Alphabetical (35 page)

    
With swíft, slow, sweet, soúr, adázzle dím.

    
[Ba BOOM ba ba BOOM ba-BOOM BOOM]

With Hopkins' alliteration this became: Wa-SOOM sa sa SOOM, a-DOOM DOOM.

Needless to say, when he sent his first sprung rhythm poem off to be published, they asked him to take the accents out and then didn't publish the poem anyway. Hopkins was a Jesuit and perhaps the editor of a Jesuit journal wasn't the most likely person in the Victorian era to be hip to this sort of thing. Though these rhythms became all-important to Hopkins, he went on rhyming. Sometimes the rhyme-words almost disappear in an unstressed or half-word limbo:

    
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom

    
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding.

To my ears, this sounded like play, jazz, experiment and impro. Miles Davis on the page. Not that I saw it at the time: it's shot through with alphabetical dance. In French, we were taught that some writers spent whole days or weeks looking for ‘le mot juste' – the right word, but the rightness of the word would depend on it being right in meaning for that place and time. Here was another kind of search for the right word, to find the one that chimed with the ones next to it. Again and again. Poem after poem.

The poet laureate of the time, Robert Bridges, didn't know what to make of it and sat on the stuff that Hopkins sent him, until 1918. Hopkins had died of typhoid in Dublin not long before his forty-fifth birthday in 1889.

I spent two years trying to write like Hopkins and although it worked for Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, I wasn't good enough at it. I went back to free verse which is called by its detractors ‘chopped-up prose' or ‘tennis without the net'. Looked at that way, it is poetry at its least alphabetical, rarely drawing attention to its letters in any consistent way, except in the experiments of e. e. cummings, Apollinaire and concrete poetry. It draws on timing, and the length of the line as its ‘foot' or basic unit. It's been around for a long time: ever since people translated the metrical Hebrew verse of the ‘Song of Songs' and the Psalms into non-metrical verse. Greek and Latin were the first languages for that, followed by the various vernaculars, like Old English, gothic and on into the modern era. The Wycliffe Bible of 1382–95 does free verse pretty well – here I've arranged the lines:

    
Lo! my love, thou art fair;

    
lo! thou art fair,

    
thine eyes be the eyes of culvers [doves].

    
Lo! my darling, thou art fair and shapely;

    
our bed is fair as flowers.

    
The beams of our houses be of cedar;

    
our couplings be of cypress.

As the Wycliffe translators show, repetition is the most useful tool in the box for free verse poets. It's ‘free' because you decide what to repeat and when, rather than be bound by the demands of a ‘foot' or of a rhyme. It's in the repetition that the prosody creeps in and the letter-i-ness of letters assert themselves.

In my own writing I've mixed and matched, noting that children love rhythm and rhyme but that sometimes means that they don't hear the words or that the words tell the rhyme but not the truth. Sometimes the youngest ones don't hear these things either.

I do a poem that says:

    
Down behind the dustbin

    
I met a dog called Jim

    
He didn't know me

    
and I didn't know him.

One sharp lad says, ‘How did you know his name was Jim then?' I don't know the answer. I say to very young ones:

    
Down behind the dustbin

    
I met a dog called Felicity.

    
It's a bit dark down here,

    
They cut off my . . .?

‘. . . head,' they say. Well, it would be dark. One of them said:

    
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall

    
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

    
All the king's horses and all the king's men

    
Trod on him.

Which proves that a not-rhyme can do as much as a rhyme. I reply:

    
Roses are red

    
violets are blue

    
most poems rhyme

    
this one doesn't.

THE STORY OF

•
EARLY STAGES OF
‘S' written by the ancient Semites of some 3,600 years ago appear to be a horizontal, curvy ‘W' shape, perhaps signifying an archer's bow. The Phoenicians of 800
BCE
made it angular, looking identical to our ‘W'. At this stage it was the letter known as ‘shin' meaning ‘tooth' with the value of ‘sh'. The early ancient Greeks rotated it to the vertical and called it ‘sigma' and it indicated the ‘s' sound. The Etruscans and early Romans took this and flipped it over so that it resembled an angular ‘S'. The Imperial Roman inscriptions turned it into the thin-thick serif letter we know today.

s

Following the pattern of many other letters, the lower-case ‘s' starts off in the Latin manuscripts of the
AD
500s, is taken up by Charlemagne's scribes for their ‘minuscule' and is adopted by the Italian printers of the late fifteenth century as their lower-case ‘s'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

‘S' is part of the family of ‘F', ‘L', ‘M', ‘N', ‘R' and ‘X' whose names are vowel plus continuous consonant (or, in X's case, continuous in part of its sound). This means that in late Roman and early medieval times it was called ‘essay' and this became contracted to ‘ess', perhaps to distinguish it from ‘zed'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

At the beginning of words, but not combined with other consonants, it can be ‘s' as in ‘simple' or a ‘sh' sound as in ‘sure' and ‘sugar'. We combine it with ‘h' to make ‘sh' and
it can also combine with consonants after it to make ‘Sri Lanka', ‘stew', ‘swing', ‘spin, ‘ski', ‘slow', ‘scowl', ‘Svetlana', ‘snoop', ‘smile', ‘squeal', ‘stroke', ‘spring' and ‘school'; and in various Yiddishisms as ‘shlemiel', ‘shmendrik' and the famous ‘Oedipus, shmoedipus, what's it matter so long as he loves his mother?' In the ‘-sion' suffix it is usually pronounced as a ‘sh' as in ‘pension', though it can be ‘zh' as in ‘explosion' or ‘erasure'.

