Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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 dark abyss of mind—
Alone, left in the dark—I hear them not.
(lines 10–24)
Each 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