Chapter 3
In This Chapter
Becoming more sensitive to language, the material of the poet’s art
Knowing the tools poets use to expand meaning: images, symbols, similes, and metaphors
Understanding what allusions are and why poets use them
Appreciating the role of music in poetry
Looking at how poets use the shape of words, lines, and stanzas
To appreciate poetry, and to write it, you need to cultivate your knowledge and appreciation of the poet’s material, which is language. In this chapter, we provide a short course on some of the ways poets mine this mother lode of human expression. We divide our tour of language into tools of significance (including similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech), music (sounds and rhythms), and visual rhythm (the shape of words and lines). But first we let you know why language is important.
Why You Need to Snuggle Up to Language
At times, language seems spiritual, as insubstantial as breath on a winter’s day. Everything seems slathered and permeated with language — it’s how we think and how we see. Yet language is also a physical thing, with characteristics and oddities — in sound and shape. To get closer to poetry, you need to fine-tune your sensitivity to language and to its histories, overtones, rhythms, meanings, and suggestions.
Noticing the beauty of language
Language is what successful poets are good with. Whether they’re born or made, poets are language people. If you have a long relationship with poetry, you become more sensitive to language. You start spotting moments of beauty, start feeling the burst of meanings in a single phrase, the punch in a well-turned line. And poetry can show you how to pay attention — both to poems and to life in general. You may start noticing the details, the surprises, the unforgettable images.
Whenever you want to speak vividly or imaginatively, you can use language in special ways. When you’re hungry, you may say, “I could eat a horse.” Now, you couldn’t actually eat a horse, and you know it. Somehow you and the people you’re talking to recognize that you’re being imaginative (not literal) in your language. Your audience switches into that imaginative gear and sees that you’re really just saying that you’re very, very hungry. In saying you could eat a horse, you’re using a figure of speech (that is, any statement or turn of phrase that is not to be taken literally yet has a meaning you and your audience can recognize). These include metaphors (comparisons poets make without using like or as — in fact, any imaginative treatment of one thing as if it were another), similes (comparisons that use like or as, as in “he came in riding like a hurricane”), understatement, overstatement, and other unusual uses of language that poets use to stretch your imagination.
Another word you’ll hear often in reference to poetry is image, which has many meanings. It can mean simply a vivid picture, or it can mean an especially powerful appeal to the senses.
Packing in more meaning with every word
With so many special uses of language, poetry can sometimes seem to be nonsense at first reading. But in fact, poets are trying to pack in more meaning per word than people pack in ordinary language. When you say, “Please give me a hamburger and a vanilla milkshake,” you usually have one meaning and that’s it. You want to be taken literally. But that’s not always so with poetry. Poets set up words to resonate with many meanings at once — and often the only judge of all that is you, the reader.
How to judge? By paying close attention — but pay attention with an open, playful mind. Look for different possibilities in the words and phrases you’re reading. If you find an implication (that is, something the poem suggests without coming out and saying it), great.
Try reading this poem, “About Face,” by Fanny Howe. At first glance, it may seem close to nonsense, but stay with it, and you’ll see that its unusual uses of language pack more possibilities of meaning per word than normal uses of language. You could say that the apparent “nonsense” ends up being supersense!:
I wrap my bones around my head
Speak through the holes
It sounds like math
is rounding the curves
or a mouth is light years
ahead of words.
Fanny Howe is using words differently from the way people normally use them. People usually speak literally, trying to limit their words to a single meaning. This poem is a tricky one, because so much of it has more than one possible meaning. Look at the title: “About Face.” It could mean “a turnaround or reversal.” Or, it could indicate that this poem concerns having a face.
None of the words in this poem is difficult or unusual. But everything that happens in it is very unusual, starting with the startling first line: “I wrap my bones around my head.” The poet can’t mean it literally — so you know you’re in the presence of a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Well, if the poem is about having a face, the line “Speak through the holes” makes sense, because holes (eyes, noses, and mouths) are what people speak through.
Think about speaking for a moment — just the act of using your mouth to make words. (Remember: This is just our guess, not a certain statement, about what Fanny Howe intends.) People are always speaking through the bones around their heads — they use their teeth, their jaws, and their facial bones to make the sounds of words. So “About Face” may be toying with the notion of what speaking involves.
