Literary Examples of the Dramatic Performative Function

Poetry as a Performative Formula through Metric Substitution
 

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

-Shakespeare's Sonnet 29

“Like to the lark at break of day arising”

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Logical Form - I believe all poetry is a performative formula (i.e. a descriptive statement changed to an active literary device by the primitives rhyme, meter, and intonation).

Locution - The poet analogizes his feelings with a bird flying at dawn in a meter that breaks from the rhythm

Illocution - The poet feels like a bird at dawn when he thinks of the subject of the poem.

Perlocution - The image of a bird taking flight at dawn is evoked through direct reference, rhythm, and intonation, contrasted with the dark imagery and repetitive iambic tetrameter, aligning the reader's experience with that of the poet thinking of the subject.

Primitive – Variation in metric verse "can serve as an extra expressive resource, shaping a lines rhythm so that it will support the conceptual content of that line" (Corn 39). The substitution of a trochee (one long or stressed syllable followed by a short or unstressed) for an iamb (short or stressed followed by a long or unstressed) causes a speeding up (Corn 41).

Corn, Alfred. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Port Townsend, Wash: Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Print.