stanza’s description of myriad sounds unheard is followed by the refrain “I hear them not.” The central energy of Carlin’s poem emerges from detailed imaginings of sounds that the “speaker” has never experienced aurally.
Each of the nine nineteenth-century deaf poets I focus on in this chapter wrote a sounds unheard poem in which the “speaker” describes all the sounds that he or she cannot hear. (These poems include Burnet’s “Lines Written after a First Visit to the Passaic Falls, at the Age of Nineteen [Since Corrected],” Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament,” Draper’s “Memories of Sound,” Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy,” Kitto’s “Mary,” Peet’s “Thoughts on Music,” Nack’s “Spring Is Coming,” Searing’s “Ten Years of Silence,” and Simpson’s “Recollections of Hearing.”)80These nine poems are extraordinarily similar in how they catalogue unheard sounds. First, they formally present long, descriptive lists of a variety of sounds. For instance, eight of the nine poems refer to birdsong, seven to music, six to wind, six to the human voice, and five to musical instruments. While mourning the human voice could perhaps be expected because its absence was believed to be so culturally and poetically disadvantageous, the frequent invocations of birdsong or wind are, perhaps, more puzzling. That is, why are each of these poems, by nine different poets—divided by age, gender, nationality, exposure to signed languages, and onset age of deafness—so remarkably similar in which sounds they represent? Second, the language used to describe each sound recurs again and again. Each of the four poets who mention a large body of water, such as the ocean or the sea, characterizes it as “roaring.” Each of the three poets who write of an organ describes its “pealing.” Three of the four poets who refer to a smaller body of water, either a “stream” or a “rill,” refer to its “murmuring.” The adjectives used to describe sound also mirror conventional descriptions of sound as they appear in texts by hearing people. The rain “patters” while the wind “whispers,” “sighs,” or “howls.” Bees are described as “buzzing” or “humming” but never as “crying,” “singing,” “cooing,” “trilling,” or “warbling” like the birds. The fact that Carlin, who would have never heard a stream, understood that streams “murmur” rather than “roar” (lines 1–2) reveals that sound description is available to him outside of his personal sensory experience.
This unique genre of sounds unheard poetry, I argue, reveals another important way that attending to deaf poetry—and its foregrounding of the illusory nature of sound in written poetry—may illuminate our understanding of the genre of poetry. The ability of deaf poets to describe sounds they have never heard underscores the conventionality of poetic language. Carlin, like most other British and North American deaf people, grasped English sound vocabulary through the writing and signing of others, and this vocabulary was meaningful because he comprehended the conventional definitions of these English words. One does not need to have ever heard a bird’s song to describe “the linnet’s dulcet tone” (Carlin, “Mute’s,” line 4), because a familiarity with the linguistic meanings of linnet, dulcet, and tone suffices. Furthermore, Carlin mines a particular poetic tradition of sound depiction by drawing on his extensive reading of canonical English poetry.81Descriptions of sound, for a poet such as Carlin, are accessible through reading, writing, and signing. That is, language mediates both the experience of hearing and the practice of representing that hearing in words. Sounds unheard poems demonstrate that deaf poets who do not have access to a sensory experience of sound do have access to a textual experience of sound.
While it seems obvious that experiences and descriptions of sound are bound by the conventions of language, there is nevertheless a long cultural history of considering hearing more immediate and unmediated than other senses, especially sight. Referencing the theological undertones of this long history that idealizes a “transhistorical” conception of the “interiority” of hearing, sound historian Jonathan Sterne has described an “audio-visual litany” of the supposed differences between hearing and seeing.82This problematic ideology includes beliefs such as, in Sterne’s words, “sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object,” “hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect,” and “hearing involves physical contact with the outside world [while] vision requires distance from it.”83Jacques Derrida has also traced the privileging of the “presence” of speech in Western history and philosophy. According to Derrida, this privileging of the voice—or “phonocentrism”—understands speech as embodied thought.84Both Sterne and Derrida highlight how aural and oral experiences have often been described as more powerful, natural, original, present, and interior than visual experience. Unfortunately, deaf people have been particularly oppressed by this cultural idealization of hearing and speech. In fact, the rhetoric of this “audio-visual litany” buttresses many Victorian incursions into deafness from medical attempts at a cure to pedagogical strategies to literary representations. From the “eh-what?” humor about deaf characters in Victorian fiction to the nineteenth-century campaign against sign language, speech and hearing were often constructed as integral to cultural participation and even to human identity.85
Because these deaf poets operated in a culture that elevated speech and denigrated signed languages, nineteenth-century deaf poetry is an important forum for interrogating the hegemony of hearing and speech. Sterne’s criticism of the construction of “hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority” is useful in challenging a particular model of poetry that constructs the poem as an unmediated transcription of a poet’s sensory experience of the world.86Sounds unheard poetry highlights the fact that describing sound in poetry does not require the ability to hear. Poets—hearing and deaf—often write about sound according to the conventions of poetic language rather than according to their experiences with hearing. The paradox of these sounds unheard poems, then, foregrounds how sensory information is processed through language and constrained by discourse. Furthermore, the deaf poets’ achievement of the seemingly impossible—that is, describing sounds they have never experienced aurally—poses a self-conscious challenge to the importance of the sense of hearing to poetry. While deaf poets do not have access to the sounds of words, they do have access to the words of sound.
Furthermore, the frequent references to birdsong, music, and wind in these sounds unheard poems reveal the influence of canonical poetic tropes: these are all conventional figures of lyric address. Deaf poets are not necessarily referencing the audible sensory experience of birdsong or wind but instead the symbolic resonances of these objects.87The most famous nineteenth-century incarnation of birdsong, of course, is John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which, interestingly, is often prefaced by the assertion that it was directly inspired by Keats’s delight in a real bird’s song.88This biographical fact—and its insistence on the inspirational powers of sound for aesthetic production—is instrumental to the framing of the poem. Most Victorian poets, of course, also use these conventional markers of lyric address. For example, Tennyson replicates this construction of the poet as the fitting interlocutor of birdsong in “The Poet’s Mind,” in which, compared to others’ “dull” ears (line 35), poets have special access to the sounds of nature, including “merry bird chants” (line 22). Indeed, Tennyson is a valuable example of this supposed connection between the poetic and the sensory.89As Campbell notes, “In the Memoir, Hallam Tennyson quotes [Tennyson] as saying, ‘Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind.”’ The pre-literate boy, we are asked to believe, could speak in pentameters.”90Like the story of Keats’s nightingale muse, this anecdote privileges the ear as the source of poetic inspiration. Poets must be more than superior writers; they must also have a special relationship to aural experience. Christina Rossetti borrows both Keats’s nightingale and his focus on mortality in “Song.” Matthew Arnold writes of nightingales in “To Marguerite—Continued” and of wind in “Dover Beach.”91Again and again, lyres and harps, birds and breezes appear in the sonic register of nineteenth-century poetry. By invoking these same markers of lyric poetry without actually being able to hear them, deaf poets illuminate the fact that nineteenth-century poetry—in this case, a particular Romantically influenced lyric poetry—is a discourse that typically relies on previous incarnations of poetry and figurative
