Sound & Sense in Verse
Poets choose words not just for meaning, but also for sound, and the actors in Six Centuries of Verse amply demonstrate the musicality of poetry read aloud. Because most people don’t listen to much poetry nowadays, the following refresher course might help.
Rhyme: Two or more lines that end in a similar sound rhyme. That seems simple enough. But poets use various kinds of rhymes for different effects:
• Masculine rhymes, in which the last stressed syllables match (“bright” and “night” in the opening line of Blake’s “The Tyger”)
• Feminine rhymes, in which the lines end in a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (“growing,” “sowing,” and “mowing,” used successively in Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”)
• Slant rhymes (also known as off, near, imperfect, and half rhymes), in which the syllables sound similar but not exactly the same (“yawl” and “hill” in Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”)
• Eye rhymes (also called slight rhymes), in which two words look as though they should sound alike, but don’t really (“star” and “near” in Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”)
The pattern of rhymes in a poem can give it organization and structure. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, follow a clearly defined pattern of rhymes that help link similar thoughts or observations and signal transitions to subsequent thoughts or observations. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost uses rhymes to keep you moving through the whole poem. Each stanza consists of four lines with lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyming. The unrhymed line 3 in each stanza anticipates the sound of the three rhyming lines in the following stanza.
Sometimes, a poet uses rhymes to call attention to certain words. In the fourth verse of “Skunk Hour,” for example, Lowell rhymes “fairy” with “marry” to underline his ironic comment. Occasionally, a poet employs rhymes—especially forced rhymes—just to make you chuckle, as when Yeats writes in “Politics,”
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Other Repetitive Sounds: Besides rhyme, the music of poetry also includes repeating the sounds of individual letters (consonants or vowels) within a line to achieve certain effects:
• Alliteration, in which the poet chooses words beginning with the same consonant sound (“The viol, the violet, and the vine” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City in the Sea”)
• Assonance, in which the poet repeats similar vowel sounds within a line—usually at the beginning of words or within stressed syllables (“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”)
• Consonance, in which the poet repeats a consonant sound within nearby words (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” in Keats’s “To Autumn”)
Besides lending musicality, these repetitive techniques can unify a line. In his adaptation of Beowulf in Episode 2, for example, Julian Glover stays true to the original Anglo-Saxon poetic technique by using alliteration to join the second half of a line to the first half, after a slight pause:
As a first step, he set his greedy hand
On a sleeping soldier, savagely tore him…
Of course, repetitive sounds work in other ways, too. Throughout “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—and especially in the third stanza—Robert Frost repeatedly chooses words with soft, breathy consonant sounds: w-, wh-, s-, sh-, and sw-:
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
Although not exactly onomatopoeia (the use of a word that mimics the sound it describes), these consonant sounds collectively help set the scene by suggesting the muffled quiet of snowfall.
Rhythm: Like music, poetry has a beat. Poets set the beat by choosing words that establish a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. In English, these metrical patterns have names:
• Iamb, in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one (da-DUM), as in “behold” or “depart”
• Trochee, in which a stressed syllable precedes an unstressed one (DUM-da), as in “usage” or “instant”
• Anapest, in which two unstressed syllables are followed by one stressed syllable (da-da-DUM), as in “century”
• Dactyl, in which a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da), as in “Washington”
• Spondee, in which two syllables in a row are stressed (DUM-DUM), as in “childhood”
Poets usually set an underlying rhythm and use it expressively. In the selection from The Dunciad read in Episode 8, Alexander Pope uses the repetition of certain phrases, the heavy stresses of iambic pentameter (the five-beat line common in English verse since Chaucer), and full stops at the end of each couplet to establish the steady drumbeat for the oncoming march of darkness:
In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls; The muse obeys the pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Like musicians, poets can also establish a tempo and then vary it subtly to focus your attention or spark interest. In reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in Episode 9, John Gielgud picks up the poet’s expressive shift to three successive stresses in the second line of this couplet:
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing…
“A Game of Chess”—the selection from The Waste Land read in Episode 15—serves as an extreme example of a poet’s expressive use of rhythm. T.S. Eliot begins this section in classic blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter); by the end, he abandons regular meter altogether, as if to make you feel the disintegration and fragmentation of his characters’ lives.
