MICROSTRUCTURE OF GREEK

Microstructure

When reading Sappho, we should try to readjust our expectations of how to proceed in reading an ancient poem. We want to pronounce the syllables of a line of her verse with a clear idea of the Durations of the vowels, from short to long to overlong. At the same time we will want to raise the pitch or our voice musically, remembering that poetry for Sappho is SONG, following specifically the Acute and the Circumflex signals posted on our printed text.

Beyond that we will want to read the sounds aloud with a sense of musical enjoyment, reading slowly and carefully as if from a large sheet of papyrus handwritten with the basic letters of the old style Greek alphabet. We are reading to imbibe the spirit of a poetic mind, something which must bedone in a suitably receptive mood or the words will merely be marks on a printed page.

If we find the authentic sounds of Greek verse strange and unfamiliar as here outlined, we must consider the damage we have done to the esthetic of Greek poetry by our clumsy and inauthentic stressing of the delicate articulation of the vowel sounds. Reading Greek as we have been learning it in our schools and colleges might be compared to looking at the paintings of Leonardo in two by three inch black and white textbook illustrations. The identity of the painting is clear, but the whole of the artistry and color are not only gone. They would be completely un-imaginable.

The vowels and consonants have special acoustic properties of their own. The vowels are musical continuants which quite literally "sing" the lines on musical pitches at various tones, while the nasal-liquid sounds ( -l- -m- -n- -r- ) are continuous drones with a great deal of acoustic persistence. The Stop-Consonants are closures at the front of the mouth which snap-off the above sonant-sounds, short and decisive but with much perceptibility since human speech involves the speaker's lips and hearer's eyes at the same time. The "air-sounds" of English are quite different from Greek, first because Aeolic Greek had no initial aspiration whatever, one of its most characteristic marks, and second because the Greek phi was certainly no more than a lightly aspirated pi, nothing like our heavy and breathy dental-aspirated -f-. On the other hand Greek chi was a medium aspirated guttural, hardly transscribable by the usual -ch-. The Greek zeta which we often compare to a Roman Z was in Aeolic pronounced not as -z- + -d-, but the other way around, so a rose is by no means still a rose.

There are other things about ancient Greek pronunciations which we do not know, much that we probably can never know. But various alternations and oppositions of the above mentioned sounds stand as a coherent and readable part of every Greek poem, and it is on the differences and the degrees of difference of the sounds in their configurations that the base level of Greek poetry rests. A little study of basic phonetics of English, even at the elementary level, will go a great way toward the understanding of how the sounds of Sappho's verse work.

In the following pages much attention will be given to a study of the Microstructure of the poetry. This term can best be defined as a way of perceiving and elucidating Meaning as the communicative semantic segment of the writing, while at the same time grasping as Form the configuration of the sounds as sounds, the arrangement of words as constructive elements in the building of verse lines and larger esthetic blocks of form. When this approach becomes familiar it is done at reading speed without hesitation, but initially it is a slow process as this study will show.

Since this is not a familiar method of approach to poetry, I want to mention a few studies which may make thing more clear. A good introduction to this may be found in the essay On Form and Meaning , and more on the use of phonetic analysis in another study The Poet and the Spectrograph. For a good example of analysis on a wide variety of language samples, I would like to refer you to Prof. Calvert Watkins' book "How to Kill a Dragon" Oxford l995, which demonstrates especially in the early chapters how micro- analysis is used to combine linguistic acuity with poetic sensibilities. More of this kind of Form Analysis is bound to appear in the coming years, but it will take time for it to become established in the mainstream of academic criticism, especially in the conservative Classics, and collegetaught English where Meaning with its hairsplits, its allusions and literary references, and its semi-literary engagement with the history of it times, seems likely to reign supreme for the while.

Literary studies which deal exclusively with Meaning in its many subcategories, seem unaware of the Form only as a semi-significant "carrier" of the ideas. This study is devoted to bringing together Form and Meaning as the two significant planes of poetry, in the belief that lacking the one or the other, we lose the whole purpose of the writing of Poetry.

If the Meaning of a poem is the set of messages sent as communicative items from text to reader, then Form is the total configuration of all the discrete lements of the poem as significant artifacts in their own right. The elemental chunks are the sounds out of which words are constructed, the arrangement of the sounds in words as they constitute patterns in phrases, and the shape of the verse-lines both independently and also in relation to what
went before and what goes after. In other words the total tally of everything that occurs within the segment of poetry which we are examining is to be seen as Form, atop which Meaning can be understood as perched. Without the substructure of Form there can be no relaying of Meaning because there is nothing for it to rest on, there is no physical substance for something as transcendental as Meaning to adhere to.

This might be compared to a coin, on which there is impressed a face on the one side and a other information on the obverse. The "meaning" of the coin may be "quarter U.S." and this is all most of us think of when taking it out of a pocket and slipping it into a telephone booth slot.

But there is much more to the coin. The low relief face design is specially contrived to catch light in a realistic way, the detailed work which went into this little piece of relief sculpture is quite astonishing, and the decorative detailing is equally well done. Notice the way the edge is impressed with hundreds of little ridges, originally a way to ensure that silver was not being filed off the coin to sell separately.

Or look at a U.S. dollar bill with its simple message "One Dollar", as against the infinite detailing on front and read, the pyramid with an eye on top, the great seal, the micro-detailing around the edges. All this is the Form of the piece, the part which we can overlook or forget so easily, the part which actually surprises us when we are asked to describe everything that is visible there. The Meaning? Just $1.

Only by paying careful attention to the form of Sappho's poetry that can we get the full thrust of her art, which never lets the denoted informational meanings get separated from the actual form of the words and the phrasing. For a Greek poet Form and Meaning are indissolubly bonded together, because poetry is a performed and acoustic art in which meaning evolves only as the sung-poem is performed aloud. The form is always there first,
whereas in our print-culture where we have learned to scan a workaday text quickly for meaning, we generally pay scant attention to the carrier elements of sound and shape. Sappho's poems, read for meaning without form, leave a thin palette of a few notions, but with the Form in close view we savor the sounds as a interlocking mode of communication with the artist poet.

The approach of this study involves this "Microstructure" of form, pursuing via this path the interpretation of Sappho's few precious poems. If the discussion and commentary seem long in relation to the few lines which they describe, that that is because of our culture's insensitivity to sound and the interweaving of acoustic threads into the fabric of poetry. Taught as we are in our college courses to examine divisions and sub-divisions of meaning with infinite care and subtlety, we are novices in the appreciation of finely wrought sound. The Greek would have thrown up his hands in despair at the crudeness of our approach, probably thinking to himself "superficial Barbarians" who cannot hear the sounds and intonations of the Muses, mere clerks untasted of the founts of Hippocrene.