To readers who like poetry so much that they also read essays about poets, nothing is so familiar as a passage in which the writer, having quoted a few lines that he admires, goes on to explain by onomatopoeia why they are admirable. “Notice,” he will say, “the alternation of l and r, repeated in the second line, and rhythmically punctuated there by the strong d and k sounds, which convey the conflict between indolence and duty which is the theme of the stanza.”
I do not believe a word of it. Onomatopoeia is a fiction. I discovered its illusory character when many years ago a Japanese friend with whom I often discussed literature told me that to him and some of his English-speaking friends the most beautiful word in our language was cellardoor. It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese. Was it because they find I and r difficult to pronounce and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment? I asked, and learned also that Tatsuo Sakuma, my friend, had never seen an American cellar door, either inside a house or outside—the usual two flaps on a sloping ledge. No doubt that lack of visual familiarity added to the word’s appeal; I concluded that its charmlessness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning. It has the l and r sounds and d and long o dear to the analysts of verse music, but it is prosaic. Compare with it celandine, where the image of the flower at once makes the sound lovely. The magic, color, music of the words said to be onomatopoetic in poetry is due primarily to their meaning.
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