PROSODIC PAUSE IN A FREE VERSE POEM READ ALOUD

Abstract

In free verse poetry, lines fulfill the function of rhythmic units. Line length, arrangement of lines on a page, the number of lines in a stanza, presence/ absence of punctuation marks depend on the author’s view on their semantic load. When a free verse poem is read aloud, its interpretation is revealed, among other features, through prosodic pauses, markers of boundaries between expressions which a reader believes to be relevant semantic units. This study discusses the results of a student-involved research project on the role of pauses in oral representations of “The long hall”, a free verse poem by contemporary Irish-Canadian author Stevie Howell. Four 4th year BA students of the English Philology Department at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University performed as readers; two 1st year MA students of the same department carried out auditory analysis. The first recordings had been made before the poem was interpreted from the perspective of Text World Theory through building mental representations, text-worlds, which rely on the poem’s language and the participants’ general knowledge of the world. Having performed a text-world analysis of the poem, the readers recorded it again. The auditory analysis shows that building the poem’s text-worlds changes the angle of the discourse perception. In their first readings, the students typically focus on delimiting major syntactic constituents; pauses are mainly used as boundary markers between clauses and sentences. The second recordings show that the readers’ attention shifts to the semantic aspect of the poem: pauses (their places, types, and length) tend to correlate with the way the lines are arranged on the page, which can be regarded as deviation from grammatical norms; however, it creates a specific rhythm, highlights the semantic load of each line, and contributes to the emotional charge of the poem.