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Cornwall, for P.J. Kislingbury, was the ‘swish’ of water singing ‘in echoing song’. My relations lived near Bude, but it was Lionel Johnson’s poem, ‘Cadgwith’, that ignited my family’s love for The Lizard Peninsula. My poem, ‘Echo from the West’, alludes to my childhood visits to Cadgwith. I have encountered at least three types of poem that relate to the echo phenomenon. The first, echo verse, refers to a form marked by an epistrophe in which a word, line or phrase is repeated for a purpose. The second concerns poetry that mentions an echo or an echo personified. The third kind of echo poem, invented by Aurélien Dauguet in 1972, falls outside the scope of this piece.

‘Echo from the West’ reads across the page, with an echo of the last word at the end of each line. These repeated words combine to form a poem-within-a-poem when they are read vertically. This second poem is a summary or diminishing echo of my main text.

Aristophanes included echo verse in his Greek comedy, Thesmophoriazusae. The Roman poet, Ovid, alluded to Echo in his Metamorphoses. She was a mountain nymph who faded away when Narcissus spurned her love, until only her voice remained.

Much later, the echo device was incorporated as a playful motif in French Renaissance Literature. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the echo often became the answer to a question, as in this English example from ‘Heaven’ by George Herbert (1593-1633):

Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
                                                                    ECHO. Light.

Shakespeare referred to the nymph as ‘the babbling gossip of the air’ in Twelfth Night. His poem, ‘Venus and Adonis’, resonates with ‘Ann Vavasour’s Echo’, attributed to his contemporary, Edward de Vere. William Browne, the poet from the ‘Tavy’s voiceful stream’, produced elegies, anagram poems and echo verse. He spent time at Wilton House, and dedicated a volume of Britannia ‘s Pastorals (1616) to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. Contemporary visitors to Wilton enjoy the muted echoes of the Whispering Seat.

Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957), the Roman Catholic theologian, penned a masterful echo poem, ‘The Visitors’ Book, Hartland Quay’. It begins:

CORYDON.        What, Echo, shall I find at Hartland Quay,
                          Save walls abandoned long ago, and sea?
ECHO.                                                           Go, and see.

Knox incorporated a pun in ancient Greek, linking his own initials to the name, Echo, as in the Doric script of the poet, Pindar.

Mention should be made of Peter Redgrove, who developed his triadic ‘stepped verses’. His poem, ‘Sleepers’ Beach (Perranporth)’, reverberates with the ‘echoes of an Atlantic storm’ in the vicinity of St Piran’s Oratory.

Echo verse is fun to write: Turco’s guidelines give a helpful summary of the form. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) offered sound advice in ‘The Sea-Limits’:

Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips...

Caroline Gill 2009

Reference.
Turco, Lewis The Book of Forms. A Handbook of Poetics
                                 (University Press of New England 2000)
Caroline Gill’s Echo Poem Blog: http://echopoems.blogspot.com