplicated: visual memories printed on the retina. Like Coleridge, then,physiologists of hallucination are fundamentally interested in the phenomenonof autonomic memory – and poetry plays an unexpectedly prominent rolein these studies. Every self-respecting physiologist included tale aftertale of hallucinators who compose or recite poetry. Erasmus Darwin, forexample, writes of a young woman who

repeated whole pages from the English poets. In repeating some lines from Mr.Pope’s works, she had forgot one word, and began again, endeavouring torecollect it; when she came to the forgotten word, it was shouted aloud in herear, and this repeatedly, to no purpose; but by many trials she at lengthregained it herself. (162)

This kind of compulsive repetition of poetry occurs again and again inthese studies. But – unexpectedly, perhaps – it is not the metre of thepoetry that prompts these involuntary recollections, but rather somethinginherent in the poem’s textuality.

As Darwin’s example suggests, sound is not the primary medium here,even though we are dealing with recitation: the reciting woman is com-pletely deaf to the people ‘shout[ing] aloud in her ear’. Instead, the ‘pagesfrom the English poets’ maintain a kind of dictatorial primacy – and itis important to note that Darwin’s phrase refers to the anthologies ofEnglish poetry that were so popular in the late eighteenth century; thegirl has memorized a book of poems removed from their original contextand relocated into this new collection. Indeed, these writers repeatedlyinsist that these hallucinated poems are based on written texts – not, asone might assume, on the regularities of sound and rhythm that wereunderstood to be necessary mnemonic devices. We even find a case inwhich a man’s sensory system becomes infected with the image of theprinted page:

he became aware that the pages of all books appeared to him to be dividedinto two colums [sic]. . . . This illusion was at first alone confined to the pagesof his books, but soon everything that he looked at presented a dark indefiniteline dividing it into two halves. (Paterson 79–80)

This contagious illusion reminds me, in a way, of Teresa Brennan’s conceptof ‘entrainment’, which, as Kirstie Blair has recently demonstrated, isremarkably applicable to the relationship between the rhythms of a poem



and responses in the body (Blair 17). But here, it happens without anykind of rhythm – no heartbeat, no metrical beats – and instead, we havea body being entrained to replicate a purely visual stimulus.

So, then, does this visual, hallucinatory mechanics mean that metre hasno role to play in the relationship of print poetry to memory? Perhapsnot: perhaps this has something to do with metre after all, with theaffective power of metre. Where Wordsworth sees metre as a way ofregulating the dangerous passions evoked by poetry, Coleridge sees metreas passion: as he wrote in a letter to William Sotheby in 1802, ‘Metre itselfimplies a passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & isexpected in that of the Reader’ (Selected Letters 107). The metrical contractof ‘passion’ and ‘excitement’ that dictates the reader/poet relationshipsuggests that these odd hallucinations of printed poems are in fact sostriking because they are poetry. And in print poetry, it seems that thecrucial relationship is not one of sympathy between reader and poet butbetween reader and printed poem. Metre, then, retains its contractualengagement with the reader’s physiological sympathy even when it isremoved from its original oral context and translated into a new medium.It is, perhaps, not absent but rather channelled through the medium ofprint – and through the physiological sense of vision. And in Coleridge’sfamous fragment poem Christabel we can see how metre interacts withprint to promote this new kind of involuntary repetition: metre that isirregular, detached and disruptive.

In hallucination theory, involuntary repetition is inspired by the printedpage: Coleridge seems to recognize this process in his Biographia, whenhe accuses Wordsworth’s poetry of operating like a series of detachedmnemonic imprints, lacking the kind of consensus that regulated oralpoetry. To be sure, Christabel would seem to challenge this notion, sinceit – a poem expressly about possession and involuntary repetition – ismost famous perhaps for its pre-print circulation via recitation. But as CelesteLangan has pointed out, Christabel’s striking, possessive power is not reducibleto its orality: instead, it can be read as ‘the sign of writing-as-citation ratherthan of speech’ (148). Both its content and its form seem to allegorize thehallucinatory power of the printed page – its unique ability to self-replicateverbatim, to enforce involuntary repetition. And if we consider the effectsof reading the printed version of the poem alongside its more famoushistory as an oral version, we can see that Coleridge builds into the printedpage a new kind of involuntary repetition, one that draws attention toits metrics as self-replicating and mnemonically disruptive.