Move on to the next stanza: When I speak, “It sounds like math / is rounding the curves” — two more simple and yet very tough lines. In math, you do a lot of rounding off of numbers, to the nearest tenth and so on. But then instead of rounding off of numbers, Howe gives you “rounding the curves.” So speaking can “sound like math” (our guess) because it’s always approximating the things people want to say or the things they want to point to in the world. People are always rounding things off — words are often insufficient, so people never actually say the exact thing they want, but they get close: They round things off.
“About Face” seems to be pointing out the way speaking doesn’t quite do everything people pretend it does. Language does a good job, but it’s approximate. So maybe that’s how “a mouth is light years / ahead of words” — a mouth is something real, and words are only a bumbling attempt to get at it. No word could ever get all the way. All the word mouth can do is refer to a real mouth — it can’t be a mouth or give you one. So a mouth always will remain “light years / ahead of words.” (Yet another possible pun: We all are “ahead of words,” and we have a head of words — we’re thinking words all the time.)
Howe has us thinking about having bones in our faces, about mouths, about words, and about what words can and can’t do. This witty, quizzical poet has brought together figures of speech to release numerous possibilities about the poem’s meaning after you give it just a few moments’ consideration.
We hope we’ve sold you on the value of snuggling up to language. In the rest of this chapter, we turn to the basic tools of the poet’s art: symbols, similes, metaphors, and allusions.
Tools of Significance: Symbols, Similes, Metaphors, and Allusions
People use symbols to stand for things, they use similes and metaphors to compare things, and they use other figures of speech to make their words powerful and moving. Successful poets are masters of all these tools.
Symbols: When A stands for B, which brings in C
People use symbols all the time. Symbols are central to the way our minds and worlds function. Think of all the symbols you see every day: Stop signs, for example, which stand for your legal obligation to stop and drive safely. There’s no police force, judge, and jury waiting at every stop sign — there’s just the sign itself, standing for the whole machinery of safety, social obligation, and law. Words themselves are symbols: They stand for the things they refer to. Instead of lugging a horse into the room each time I want to discuss a horse, I can say a word — horse — that stands for that animal. Even the letters in words are symbols: They stand for the sounds you’d make if you spoke the word aloud. We just couldn’t function as human beings without symbols.
A symbol stands for something else — which in turn brings with it an intense world of meaning. It’s an A that “stands for” a B, which results in a C (a greater meaning). Symbols unite a concrete thing with an idea or concept greater than that thing. Here are a couple symbols and how this pattern works with each one:
Money: A dollar (or a pound or a ruble) is a symbol. Money is really just a piece of paper or metal. That paper or metal is the A (the real element). But it symbolizes (or stands for) a certain economic value, which is the B. So what’s the significance that B results in? Buying power. (That’s the C. So A — the hard currency — is a symbol for B — the economic value — that results in C: purchase power.) Everyone agrees to abide by that symbolism. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be so reluctant to part with your money, or so pleased to discover some in your jeans pocket.
A wedding ring: A wedding ring is really just a piece of gold, molded into a certain shape. That gold is the A. But it symbolizes (stands for) a marriage, which is the B. And what’s the significance that B (marriage) brings with it? Lifelong commitment and unending love, all symbolized by that never-ending line of the wedding ring (and that’s the C).
Identifying symbols
So how can you tell whether something is a symbol? You can be relatively sure something is a symbol if:
You already recognize the symbol as a symbol. A lot of literature and other art contains common symbols you probably recognize: flowers, storms, sunrises. These symbols come ready-made with their own meanings (storms, for example, usually symbolize trouble, but sunrises often symbolize hope). If you see such things in a poem, try looking at it as a symbol and see what that does for your understanding of the poem.
The poet leaves indicators (including your own feelings) that the poem represents a much larger world than its images normally would by themselves. For example, in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Traveled,” a hiker comes to a crossroads and must decide which road to take. That event is not, in and of itself, too meaningful. But later, the speaker says his choice of road has made “all the difference.” That statement invests the choice of road with a big (and unexplained) importance, leading you to wonder about all such choices, all such “crossroads.” And that makes it a symbol.
