The nature of the “organic unity,” at once dynamic and semantic, which is central to music, incantation, recitation, and all metrical structures, has been most profoundly analyzed by Victor Zuckerkandl in his remarkable book Sound and Symbol. It is typical of such flowing dynamic-semantic structures that each part leads on to the next, that every part has reference to the rest. Such structures cannot usually be perceived, or remembered, in part—they are perceived and remembered, if at all, as wholes.
Easier for amnesiacs to remember as a “whole.”
