Poems yearn to be read aloud. Much of their energy, charm, and beauty come to life only when they are heard. Poets choose and arrange words for their sounds as well as for their meanings. Most poetry is best read with your lips, teeth, and tongue because they serve to articulate the effects that sound may have in a poem. When a voice is breathed into a good poem, there is pleasure in the reading, the saying, and the hearing.
The earliest poetry — before writing and painting — was chanted or sung. The rhythmic quality of such oral performances served two purposes: it helped the chanting bard remember the lines and it entertained audiences with patterned sounds of language, which were sometimes accompanied by musical instruments. Poetry has always been closely related to music. Indeed, as the word suggests, lyric poetry evolved from songs. “Scarborough Fair,” an anonymous Middle English lyric, survived as song long before it was written down, and the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel put it to music in the 1960s. Had Robert Frost lived in a nonliterate society, he probably would have sung some version — a very different version to be sure — of “Acquainted with the Night” instead of writing it down. Even though Frost creates a speaking rather than a singing voice, the speaker’s anxious tone is distinctly heard in any careful reading of the poem.
Like lyrics, early narrative poems were originally part of an anonymous oral folk tradition. A ballad such as “Lord Randal” told a story that was sung from one generation to the next until it was finally transcribed. Since the eighteenth century, this narrative form has sometimes been imitated by poets who write literary ballads. In considering poetry as sound, we should not forget that poetry traces its beginnings to song. See Chapter 31, “Song Lyrics as Poetry,” for an in-depth examination of the relationship between these categories.
These next lines exemplify poetry’s continuing relation to song. Which poetic elements can you find in this ballad?
Where are you going? To Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Remember me to a bonny lass there,
For once she was a true lover of mine.
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Without any needle or thread work’d in it,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
Tell her to wash it in yonder well,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Where water ne’er sprung nor a drop of rain fell,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
Tell her to plough me an acre of land,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Between the sea and the salt sea strand,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
Tell her to plough it with one ram’s horn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
And sow it all over with one peppercorn,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
And tie it all up with a tom tit’s feather,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.
Tell her to gather it all in a sack,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
And carry it home on a butterfly’s back,
And then she shall be a true lover of mine.
Of course, reading “Scarborough Fair” is not the same as hearing it. Like the lyrics of a song, many poems must be heard — or at least read with listening eyes — before they can be fully understood and enjoyed. The sounds of words are a universal source of music for human beings. This has been so from ancient tribes to bards to the two-year-old child in a bakery gleefully chanting “Cuppitycake, cuppitycake!”
Listen to the sound of this poem as you read it aloud. How do the words provide, in a sense, their own musical accompaniment?
My stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.
My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.
At times I’m a jumble of rumbles,
At others I’m light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.
The speaker in this poem is a piano that can play automatically by means of a mechanism that depresses keys in response to signals on a perforated roll. Notice how the speaker’s voice approximates the sounds of a piano. In each stanza a predominant sound emerges from the carefully chosen words. How is the sound of each stanza tuned to its sense?
Like Updike’s “Player Piano,” this next poem also employs sounds to reinforce meanings.
A Bird came down the Walk —
He did not know I saw —
He bit an Angleworm 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 —
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around —
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought —
He stirred his Velvet Head
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
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.
This description of a bird offers a close look at how differently a bird moves when it hops on the ground than when it flies in the air. On the ground the bird moves quickly, awkwardly, and irregularly as it plucks up a worm, washes it down with dew, and then hops aside to avoid a passing beetle. The speaker recounts the bird’s rapid, abrupt actions from a somewhat superior, amused perspective. By describing the bird in human terms (as if, for example, it chose to eat the worm “raw”), the speaker is almost condescending. But when the attempt to offer a crumb fails and the frightened bird flies off, the speaker is left looking up instead of down at the bird.
With that shift in perspective the tone shifts from amusement to awe in response to the bird’s graceful flight. The jerky movements of lines 1 to 13 give way to the smooth motion of lines 15 to 20. The pace of the first three stanzas is fast and discontinuous. We tend to pause at the end of each line, and this reinforces a sense of disconnected movements. In contrast, the final six lines are to be read as a single sentence in one flowing movement, lubricated by various sounds.
Read again the description of the bird flying away. Several o-sounds contribute to the image of the serene, expansive, confident flight, just as the s-sounds serve as smooth transitions from one line to the next. Notice how these sounds are grouped in the following vertical columns:
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This blending of sounds (notice how “Leap, plashless” brings together the p- and l-sounds without a ripple) helps convey the bird’s smooth grace in the air. Like a feathered oar, the bird moves seamlessly in its element.
The repetition of sounds in poetry is similar to the function of the tones and melodies that are repeated, with variations, in music. Just as the patterned sounds in music unify a work, so do the words in poems, which have been carefully chosen for the combinations of sounds they create. These sounds are produced in a number of ways.
The most direct way in which the sound of a word suggests its meaning is through onomatopoeia, which is the use of a word that resembles the sound it denotes: quack, buzz, rattle, bang, squeak, bowwow, burp, choo-choo, ding-a-ling, sizzle. The sound and sense of these words are closely related, but such words represent a very small percentage of the words available to us. Poets usually employ more subtle means for echoing meanings.
Onomatopoeia can consist of more than just single words. In its broadest meaning the term refers to lines or passages in which sounds help to convey meanings, as in these lines from Updike’s “Player Piano”:
My stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys.
The sharp, crisp sounds of these two lines approximate the sounds of a piano; the syllables seem to “click” against one another. Contrast Updike’s rendition with the following lines:
My long fingers play with abandon
And, laughing, they cover the keys.
The original version is more interesting and alive because the sounds of the words are pleasurable and reinforce the meaning through a careful blending of consonants and vowels.
Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the beginnings of nearby words: “descending dewdrops,” “luscious lemons.” Sometimes the term is also used to describe the consonant sounds within words: “trespasser’s reproach,” “wedded lady.” Alliteration is based on sound rather than spelling. “Keen” and “car” alliterate, but “car” does not alliterate with “cite.” Rarely is heavy-handed alliteration effective. Used too self-consciously, it can be distracting instead of strengthening meaning or emphasizing a relation between words. Consider the relentless h’s in this line: “Horrendous horrors haunted Helen’s happiness.” Those h’s certainly suggest that Helen is being pursued, but they have a more comic than serious effect because they are overdone.
Assonance is the repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby words: “asleep under a tree,” “time and tide,” “haunt” and “awesome,” “each evening.” Both alliteration and assonance help to establish relations among words in a line or a series of lines. Whether the effect is euphony (lines that are musically pleasant to the ear and smooth, like the final lines of Dickinson’s “A Bird came down the Walk —”) or cacophony (lines that are discordant and difficult to pronounce, like the claim that “never my numb plunker fumbles” in Updike’s “Player Piano”), the sounds of words in poetry can be as significant as the words’ denotative or connotative meanings.