Ah!

Abstract

Ah is a peculiar word—or, rather, a peculiar nonword word. It is an exhalation, a flow of air that seems to vibrate slightly in the back of the throat. It is imitative of a sigh or maybe a soft gasp. It is nonreferential, not entirely unlike an onomatopoeia. Although, oddly, onomatopoeic words are not the same in all languages (in Norwegian, vrinsk is the sound that a horse makes, and voff the sound that a dog makes), forms of ah exist in many other languages: Anglo-Norman, Old French, Middle French, Latin, Old Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. But unlike other onomatopoeic words (unlike, for example, quack, the sound in English that a duck makes), ah is the sound that, in a lyric poem, the narrator or speaker makes. What interests me about the word is the way that it has been used in some Renaissance lyric poems to mark the narrator’s sudden encounter with the external world and, in so doing, to interrupt an internalized and seemingly sealed-off discourse. While one might assume that such an encounter would threaten the apparent autonomy of themind’s internal world, this encounter may actually undergird the mind’s autonomy—or at least its claim to autonomy. To start to make sense of that rather abstract assertion, consider the following example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34 (where the ah appears in the final couplet):