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By Root 415 0

how a poem says what it says. The sounds a poem makes are its music, the lilt and echo that charm the reader. Originally, poetry was an oral art. Poems were recited to audiences gathered specifically to hear poems. (These events still take place. Look for poetry readings in your area.) Now poetry reaches a wider audience through print. Still, when you read poems, read them aloud and listen to their music. At the very least, sound them out in your mind as you read. Develop an inner ear that hears what your eyes see. Listen closely. Music makes the poem and, as the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, one sign of genius in a poet is a "delight in richness and sweetness of sound."

You need not understand the elements of sound—fricatives (f and v sounds), plosives (b and p sounds) and such. Linguists take care of those. But you must be aware of the language and listen to its sounds and echoes. Read these lines from Alexander Pope's long poem An Essay on Criticism and hear the sounds they make:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,

The sound must seem an Echo to the sense:

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,

And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,

The line too labours, and the words move slow;

Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

The eye moves quicker than the lips, but it recognizes rather than intones. If you read these lines silently, read them aloud now and linger over the sounds. Hear the music they make.

This passage is itself a lesson in the art of writing poetry. Its subject is the use of sound to complement sense: "The sound must seem an Echo to the sense." Notice how easily "And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows" slips from the lips. Notice how patiently you must articulate "But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, / The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar." Because the sounds clash, they require precise utterance, and that precision gives those lines a loud energy. Notice how slowly you must enunciate "When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, / The line too labours, and the words move slow." The sounds reproduce the deliberate effort it takes to heave a great stone.

This passage also illustrates two styles of sound: euphony and cacophony. Euphony is a combination of sounds that please the ear, such as "Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows." The sounds flow smoothly by. Cacophony is a combination of sounds that grate on the ear, such as "When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw." The j, x and k sounds are harsh and jarring. Poems generally make use of euphony. They strive for grace and beauty, using euphony to achieve those aims. But cacophony also plays a role. When the sense calls for it, cacophony achieves dramatic results. The American poet Randall Jarrell uses it effectively in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" when the gunner, sleeping at his guns as his B-29 flies over enemy territory, wakes to "black flak and the nightmare fighters." The discordant double k sound of "black flak" staggers him—blam, blam—and staggers the reader, too.

The music of poetry comes from putting sounds together in certain combinations, either for euphony or cacophony, whichever the poem needs at a particular spot. The main devices of sound are alliteration, assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia.

Alliteration is the repetition of identical consonant sounds: "And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows." It may occur anywhere within the words—the beginning, middle or end—and it may occur in one line or over a number of lines. But take care with alliteration. It occurs naturally, without your purposefully using it. In fact, you'd have to work to avoid it. When used to excess, alliteration ends up like a bad newspaper