During the poem’s long circulation in manuscript form, Christabelprompted both hallucination (Shelley claims to have had a horrible visionof a woman with eyeballs for nipples) and repetition (it spawned dozensof imitations, many of which were partial plagiarisms). The poem was famousfor its ‘striking’ power – and that pointedly physical verb is indeed the verbof choice, over and over again, for people describing their experiences



with Christabel. But the most famous case of this strike is the case ofWalter Scott, who admired in the ‘striking fragment called Christabel’ itsnew, ‘singularly irregular structure of the stanzas’ (qtd. in Russett 86).Scott found Coleridge’s metrical experimentation so compelling that hewas inspired to adopt a disconcertingly similar style for his lengthy (andenormously popular) Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). In a letter of 27October 1805, Dorothy Wordsworth acknowledged that the similaritybetween Christabel and the Lay ‘must strike every one who is acquaintedwith the two poems, and I fear it is to be accounted for by Mr Scottshaving heard Christabel repeated more than once’ (632).

That Dorothy locates the source of the problem in the poem’s repetitionis telling. Indeed, this repetition functions in Dorothy’s account like acontagion, spreading throughout the literati:

Coleridge gave a Copy of Christabel to a Mr Stoddart who used to recite itat Edinburgh . . . and once he did so at W Scott’s house, who being very muchstruck with it desired him to repeat it again, and, as he told us, he himself afterthis could repeat a great deal of it. (633)

But this repetition, which begins for Scott as intentional, soon becomesunintentional as the poem’s possessive mnemonics press Scott into itsservice: Scott’s only fault, according to Dorothy, is that ‘having beenexceedingly delighted with C’s poem he was led by it insensibly into thesame path’ (632). The poem is given the authority here; Scott is merelya passive mouthpiece (or, rather, amanuensis) for its reproduction, led ‘byit’ into a recreation of it.

As Margaret Russett notes, Dorothy’s account casts Scott in the role ofChristabel (85), entranced by the mysterious sorceress Geraldine into anunconscious mimesis, the ‘forced unconscious sympathy’ of Coleridge’spoem (line 597). But William Roberts, writing for the British Review,dismisses the question of who plagiarized whom: ‘With this question weshall not trouble ourselves: where two are afflicted with an epidemic it isof little importance which caught it of it other, so long as we can escapethe contagion’ (239). He is, perhaps, reading the situation more astutelythan he thinks, for the poem did seem to provoke a kind of epidemic ofplagiarism. But Roberts seems to have caught another contagion – thatof incessantly repeating Byron’s famous praise of Christabel, ‘that wild andsingularly original and beautiful poem’, which is quoted verbatim fourtimes within the short review. Coleridge himself had a derogatory phrasefor this kind of phenomenon: ‘the passive page of a book, by having anepigram or doggrel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear ofthe public’ (Biographia 1:60–1). The page, formerly ‘passive’, becomesendowed with a self-reproducing autonomy by its imprint.

If any passage in Christabel itself assumed such autonomous locomotion,it was without a doubt the opening lines of the poem, which very nearly



did attain the kind of ‘ubiquity’ Coleridge claimed to despise. Almostevery negative review (and there were many) saw fit to reprint at least thefirst thirteen stanzas, ridiculing its gothic imagery and its grotesquelymundane details. Most importantly, however, this repeated excerpt seemsto be a rallying cry for those who wished to ridicule Coleridge’s ‘new’metre – for metre, indeed, was the focus of his critics’ disdain. In particular,they were fond of repeating the lines with the most difficult rhythms,challenging their readers to find any semblance of regularity in the oddlymeasured lines. The Academic’s reviewer declares:

it will ever be a secret to all but himself [Coleridge], how the twofollowing lines, for example, may be accentuated so as to have the sameregular metre;

‘Ah, well-a-day!’‘And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity’. (Review 2)

Just as the reviews themselves participated in the replication of theseirregular passages, so too are readers asked to re-repeat them, presumablyout loud, playing with the accents – letting the strike of the metre itself,rather than its syllabic context, dictate the rhythm of each line. But thiskind of repetition, this privileging of accent (strike) over syllabic regularity(context), is exactly what Coleridge intends: the odd, disruptive mechanicsof hallucination and print-based memory.

In his introduction to the poem, Coleridge justifies his metrical exper-imentation, noting that the metre

is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its beingfounded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line theaccents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve,yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. (Complete PoeticalWorks 215)

Coleridge’s (supposedly) ‘new’ principle is metre decontextualized andirregularly recalled; it lacks metrical consensus. What had been the regularstrike of metre, the tranquilizing rhythm of Wordsworth, has become anindependent one. Like the irregular mechanics of hallucination, throughwhich visual images are detached from their original context andreapplied unexpectedly in new ones, Coleridge’s metrical strike is repetitivebut unruly.