Rhyme: Two or more lines that end in a similar sound rhyme. That seems simple enough. But poets use various kinds of rhymes for different effects:
• Masculine rhymes, in which the last stressed syllables match (“bright” and “night” in the opening line of Blake’s “The Tyger”)
• Feminine rhymes, in which the lines end in a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (“growing,” “sowing,” and “mowing,” used successively in Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”)
• Slant rhymes (also known as off, near, imperfect, and half rhymes), in which the syllables sound similar but not exactly the same (“yawl” and “hill” in Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”)
• Eye rhymes (also called slight rhymes), in which two words look as though they should sound alike, but don’t really (“star” and “near” in Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”)
The pattern of rhymes in a poem can give it organization and structure. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, follow a clearly defined pattern of rhymes that help link similar thoughts or observations and signal transitions to subsequent thoughts or observations. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost uses rhymes to keep you moving through the whole poem. Each stanza consists of four lines with lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyming. The unrhymed line 3 in each stanza anticipates the sound of the three rhyming lines in the following stanza.
Sometimes, a poet uses rhymes to call attention to certain words. In the fourth verse of “Skunk Hour,” for example, Lowell rhymes “fairy” with “marry” to underline his ironic comment. Occasionally, a poet employs rhymes—especially forced rhymes—just to make you chuckle, as when Yeats writes in “Politics,”
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Other Repetitive Sounds: Besides rhyme, the music of poetry also includes repeating the sounds of individual letters (consonants or vowels) within a line to achieve certain effects:
• Alliteration, in which the poet chooses words beginning with the same consonant sound (“The viol, the violet, and the vine” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City in the Sea”)
• Assonance, in which the poet repeats similar vowel sounds within a line—usually at the beginning of words or within stressed syllables (“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”)
• Consonance, in which the poet repeats a consonant sound within nearby words (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” in Keats’s “To Autumn”)
Besides lending musicality, these repetitive techniques can unify a line. In his adaptation of Beowulf in Episode 2, for example, Julian Glover stays true to the original Anglo-Saxon poetic technique by using alliteration to join the second half of a line to the first half, after a slight pause:
As a first step, he set his greedy hand
On a sleeping soldier, savagely tore him…
Of course, repetitive sounds work in other ways, too. Throughout “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—and especially in the third stanza—Robert Frost repeatedly chooses words with soft, breathy consonant sounds: w-, wh-, s-, sh-, and sw-:
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
Although not exactly onomatopoeia (the use of a word that mimics the sound it describes), these consonant sounds collectively help set the scene by suggesting the muffled quiet of snowfall.
Rhythm: Like music, poetry has a beat. Poets set the beat by choosing words that establish a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. In English, these metrical patterns have names:
• Iamb, in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one (da-DUM), as in “behold” or “depart”
• Trochee, in which a stressed syllable precedes an unstressed one (DUM-da), as in “usage” or “instant”
• Anapest, in which two unstressed syllables are followed by one stressed syllable (da-da-DUM), as in “century”
• Dactyl, in which a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed ones (DUM-da-da), as in “Washington”
• Spondee, in which two syllables in a row are stressed (DUM-DUM), as in “childhood”
Poets usually set an underlying rhythm and use it expressively. In the selection from The Dunciad read in Episode 8, Alexander Pope uses the repetition of certain phrases, the heavy stresses of iambic pentameter (the five-beat line common in English verse since Chaucer), and full stops at the end of each couplet to establish the steady drumbeat for the oncoming march of darkness:
In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls; The muse obeys the pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Like musicians, poets can also establish a tempo and then vary it subtly to focus your attention or spark interest. In reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in Episode 9, John Gielgud picks up the poet’s expressive shift to three successive stresses in the second line of this couplet:
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing…
“A Game of Chess”—the selection from The Waste Land read in Episode 15—serves as an extreme example of a poet’s expressive use of rhythm. T.S. Eliot begins this section in classic blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter); by the end, he abandons regular meter altogether, as if to make you feel the disintegration and fragmentation of his characters’ lives.
