Do You Hear What I Hear?

M y focus in this essay is tone: a word that I have long loathed and occasionally banned from my seminar room. I can hear tone in conversation, mostly. I can modulate my own tone (when required). My primary experience of tone in poetry, however, has been the experience of someone who cannot hear what everyone else can hear.Which is to say, I can hear them hearing tone, but I secretly suspect that they are all engaged in a formof self-congratulatory cahoots. I. A. Richards confirms: “subtleties of tone are rarely appreciated without some special training. The gift reaches its heights perhaps only in certain favourable social settings.” The literary-historical costs of my inadequacies around tone have been, thus far: irony, satire, Romanticism. But then I read John Heywood’s poem “A quiet neighbour.” Originally published in a 1550 volume entitled The firste hundred of Epigrammes, “A quiet neighbour” departs from its ninety-nine companions, all of whichmight be better interpreted under the rubric of “wit” rather than “tone.”Between the fart jokes, squabbling husbands and wives (across species), and anatomical comparisons, the best of Heywood’s epigrams pick up a linguistic gambit and exhaust its resources, as with “Of the letter H,” which you hope never to find on any body part (“ache”) or as with the poem “Biyung of showes,” in praise of the shoemaker who is able to alter the reality of fit by way of words like “stretche” and “shrinke.” In his opening “To the reader,”Heywood offers a veritable humanist catalog of the lexical choices that will follow—“Some woordes, shewe one sence, a nother to disclose, / Some woordes. them selues sondrie senses signifie: / Some woordes, somewhat from common sence, I