A Question of Syllables

Verse is one of the most highly coded, if not the most coded, kinds of discourse, and it is a kind of coded discourse in which, paradoxically, the codes operate to give the text pure performance value, that is, the poetic text does not reveal its origins in a competence; the poetic text is understandable as the manifestation or realisation of a set of codes and yet is ultimately irreducible, unparaphrasable, and is subject to processes of abstraction only if its parts are separated and considered in isolation. The reasons why the poetic text is, relatively speaking, a surface structure whose deep structure is invisible, a parole without a langue, are that its codes are so manifold that they are non-coincident, and that at any given point in the text one code may have predominance over the others; in other words the codes operate in a complex permutational structure of shifting priority. In regular verse, for example, the following, by no means exhaustive, set of codes is active: lineation (as a code of a certain kind of readerly attention); metricity, which entails numericity; rhythmicity; rhyme; codes of other acoustic patterns; a rhetorical code (code of figures); a grammatical and syntactic code (including peculiarly poetic forms of grammar and syntax e.g. inversion, ellipsis, iteration, special punctuational usage); a dictional code (code of register); a generical code (attitudes and treatment consonant with the poem's being elegy, ode, satire etc.); a formal code, which may relate to the generical but need not (the overall structures of fixed forms such as the sonnet, triolet, haiku, stanzaic structures of non-fixed forms).