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Rhyme, Icons of Sound, and Middle English Pearl* Since Socrates's dialogue with Cratylus, thinkers about language have rejected mimetic theories of language meaning that dictate a consistent relationship between sounds and verbal sense. While such ideas have continued to appear in various guises,1 Ferdinand de definitively demonstrated that discursive meaning in language is produced not by phonetic qualities but by an intricate network of phonologic contrasts.2 In consequence, Jacques Derrida observed that meaning is found not in signs themselves but in gaps between signs, and, on basis of Saussure's proof, he defined grammatology, a science of arbitrariness of sign, which Saussure saw without seeing (43).3 But neither nor Derrida is much concerned with an important question posed by their demonstrations: if verbal sense does not reside in, and in fact little regards, fascinating intrinsic qualities of sounds that are so elaborately produced and processed by complex mechanisms of speech and hearing, do these qualities lack determinate semiotic value? Poetry supplies one answer; as has often been stated, it employs sound qualities in ways that ordinary language does not. That should not be taken to mean, however, that in verse sounds themselves directly and systematically serve verbal sense. The continuing assumption that in literature sound always subserves sense, expressed most influentially with regard to rhyme by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and by Jurij Lotman (esp. 36, 120),4 fails to acknowledge noncontingent richness of patterned sound continuum. The of sound in poetry is much more than its imitative support of verbal sense, and it does not lie in a mysterious fusion of sound with meaning in an objective icon. Nor do prosodic patterns simply provide a bass undertone to verbal sense produced by sounds; instead, they organize a separate semiotic system with independent sign value. An obvious objection is that reader or hearer of poetry processes values of a sign at one time; they are conveyed simultaneously, so all must serve under one banner, which in case of language must be verbal sense. But semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce makes clear that, while interpretant, third member of triadic sign that he postulates (sign, object, interpretant), indeed will unify sign values, objective values do not coalesce.5 A corporation logo, for example, can offer verbal identification of a company-in Peirce's terms a symbol-together with an identifying design-an icon.6 The company intends interpretant to translate sign values of name (symbol) and design (icon) into a single agreeable experience uniting artistic image and its associations with company recognition, but two remain objectively distinct. Comparably, experience of a poem will produce an interpretant that joins symbolic sense of words (produced by phonologic contrasts) with iconic pattern of sound (produced by phonetic qualities). An associated objection is that verbal sound alone has no independent value. Wimsatt states that [t]he music of spoken words in itself is meager, so meager in comparison to music of song or instrument, as to be hardly worth discussion. It has become a platitude of criticism to point out that verses composed of meaningless words afford no pleasure of any kind and can scarcely be called rhythmical-let them even be rhymed (165). The argument I present in response to Wimsatt in a recent article is, put briefly, that we may grant that sounds of poetry cannot exist independently of verbal sense without saying that they are wholly in service of that sense. Poems without sound would be about as poor as poems without verbal meaning. As I asserted, the sound patterns of poetry and verbal meaning have a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence and independent semiotic value (Rhyme/Reason 24). …
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