And its repetitions are exaggerated when reading from the page. Unlikelearning the poem by ear – a process that, as we have seen, prompted itsown kind of imitation – reading the poem from the page transcendsimitation entirely. Consider Scott, hearing the poem recited and thenrepeating it himself: he would have no question about how to deliver themetrical stresses because Mr Stoddart, the poem’s mouthpiece, would havealready made the decision. Scott would merely imitate Stoddart recitingColeridge. But this oral-aural imitation vanishes when the reader isconfronted only with the printed poem and Coleridge’s injunction to



deliver four beats per multi-syllabic line. Instead of copying the sound, thesilent reader must test each line to see where the requisite four beats mayfall. Take, for example, the much-maligned third line, the unexpectedbrevity of which, indeed, disrupts the galloping anapaests of the first twoeleven-syllable lines:

’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;Tu – whit! —— Tu – whoo!And hark, again! the crowing cock,How drowsily it crew. (ll. 1–5)

Doling out one accent to each of the four syllables in the third line, asColeridge’s ‘new principle’ demands, almost always requires a second passthrough the line. The galloping reader who takes the phrase in iambs willsuddenly find herself at the end of the line, with no text left to accent;only by repeating the line is she likely to give each nonsense-syllable itsequal stress. As Langan notes, ‘It is not via orality, but by rereading’, thatChristabel’s metre becomes pleasurable (146). But I want to argue thatmore than rereading is at work here. Like Darwin’s young woman, whois deaf to the voices of her friends attempting to aid her recitation, thereader of Christabel cannot merely repeat what is heard but must returnrepeatedly to the text in order to transform it into sound.

As Coleridge himself explains, the ‘accents will be found’ to be four –but it may require some experimentation on the part of the reader.Thus the poem’s metrical experimentation – its disruptive irregularity –is self-replicating just as the actual lines of the poem are repeated in theprocess of the experiment. In Coleridge’s metrical theory, as in hallucinationtheory, the reader’s agency is invoked only to replicate the text’s, to find theproper irregularity dictated by the text itself. In this way the text compelsboth decontextualization and repetition, and thus it provokes a morefragmented reading experience – a more fragmented form of compulsiverepetition – than did the contagiously oral version, in which the rhythmof the individual lines would come pre-interpreted for you, ready to bemerely echoed.

In the early-century studies of memory and hallucination I have beenciting here, poetry strikes the body in ways that are perhaps less regular –and less regulating – than are the physiological pulses that come to dominatelater in the century: what Jason Rudy has beautifully termed the ‘rhythmicepistemology’ of mid-Victorian poetry (453). But these late Romanticand early Victorian scientists suggest that poetry’s visual presence on thepage has its own physiological force. In these studies, as in Coleridge’spoetic theory, metre retains its strike – the force of the rhythmic beatdivorced from oral regularity and printed on the page, where it developsa newly disruptive mnemonic power. This strike correlates with the verystrike of print, print both on the page and on the body.



Short Biography

Ashley Miller is a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington,where she is working on a Ph.D. in English and Victorian Studies. Shereceived her undergraduate degree in English from Vassar College. Herdissertation is on poetry and mental physiology in nineteenth-centuryBritain, and she currently works as Managing Editor at the VictorianStudies journal.

Note

* Correspondence address: Department of English, Ballantine Hall 442, 1020 E. KirkwoodAvenue, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 USA. Email: [email protected].

Works Cited

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475–90.——. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 1. Ed. Ernest Hartley Col-

eridge. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912.——. Selected Letters. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.Darwin, Erasmus. Zoönomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1796). 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Thomas

and Andrews, 1803.Langan, Celeste. ‘Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber’. South Atlantic

Quarterly 102.1 (2003): 118–52.Paterson, Robert. ‘On Spectral Illusions’. Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 59 (1843): 77–

102.‘Review of Christabel and other poems, by S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ (1821). The Romantics

Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers. Part A: The Lake Poets. Vol. 1. Ed.Donald R. Reiman. New York, NY: Garland, 1972. 1–2.

Roberts, William. ‘Review of Christabel’ (1816). The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviewsof British Romantic Writers. Part A: The Lake Poets. Vol. 1. Ed. Donald R. Reiman. New York,NY: Garland, 1972. 238–47.

Robson, Catherine. ‘Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History’. PMLA120.1 (2005): 148–62.

Rudy, Jason R. ‘Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology’. Victorian Poetry 42.4 (2004):451–72.

Russett, Margaret. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2006.

Wordsworth, William. ‘Preface [to Lyrical Ballads]’ (1802). Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings.Eds. William Richey and Daniel Robinson. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. 390–411.

—— and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest deSelincourt. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.

Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

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