The poet has created an unusually highly-charged setting around these objects or events — a place or time or circumstance in which everything takes on a heightened meaning. A familiar kind of heightened setting is the horror movie, in which almost everything symbolizes good, evil, devils, spirits, and so forth.
The possible symbol takes on a great deal of importance within the poem itself. For example, think of the sword in the stone in many King Arthur tales. Swords are symbolic already, of course: They often stand for war, or for political power (such as in kingship). But when the little boy draws the sword out of the stone, something none of the great warriors of the world have been able to do, the sword comes to stand for the child’s glittering future as the powerful king of Camelot, as well as his close alliance with magic.
You think it’s a symbol. If something strikes you as symbolic, go with that feeling. Apply it to the rest of the poem and see how it works. Trust your powers of reading.
Figuring out what symbols stand for
You can find symbols everywhere in poetry, as in this poem. “The Sick Rose,” by English poet William Blake:
O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
You can read this poem literally (a flying worm destroys a flower) — which is what probably happens with a quick review of the words on the page. But you’ll appreciate the poem more — and understand it better — if you dig deeper and try to figure out what the symbols mean. Here are some clues:
You get a sense that the events in the poem transcend themselves. That is, these events don’t stand only for themselves, a particular rose being savaged by a particular worm. If that were all, you could easily say, “Who cares? Worms eat plants. Big deal.” But these events suggest a larger world of meaning. How do you know? In this case, both the rose and the worm are well-established symbols: Roses often signify love or beauty, and the worm is often used to signify death and decay. So here, you see one famous symbol (which you know as a symbol for death) destroy another famous symbol (which you’re familiar with as a symbol for beauty). Although literally all you read about is a worm destroying a flower, you feel a great weight of significance, pulling you to think of other kinds of destruction, and how other beautiful things lose their beauty or their lives.
The setting of the poem is gruesome and frightening. You feel the setting in the words the “howling storm,” the night, and the invisible, flying worm that destroys the rose with its “dark, secret love” — all scary notions. These words invest everything that happens with a heightened character, as in a melodrama or frightening story. That heightened character helps suggest that the action is symbolic.
This poem seems to create its own universe, in which the death of a rose involves sickness, love, and sorrow. The worm is “invisible” and its love “secret.” Secrecy and invisibility imply stealth and furtiveness, as though fate or some malevolent entity were ensuring the rose’s death.
The speaker addresses the rose as “thou,” an unfamiliar way to talk to a plant. Blake is using personification, giving human attributes to something not human. The rose had a prior life of “crimson joy” that it is now losing, and you may feel sympathy for the rose. The worm is also characterized as destructive, inescapable, and scary — all human characteristics placed onto something not human.
We hope we’ve convinced you that the rose and the worm are symbols. So what do they stand for? The poem doesn’t exactly say, so you may have to do a little guesswork and digging here.
Traditionally, red roses symbolize beauty and love, and worms symbolize death. So is this poem about death destroying beauty? That’s definitely a possibility. The rose also seems innocent and vulnerable; it doesn’t stand much of a chance, what with a howling storm carrying lethal worms. The rose is bright red, and the worm is invisible and comes from the darkness. As a reader, you may feel not only the death of innocence (symbolized by the death of the rose) but also the inescapability of that death. Some readers see the rose’s “bed / Of crimson joy” as a symbol for sexual innocence, which gives the worm a sexual significance, too, representing a man deflowering a woman.
Watch for indicators (including your own feelings) that the poem represents a much larger world than its images normally would alone. In “The Sick Rose,” Blake shows you the larger universe, in the play of love, life, joy, sickness, and the storm. Many poems, possibly most, have a moment when you feel the poem indicate a larger universe. That’s when you know you’re in the presence of symbols.
Digging deeper to uncover private symbols
With some symbols, the poet gives you an obvious A, but you get few clues as to B or C — that is, what the symbol stands for and what it means. These are known as private symbols. Clues in the poem — sometimes just the emotion with which the poem is written — tell you that they aresymbols, but you just don’t know what they stand for. The French poets called the Symbolists created an entire poetic technique from this kind of symbolism, and it dominates much poetry written today.
One of the most famous of private symbols is from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”):
If I desire one water in Europe, it’s the pond,
Black and cold, where, against the perfumed twilight,
A crouching child, full of sadness, launches
A boat, frail as a butterfly in May.
