Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
over all the birds at length—
Then I could die!
(207)
The poem repeatedly emphasizes that the “crippled” bird sings as skillfully as the other birds. The real challenge facing Searing’s bird—and all nineteenth-century deaf poets—is not a particular physical disability but rather cultural prejudices about the relationship between disability and poetry. Those who pass by the “crippled” bird admire her singing until they spot her wings and reply:
What have we here? A crippled bird that tries to sing? Such a thing was never heard of before. It is impossible for her to sing correctly under such circumstances and we were certainly mistaken in thinking that there was anything in such songs. Our ears have deceived us. (208)
By emphasizing that the listeners’ “ears” have deceived them, Searing implicates hearing audiences in the mistaken belief that deaf people cannot write poetry. In overvaluing their own ability to hear, this audience underestimates those who do not hear. Searing argues that her poetic ability is intensely scrutinized only after her deafness is discovered, which reveals that ideology rather than evidence informs skepticism about deaf poetry.
Editors who published deaf poetry also consistently underscored its apparent impossibility. When deaf poets published their work for hearing audiences, rather than in deaf-specific publications, they were shackled to the identity of deaf poet—a commodity and curiosity—rather than a poet who was deaf. For instance, when Nack’s “Spring Is Coming,” which repeatedly references the sounds of spring, including “birds . . . chirping” and “insects humming” (line 2), was published in 1845 by the New York Tribune,55the paper attributed the poem to “Mr. Nack who is deaf and dumb since his childhood.” This foregrounding of Nack’s deafness suggests the unfortunate possibility that his deafness was as important as his poetic skill to the publication of his poetry. Even journals devoted to deaf issues, such as the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, highlighted the contrast between the deafness of the poet and the oral resonances of the genre. Carlin’s poem “The Mute’s Lament” was published in the Annals in 1847 with a lengthy editor’s preface about the “special surprise” excited by a poet born deaf.56The editor declared, “We should almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter, as one born deaf to produce poetry of even tolerable merit” (14). After assuring readers that Carlin’s poem had not been edited, he emphasized that while “The Mute’s Lament” did not contain rhyme, Carlin did frequently write in regular rhyme and meter. Carlin’s ability to master the apparently sound-based elements of poetry such as rhythm and rhyme was instrumental to the establishment of his poetic credibility.
Like Carlin, Kitto believed that his authority as a poet depended on his use of the formal poetic features traditionally tied to sound. However, Kitto’s self-assessment of his “bad rhymes” and “halting, hopping, stumping feet” is entirely mistaken. Reviewers of Kitto’s work often commented on his facility with poetry; the reviewer from the Westminster Review, for instance, declares that “it would puzzle any one to discover deficiencies either of sense or [of] rhythm” in Kitto’s verse.57However, this evidence of a deaf man’s poetic ability does not preclude the reviewer from echoing Kitto’s own denigration of deaf poetic ability: “[T]he deaf . . . have no command of language, no ear, and a sad deficiency of ideas and emotions” (186). In his “Poetry of the Deaf” article, Gallaudet disputes Kitto’s disparagement of deaf people’s poetic abilities by using Kitto’s verses as proof; according to Gallaudet, “Kitto’s poetry is better than his reasoning” (91). Kitto skillfully manipulates rhyme and rhythm in his poetry. For example, his poem “Mary,” which describes how both his visual acumen and the communicative potential of his wife’s eyes compensate for his deafness, is roughly iambic. In a stanza describing how deafness complicates social interactions, Kitto mourns the loss of exposure to new ideas:
True, that the human voice divine
Falls not on this cold sense of mine;
And that brisk commercing of thought
Which brings home rich returns, all fraught
With ripe ideas—points of view
Varied, and beautiful, and new,
Is lost, is dead, in this lone state
Where feelings sicken, thoughts stagnate . . .
(lines 66–73)
The stanza deviates most strikingly from its regular rhythm in line 70. This irregular line, punctuated with a dash, describes the “ripe ideas” and “points of view” that the “speaker” misses.58His desire for variety is therefore mirrored in the metrical singularity of that line, which diverges markedly from the pattern of the rest of the stanza.
Whereas Kitto experimented with various forms of poetry, many deaf poets adhered to genres with rigid patterns of rhyme and meter. Draper, for instance, wrote a Petrarchan sonnet titled “Memories of Sound”:59
They are like one who shuts his eyes to dream
Of some bright vista in his fading past;
And suddenly the faces that were lost
In long forgetfulness before him seem—
Th’ uplifted brow, the love-lit eyes whose beam
Could ever o’er his soul a radiance cast,
Numberless charms that long ago have askt
The homage of his fresh young life’s esteem;
For sometimes, from the silence that they bear,
Well up the tones that erst formed half their joys—
A strain of music floats to the dull ear,
Or low, melodious murmur of a voice,
Till all the chords of harmony vibrant are
With consciousness of deeply slumb’ring pow’rs.
When Draper deviates from his patterns of rhythm and rhyme, he playfully highlights the apparent obstacles facing a deaf poet. The two lines that stray from iambic pentameter, lines twelve and thirteen, have eleven syllables and an irregular meter. These two lines are the only lines that explicitly reference “melod[y]” or “harmony,” yet they blatantly resist the harmonious with their metrical irregularity. Draper thereby facetiously underscores the potential inharmoniousness of the deaf poet’s lines. Furthermore, the poem contains one eye rhyme—“bear” and “ear”—that appears when the “speaker” explicitly mentions his “dull ear” (lines 9, 11). It is only fitting that the line that references this deaf ear rhymes “ear” with a word that only looks as though it rhymes. Finally, Draper mobilizes the rigidity of the octave-sestet structure of the sonnet, and the centrality of the sonnet’s turn, to consider the shift between being deaf and being hearing. The octave treats vision exclusively and turns to remembrances of sound only in the sestet. Therefore, this poem, which is explicitly about the “speaker’s” “memories of sound,” is dominated by visual description. Draper uses the formal features of the sonnet to highlight the perceived barriers to deaf poetry. His inharmonious lines about harmony, his eye rhyme that reflects his “dull ear,” and his emphasis on visuality in a poem titled “Memories of Sound” are moments where Draper uses the formal properties of the sonnet to undermine the centrality of sound to his poetry.
Kitto and Draper, whom I use to represent early and later nineteenth-
century deaf poetry respectively, are examples of the larger trend in most nineteenth-century deaf poetry toward fixed patterns of rhythm and rhyme. While the formal innovation taking place throughout the century—from new genres such as the dramatic monologue to experiments with what we would now call “free verse”—was striking, what was most notable about these deaf poets on both sides of the Atlantic is how they generally refrained from this kind of experimentation. Their understanding of the relationship between sound and poetry—as it was expressed formally—adhered to cultural constructions of poetry as a genre dependent on the aurality of spoken words. However, this very obedience to