Through verdant meadows and responding woodlands,
Vocal with merry tones—I hear them not.
(lines 1–9)
The “speaker” contrasts his cell-like muteness—where he is at once among, yet excluded from, the sound-filled world around him—with all the voices he cannot hear, including streamlets “vocal with merry tones” (lines 7–9), the melodies of birds (lines 10–14), the “deep pause of maiden’s pensive song” (line 17), the “orator’s exciting strains” (line 21), and the “balmy words of God’s own messenger” (line 27).
Both Fischer’s and Carlin’s “speakers” mourn the loss of speech that they experience as deaf people. However, this theme of bemoaning the personal failure of speech also appears repeatedly in canonical Victorian poetry. Victorian poets are frequently self-conscious about the possibilities and limits of using poetry as a medium to address the change, alienation, and struggles with subjectivity that sometimes leave the “speaker” without words. In “Break, Break, Break,” for instance, Tennyson’s “speaker” emphasizes his inability to speak by contrasting his grief-filled silence with the sounds of the world around him.73In what Campbell calls a “longing, lyric cadence,”74the “speaker” compares his muteness to the singing sailor lad and the shouting fisherman’s boy, declaring, “I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me” (lines 3–4). In mourning “the sound of a voice that is still” (line 12), Tennyson’s “speaker” loses his own voice. By using words on the page to despair of his inability to speak in the world, Tennyson’s “speaker” mobilizes a paradox similar to that of the deaf poets. In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” we encounter what Armstrong has called “the splutter of speech” in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues.75From his deathbed, the Bishop calls out to his “Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well—” (line 3). This poem is littered with ellipses and dashes that signal the Bishop’s struggles to articulate his last wishes for guaranteeing his posterity. Browning’s poem is only one example, of course, of how the entire genre of the dramatic monologue itself dramatizes the complicated interactions of speech and silence on the printed page. The very genre hinges on the disparities between what the “speaker” says about himself and what the paraverbal elements of the poem reveal in the “speaker’s” silences. This duplicity, then, is a symptom of the imagined fiction of Victorian poetry—that it is a form with a special connection to orality—when a written poem is, in fact, a silent text like any other.76The “speakers” of all these poems, whether deaf or hearing, connect a lack of speech with mourning, personal disconnection, and alienation from the world around them.
Deaf poets capitalize on this wider aesthetic theme of poetic muteness to point to the limits of understanding written poetry as a genre of speech. While the “speakers” in speaking mute poems bemoan their inability to speak audibly, they paradoxically claim a written “voice” for themselves through their poems. The titles of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” and Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” self-consciously appropriate orality and thereby play with the doubleness of the written poem that imagines an inherent vocality. The titular declaration of soliloquizing or lamenting claims a “voice” for those who would not otherwise use one. By definition, a mute person cannot speak, except by becoming the “speaker” of a genre of writing that calls itself speech.
The “speaker” of a written poem is able to access a voice because of a definition of poetry that invests it with an imagined orality. In fact, almost every nineteenth-century deaf poet explicitly invokes the “voice” of the poet. Pseudonymous contributors to the poetry columns in deaf periodicals consistently styled themselves along the lines of “Singing-Mute” with this contradiction of poetic orality in mind.77Searing’s poem celebrating John Keats has the refrain “O rare, sweet singer!” and Burnet’s mute “speaker” in “Passaic Falls” describes himself as “singing” “lays” as part of the tradition of the “bard” (lines 65–68).78In fact, in “Passaic Falls,” Burnet makes the paradox of written deaf poetry explicit: “ears to the deaf thou art, speech to the dumb” (line 49). Burnet imagines the pen and the page as material prosthetics that substitute for the deaf poet’s physiological difference.
However, while these deaf poets invest their written poetry with “orality,” they just as clearly highlight the absurdity of this orality’s origin in a mute “speaker.” The orality of their poetry is always juxtaposed with the muteness that inheres not only in their “speakers” but also in their personal experience. Through creating this paradox of the speaking mute, Carlin, Fischer, and other deaf poets foreground the problematic construction of written poetry as a genre of orality. In describing canonical Victorian poets, Armstrong has argued that “poets resort to songs and speech, as if to foreground the act of reading a secondary text, for the song is not sung but read, and the speech is not spoken but written.”79If this is true for canonical Victorian poets, then it is even more suggestive for deaf poets invested in challenging the hegemony of the audible voice in poetry. By emphasizing the silence of their lamenting, soliloquizing, and speaking, these deaf poets implicitly argue that written poetry can thrive outside of hearing and speaking. Poetry was generally produced, disseminated, and received through the written word in the nineteenth century. And for deaf people, at least, the oral and the aural were both audibly absent and legibly present in this written text. Deaf poets deployed the tension of the speaking mute figure to create a space for their absurd poetry in a genre that seemed to preclude deaf poetic achievement. However, these deaf poets also dramatized more forcefully the larger issue that all Victorian poets wrestled with: how far the “voice” inhered in their written words. That is, the sensory difference of deaf poets permits a moment of critical clarity because these poets are at once unique and yet akin to poets who are not deaf. By acknowledging the absurdities that may creep into conversations around sound in deaf poetry, we may recognize some critical oversights that have previously been obscured in approaches to the wider genre of Victorian poetry.
A second theme that appears frequently in nineteenth-century deaf poetry also relies on the space between sound and text as a locus for aesthetic power. These poets collectively constructed a group of poems that I call “sounds unheard” poetry. The five poems by Kitto, Draper, Fischer, Carlin, and Burnet that I have already discussed are examples of sounds unheard poems. For example, the “speaker” of Kitto’s “Mary” describes various sounds that he is unable to hear, including “the organ’s rolling peal” (line 31), “leaves rustl[ing] in the breeze” (line 45) and “the human voice divine” (line 67). Similarly, the “speaker” of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” mourns all of the sounds that he has never heard:
The linnet’s dulcet tone; the robin’s strain;
The whipporwil’s; the lightsome mock-bird’s cry,
When merrily from branch to branch they skip,
Flap their blithe wings, and o’er the tranquil air
Diffuse their melodies—I hear them not.
The touches-lyric of the lute divine,
Obedience to the rise, the cadence soft,
And the deep pause of maiden’s pensive song,
While swells her heart with love’s elated life,
Draw forth its mellow tones—I hear them not.
Deep silence over all, and all seems lifeless;
The orator’s exciting strains the crowd
Enraptur’d hear, while meteor-like his wit
Illuminates the