Here, the A is achingly clear and detailed: the cold pond, the sad child, the boat, the butterfly. Our guess is that this image is packed with the sadness, loneliness, and fragility of childhood. Maybe this symbol is from Rimbaud’s childhood, but maybe not. Either way, the setting is definitely emotionally charged. Everything seems to take on a larger meaning than you’d expect in the simple image of a child playing with a boat on a pond. That heightened setting, suggesting a larger meaning, is why many readers think this seemingly private moment stands for all childhoods, not just Rimbaud’s.
How do you know when a symbol is a symbol? In general, whenever an image seems to evoke meanings that extend far beyond itself, you can call it a symbol — even when you can’t work out the B and C for sure.
Similes and metaphors: My love is like a can of tuna; no, he is a can of tuna
With symbols, one thing represents another. Similes and metaphors, however, work differently. Both of these figures of speech are forms of imaginative comparison.
Similes
A simile is an explicit comparison — it is directly stated, often using the words like or as. If a poet writes, “My love is like a can of tuna,” that silly poet would be coming right out and saying, “He resembles that can of tuna in many ways.” (Cold and hard on the outside, soft and nourishing and a bit fishy on the inside?)
You can find similes everywhere. In Homer’s The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles changes a battle simply by letting loose a great shout:
Infinite terror wracked the foe:
Like the piercing shrill of a trumpet
The lucid voice of Achilles rang —
And when the Trojans heard his brassy cry
Their hearts hurt, their thick-maned horses
Bucked, knowing agony was near
The shout was like “the piercing shrill of a trumpet,” which is a simile.
Notice how the word brassy continues the comparison of Achilles’s voice to a trumpet.
When Byron wants to describe the savage attack of the Assyrian army in “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” he compares it to a wolf attacking a flock or “fold” of sheep:
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
Notice that Byron says the Assyrian was like “a wolf on the fold.”
Similes help make an image or state of feeling more precise. You can feel the reverberant shout of Achilles in Homer’s writing and the attack of the Assyrians in Byron’s.
Metaphors
Metaphor makes a comparison without using like or as. Instead, the poet talks as though thing A really were thing B. (My love isn’t like a can of tuna; he is a can of tuna.)
Where simile works with similarity, metaphor is a claim of exact equivalence or identity. It’s far more intimate and packs a greater emotional punch. When in his poem “The Search” Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew writes that “The past / Is but the cinders / Of the present,” the unspoken comparison between the passage of time and the destructiveness of fire drives home the way time erases what used to be (much stronger than if he had written, “The past / Is like the cinders / of the present”).
Because metaphor works with an unspoken comparison, it challenges you to think of all the ways two things are alike — for example, the passage of time and the destructiveness of fire. Those ways that the two things being compared are alike are called the grounds of the metaphor.
How do you know when you’re seeing metaphors? When poets speak of one thing as being another, even though literally those two things aren’t the same. My love is not literally a can of tuna, but I call him one to bring out the similarities between him and that foodstuff. In The Iliad, Homer writes of war-spears “stuck in the ground, longing for their fill of flesh.” Spears can’t long for bloodshed; only warriors can. But Homer speaks as if the spears can thirst for blood, as if the spears were literally warriors. This is definitely a metaphor (actually, personification, which is a kind of metaphor that speaks of a nonhuman thing as if it were human). It rams home the all-penetrating rage of war.
Shakespeare seemed to think in metaphors. When Hamlet feels he has done something wrong, he cries, “O, my offense is rank; it smells to heaven,” implicitly comparing his misdeed to something rotten. When a servant in Timon of Athens wants to say a rich man has no money, he declares, “’Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse,” comparing the emptiness of winter to the lack of money in Timon’s purse. These images have greater power for not using like or as.
In most metaphors, we can sort out the vehicle (the thing being compared) from the tenor (the thing to which it is being compared):
Sometimes you get only the vehicle, with the tenor being strongly implied. That happens in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, when Faustus cries, “Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make / Perpetual day.” Marlowe doesn’t tell you that the tenor is “the sun,” but you can dig deeper and see that the thing that is rising and making day is the sun.
