Anaphoric Mnemonics

English 205
31 March  2010

Anaphoric Mnemonics:
When Words and Sound Become Muscle Memory

    If we were to travel, like Joseph Conrad's famous protagonist, Marlow, up the waterway of human tradition—what Richard Dawkins has called "the river out of Eden" (qtd. in Drout 269)—we would find that all poetry, all stories, originated with the sounds uttered by humans that would formulate basic speech patterns; the first words.  This repetition of sound becomes the basis for pattern-recognition and furthermore, that pattern-recognition becomes the the underlying foundation for anaphora and repeated metrical devices in poetry and storytelling.  Somewhere up that dark river of tradition we find the earliest human narratives were handed down, word-to-ear to be retold again and again through different peoples, different generations.  The earliest stories were repeated patterns told orally.

    When Walt Whitman begins one of his better known poems with the line, "I sing the Body electric" he invokes one of the earliest-known epic poems to have made the leap from oral to written tradition: Homer's The Odyssey ("Sing to me of the man, O Muse" (Homer)).  Whitman is well aware of his place along the river of tradition and displays in the majority of his work, as displayed by his intricate use of cadence; of meter.  As Michael D. C. Drout observes, "One of the major features of any traditional poetic style is meter, however construed (whether by stress, quantity, syllable count, and other tradition-dependent criteria). Meter serves as an important feature of poetic, traditional language" (286-287).  Even though Whitman does not use intentional rhyme scheme, his meter is precise and carefully composed to reflect the traditional referentiality where his work resides.  Drout goes on to say that "if the meter is a marked feature of the poetry, then it is likely to be imitated, and in fact this is exactly what we see across oral traditions: meter is [...] one of the tests of traditionally of poetry" (287).  If Whitman is our Marlow, then he has most certainly found Kurtz's outpost along our river of linguistic tradition.

    Perhaps more so than meter, the use of repetition is integral to oral storytelling.  Repetition certainly aids as a mnemonic, as well as to serve the purpose of iteration.  This can be seen in works from The Iliad's seemingly endless "Catalogue of Ships" (which serves to familiarize the audience with the participants of the conflict) to the Torah's genealogical lists of who begat whom (which acquaints the audience with the ancestral traditions of the protagonists), to the religious refrain that begins each Sura of the Qur'an.  This sort of repetition shows the importance of the information given.  According to Drout, "important elements are more likely to be able to be re-transmitted and thus spread to other individuals. Thus this cultural poetics helps to explain how information gets put into and accessed from what Maurice Halbwachs in 1950 called the 'collective memory'" (283).  A most effective way to illustrate this is in the use of anaphora—a device Whitman excelled at and used often.

    John Miles Foley points out that anaphora can extend "beyond the poetic line into formula, scene, and theme."  Given this observation, we can easily find examples in Whitman's work of anaphoric themes (e.g. death, nature, the body).  But in using anaphora strictly in the verbal sense, it may just as easily be understood as to why it originated in the oral tradition: such repetition reduces the demands on cognitive ability to memorize a poem or story.  Since, according to both Drout and Foley—and indirectly by the research of Dawkins—such examples can be found in most every language and culture, we could look back at Dawkins' citation of the river flowing out of Eden to consider his hypothesis that such repetitions are a result of natural process, and part of the make up of human genetics.  With this in mind, Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth's statement that Whitman verse is a "poetry of the body" could be considered critically and metaphorically, as well as scientifically.  "Traditional metrical forms," Amitai Avi-Ram states at the beginning of his notable essay, "The Body and the Simulacrum," "work by invoking in the reader a clear sense of rhythm, might more properly be called 'poetry of the body.'"  He continues, extending this concept to "ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and jingles [which] all seem to invite in the reader a sympathetic response to their rhythms in a way that can be and often is directly reflected in movements and feelings in the body" (93-94)  It is Avi-Ram's conclusion that Whitman's verses:

can be understood not as a simple liberation of the body but as a shifting of the body from a realm of direct experience available through palpable and audible musical rhythms in poetry toward an imaginary item which has only a problematic relation to the body itself, a being whose existence can only be inferred by thought. (94)

    This being of thought is akin to the idea of the poetic body's muscle memory; in hearing the anaphoric repetition and the cadence of the verse, the body responds to and remembers that rhythm.  It is that memory that is exercised when repeating or re-reading that poem at a later time.

    The connection between anaphora, cadence, rhythm, and the oral and written traditions of poetic storytelling is intricate and tight.  As these examples have shown, the tradition is as deep and vast as a river that flows from some mythic Eden in our collective distant past to right where we are sitting now.

Works Cited

Avi-Ram, Amitai. "Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the Simulacrum." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. 93-113. Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1992. NetLibrary. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Drout, Michael D. C. "A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory." Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006): 269-294. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press. 1996. Print.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1989. Google Books. 23 Mar. 2010.

John Miles Foley. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1988. Web. 27 Mar. 2010.



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