In various places in words it can be a ‘hard s' sounding like a ‘z sound' as in ‘exercise'.

It's the most common plural in English, with only a few words like ‘oxen', ‘children', ‘women', ‘men' and ‘brethren' showing the Old Germanic plural. It's also the most common way in which we conjugate the third person singular, as in ‘he eats' (‘soft s') or ‘she hums' (‘hard s'). Non-natives find this hard to remember and if you're a spy, it's one of the ways you can spot that someone is unlikely to have been brought up speaking English as a first language. We don't like the ‘s' or ‘z' sound abutting up to another ‘s' so we insert an ‘e' or an ‘e' sound to make it easier for ourselves. So it's ‘cats', ‘dogs', ‘hits' and ‘shops' but ‘misses', ‘mixes' and ‘fizzes'. One kind of plural causes difficulties: ‘potatoes', ‘mangos', ‘tomatoes', ‘tangos', ‘pinkos', ‘lingoes', ‘dingos', ‘hellos' . . .

At the ends of single-syllable words, an ‘s' on its own is usually double: ‘pass', ‘boss', ‘hiss' and ‘mess', but we have the word ‘pus' which is not the same as ‘puss', and the words ‘has', ‘was', ‘yes', ‘bus', ‘is' and ‘as', and, since the popularity of
Les Misérables
, there are people saying ‘Les Mis'. This seems to follow on from some other abbreviated words ending in a ‘hard s' like ‘biz' and ‘showbiz', ‘Pres.', ‘des. res.' and the shortened names Les, Des and Baz.
Shakespeare's close friends called each other ‘coz' for ‘cousin'; we say ‘cos' for ‘because' but the Wizard of Oz is a wonderful ‘wiz'.

The ‘sh' combination gives us an ‘imperative' ‘Sh!' or ‘Shhhhh!' which may come from the verb ‘shush', as in, ‘I shushed them up . . .'

Loan words allow us to borrow German ways of using ‘s' as in ‘kitsch', ‘schadenfreude' and the stunningly spelled ‘Nietzsche'.

In some words the ‘s' is not voiced as in ‘island', ‘aisle' and ‘isle'.

Sound-play with ‘s' gives us words like ‘sizzle', the ‘sssss' of hissing disapproval, ‘sassy', ‘sis' for ‘sister', ‘suss' as an abbreviation for ‘suspect' or ‘suspicion', and a host of words using the ‘s' combinations like ‘shloosh', ‘slosh', ‘smash', ‘splosh', ‘splash', ‘swish' . . . And there's ‘I do like to be beside the seaside' which shares out Bs and Ss.

I look at the now-extinct ‘f'-looking ‘s' in ‘S is for Signs and Sign Systems', below.

S
IS FOR SIGNS AND SIGN SYSTEMS

I
N EVERYDAY CHAT
, the words ‘sign' and ‘symbol' are used interchangeably but academics like to make distinctions between them. The word ‘symbol' is often understood to be a picture or image (actual or literary) with two meanings: it has a literal meaning and at least one other. In the visual sphere, a symbol usually looks like something we recognize – a tree, a lion or some such – and we say that this tree or lion symbolizes ‘life' or ‘strength' and the like.

A sign is slightly different in that, in the visual sphere, more often than not it does not look much like something we recognize – as with an alphabetic letter, or a circle with a line across it on a road-sign – and yet we regard it as standing for or indicating something else. In the case of a letter, it's a sound; the circle with the line across is ‘no parking', or ‘if I park here for a short while, I might not get caught'.

In literature, the cited objects, living things, people and scenes tend to be described as being ‘symbolic' of ideas, historical moments, feelings and the like: the demolishing of Saddam Hussein's statue was symbolic of the downfall of the regime.
The word ‘sign' is used very often to indicate that a word has a set of meanings ‘signified' by that word: ‘cat' signifies a furry four-legged animal and is also used to signify a kind of whip. The sign of a letter indicates sounds.

So, the letter ‘g', say, isn't really symbolic of anything. On the other hand it's a sign which indicates several different sounds in English. The word ‘rabbit' involves putting letters (signs) together to create another sign which we take to indicate a particular animal. However, we can use the idea or image of the rabbit to be symbolic of other ideas, as with ‘a rabbit caught in the headlights'. At this point the word ‘rabbit' is the sign for ‘rabbit', while also being a symbol for being scared.

These two notions are not quite as distinct as I have suggested, though. Our understanding of the word ‘rabbit' (when it's working as a sign) is flavoured by its ‘connotations'. These are all the experiences, references and language we know that are connected with rabbits. For us to be able to communicate with each other, we must have some shared sense of what a rabbit is, whilst having many personal, communal and ethnic variations. Some people rear and eat rabbits, some people don't. Some people have read
Peter Rabbit
, some people haven't. Some people remember the countryside full of rabbits dying of myxomatosis, some people don't. Some people may see the word ‘rabbit' as being similar to ‘habit', while others see it as similar to ‘rabbi'.

Those who study signs and symbols often talk of them having ‘systems'. Chess pieces may or may not be symbolic of kings, queens and knights – I'll leave that to your imagination – but they are surely signs for different capabilities or functions in a game. The game itself works because of how we agree that these different signs should be interpreted and function as an ensemble. Some argue that if letters are signs, the way they operate in
different languages is in sign systems. These can be deduced by observing how we get them to behave.