There are no closed vowels in those words, and the word ’resonant’ is precisely resonant in vowel-melody and harmony. It is the open vowels that count melodically in this stanza:—
_But in the yule, O Yanna,_ Up from the round dim sea _And reeling dungeons of the fog,_ I am come back to thee!
What a superb singing line is the first, and what booming sonorities are in the eloquently descriptive third line, ‘the reeling dungeons of the fog.’ Repeat it orally (for with Carman poetry is an _oral_ art) and all the melody will be found in the vowels. And what bright vowel-melody resides in the single words of this line:—
For an example of just the kind of vowel-melody, dulcet and delicate, which is of the lutanist or harpist order, all in the words _per se_, not in the lines as lines, consider this stanza:—
A golden flute in the cedars, A silver pipe in the swales, And the slow large life of the forest Wells back and prevails.
This is the music or melody which Pan must have piped and with which he hushed to peace the wild-creatures of the ancient forests—it is silvery, pastoral reed music, and in verbal reed melody Carman is a modern Pan.
Carman can make beautiful line-melody, line-harmony when he wishes to do so; and he is a master of alliteration, quite the peer of Tennyson or Swinburne. For instance, these alliterative lines:—
The gold languorous lilies of the glade. • • • • Burying, brimming, the building billows. • • • • Silent with frost and floored with snow. • • • • And softer than sleep her hands first sweep • • • • And down the sluices of the dawn. • • • • And like green clouds in opal calms. • • • • Behind her banners burns the crimson sun. • • • • While down the soft blue-shadowed aisles of snow Night, like a sacristan with silent step, Passes to light the tapers of the stars.
Carman is as adept as Kipling in employing, for the sake of verbal music and variety of rhythm, such devices as shifting of accent, slurring, and elision, and, further, he invents beautiful measures, as, for instance, the dimeter of _Ilicet_, or the six-line stanza of _The White Gull_ (Shelley):—
O captain of the rebel host, Lead forth and far! Thy toiling troopers of the night Press on the unavailing fight; The sombre field is not yet lost, With thee for star.