Chapter 13-Sounds in Poetry

Most readers recognize that the sounds of words mean more in poetry than they do in short stories or novels.  Poems are meant to be heard. All poetry should be read aloud.  Some prose sounds quite enjoyable when read aloud and some doesn’t. Poetry, however, always works when read aloud.

Poems have always been closely related to music. Several years ago, Bob Dylan, a songwriter and singer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature and this upset some people because they thought an author should have won the prize or a poet, but songwriters are poets and authors, so Dylan won the highest prize in literature. Lyric poetry, which sounds like the word “lyrics,” evolved from early songs  as far as literary scholars can tell in the history of poetry and music over thousands of years. Poetry began as songs. For instance, here’s one of the songs that Bob Dylan wrote.

May God bless you and keep you always

May your wishes all come true

May you always do for others and let others do for you

May you build a ladder to the Stars

And climb on every rung

May you stay forever young

Forever young, forever young

May you stay forever young

These lyrics have many of those figures of speech used frequently in poetry. The repetition and the rhyme, for example. Most early Anglo-Saxon poetry was originally sung by bards. They probably were not recited often. Early poetry was memorized by a bard and taken around to different places, and they probably sang for their audience rather than reciting; therefore, sound is important in poetry. The song Scarborough Fair, an old lyric poem probably from medieval times, was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in the 1960s.  When written, the poem was about actual events or the type of thing where a person went to a fair and even maybe had some message in it about the plague, a sad poem. The poem talked about parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme; herbs probably used to treat the plague. Simon and Garfunkel set the same poem to music modern music and recorded it in the 60s as an anti-war protest song. When listening to a song like Scarborough Fair, it’s interesting to think about it as a poem as well as a song. The words work equally well either way.

Sounds in a poem can create mood and feeling.  Think about this poem by Emily Dickinson.

A Bird, came down the Walk –

He did not know I saw –

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass –

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass –

The beginning of the poem contains many abrupt sounds, choppy sounds, Ds and Bs, as the bird is on the ground. He’s walking around doing things.  The bird is not in his natural element.   Then, at the end of the poem, he flies away, which is much more his element, and the sounds become much less choppy.

And he unrolled his feathers,

And rowed him softer Home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim.

Here the poet used smoother sounds because the bird is flying.  He’s not hopping around on the ground and the difference in how gracefully he moves is evident in the way the poet uses the sounds, the syllables, the vowel sounds, to create that mood and that feeling. The poet uses sea sounds and imagery.  The last lines roll off the tongue, so if one reads it aloud, the listener will hear the difference in the way it reads and the difference in the way it sounds compared to the first section.

Poets use many different sound schemes, such as onomatopoeias such as “pow,” “quack,” “moo” and other words where the word makes the sound itself. Adults do this with animal sounds for small children and the words in the bubble in a comic book are onomatopoeias. People use them to make an impact.

Alliterations are the sound scheme where the words all start with the same sound, such as “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Children think tongue twisters sound cool because of alliteration. Humans just enjoy hearing. If a poet uses assonance, they use the same sound over and over. Look for all the I sounds in this little line by Poe from “Annabel Lee.” and so all the night-tide I lie down by the side of My Darling my darling my life and my bride hear all those long I sounds are evident. Using the same sound over and over is assonance. The repeated sound ties the work together. The reader may not realize what they are hearing and why they feel a certain way, but it is because the lines all hold together with those long “I” sounds.

Euphony is creating beautiful lines that are pleasant on the ear.

Around the coast the languid air did swoon

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream

Tennyson

The end of the Dickinson poem where the bird flew away had euphony because the line flows off the tongue smoothly. Cacophony is a sound scheme in which a line deliberately does the opposite,  deliberately sounding harsh. “Twas brillig and the slithery toads did gyre and gimble in the wabe” from “Jabberwocky” is meant to sound harsh. A reader may enjoy the silliness, but it’s not meant to be pleasant on the ear.

Rhyme can be important to the sound of poems. Children learn about rhyme early in life.  Parents and teachers teach them out about rhyming words such as “happy” “snappy.”  Eye rhymes are words such as  bough and cough.  Those don’t sound the same, but they look the same. Poets generally don’t use eye rhyme, but sometimes they will.  Many poems do not rhyme.  Some readers think that a work isn’t a poem because it doesn’t rhyme. However, poetry such as  free verse and blank verse don’t rhyme. Many poets choose not to use rhyme because they feel using rhyme would be distracting to the reader. People can really fall into that sing-songy voice when everything rhymes so some poets choose not to rhyme. They may not want to have to use a word because it rhymes when it doesn’t really suit what they want to write. John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, would not use rhyme because he thought that’s what lesser poets did, and he was too serious to rhyme his poetry.  Poems can rhyme at the end of the line, or they can use internal rhyme where the rhymes are inside the lines, not necessarily used to end lines. Slant rhymes are sounds that are almost, but not exactly, alike.  Emily Dickinson uses slant rhyme frequently.  In fact, she has a poem where she talks about telling the truth but telling it slant. A poet might use “home” and “same” or “sound” and “sand” They don’t rhyme but they sound enough alike that using them at the ends of lines is called slant rhyme.

These types of sound schemes can enhance the meaning of a poem. They can add to the emotion of a poem by the way the syllables fall on a listener’s ears. They can add to the appeal to the senses.  They could display tone or attitude as with the bird coming down the walk. It sounds choppy, and then it becomes smooth. A good poet is thinking about the sounds all the time.  They think about how the poem sounds when it’s read aloud. They think about whether it contributes to the emotions.  If they are writing a beautiful love poem, they’re not going to put many choppy sounds and not going to include many  Ts and K’s. They will look for sounds that are smoother. If they want to show a harsh or mad tone, they will put all those really harsh sounds, gh sounds and T’s and Ks and hard Cs, so the sounds of the words in a poem are never just by chance.  The poets are always using the sounds to enhance their message.