Metaphors come in different varieties. In metonymy, the poet replaces the name of a thing with the name of something closely associated with that thing. (People do this all the time, as when they speak of the White House when they mean the President, or when they use the word suits when they mean bosses.) In synecdoche, people take a part of a thing and use it to stand for the whole thing, as when people use the word wheels when they mean car. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot has his speaker say, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” The speaker doesn’t mean that he should be just claws, of course, but instead some lowly, crablike animal, an excellent metaphor for Prufrock’s dissatisfaction with himself.
Knowing the names of these tools of language is not as important as being aware of all the ways poets can create them. When you come upon a metaphor, try to sort out vehicle and tenor, and think about the grounds. The poet’s art, and much of its psychological magic, will become a little clearer and all the more impressive.
Allusions: Names and places you just have to know
An allusion is a reference to something — a person, place, story, historical event — outside the poem. Poets allude to these things to create metaphors and intensify the message of their poetry.
In his poem “Epithalamion,” which is about his wedding day, the Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser describes his bride-to-be, who approaches “Like Phoebe from her chamber in the east.” Who’s Phoebe? A brief consultation with your reference books will tell you that Spenser is alluding to Phoebe, the Greek goddess of the moon, a virgin goddess. The moon rises in the east. So his bride is coming like the rising moon, a virgin goddess. His allusion creates a simile that praises his fiancée for her beauty and chastity.
In the case of Spenser’s poem, if you know about Phoebe, you’re off to a great start; if not, you owe it to yourself to find out who she is and why he alludes to her.
Writers of all periods make allusions — none more than contemporary writers. The lyrics of hip-hop, rap, and metal music are full of allusions. A brief perusal of Rage Against the Machine’s album Evil Empire reveals references to Jacqueline Onassis, NBC, ABC, General Electric, Disney, and Aztec mythology. Rap artists refer constantly to one another, to the names of cities, TV shows, films, and pop stars and celebrities.
Here is the distinguished chemist and poet Roald Hoffman, in a passage from his list poem “Deceptively Like a Solid.” Even the title is an allusion, because the poem concerns glass, which is a liquid deceptively like a solid. The poem ends in a spasm of allusions, all having to do with glass:
If you really want to know this poem, you’ll get busy tracking down these allusions. “Chartres, Rouen, Amiens” is a list of three great Gothic cathedrals in France; each one has a magnificent stained-glass window. And “the Palomar mirror” refers to a huge reflecting mirror created for a giant telescope at Hale Observatory on Mt. Palomar in California. Like the cathedrals’ windows, the Palomar mirror is an astonishing thing done with glass.
Tracking down allusions makes the experience richer, and you’ll be that much better informed about glass, about this poem, and about the world if you do the legwork.
Music: What You Hear, Feel, and See
When people talk about poetry, they use some of the same terminology that they use when they talk about music. For example, a line of poetry is a group of words printed as a unit on the page — usually on the same physical level. Here’s one line from Shakespeare:
And two lines from Jack Spicer:
People also speak of numbers of lines as units. Two lines are a couplet; usually we use this word to refer to two lines in the same form, like these two from John Milton’s “L’Allegro”:
Come and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe
They also speak of tercets (three lines), quatrains (four), cinquains (five), sestets (six), septets (seven), and octaves (eight).
Just as in music, a stanza is a group of lines arranged as a unit. The most familiar kinds of stanzas are those the poet repeats in exactly the same form again and again, as in Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
But the word stanza can also refer to any group of lines considered as a unit — not just those that have a repeated form.
Finally, the word music is used to denote the sounds and rhythms in a poem. In the following sections, we separate music into these elements:
The sounds of words
Rhyme (which is the echoing or repetition of sounds)
The rhythms of lines
Orchestrating sound
Poets are supremely conscious of the physical properties of words — their length in letters and syllables, and even their length in time (how long it takes to say them); their vowels, consonants, and ease or difficulty of pronunciation. Poets know what sorts of sounds are smooth and sweet, and which are clotted and ugly. When sounds are pleasant together, it is referred to as euphony; when they are uncomfortable, rough, or ugly, it is called dissonance.
Poets are famous for writing beautiful, sweet-sounding verse — and they should be. Here are six lines of pleasing sounds from “The Garden” by the 17th-century English poet Andrew Marvell. The speaker finds himself in a beautiful garden:
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
Listen for the vowels in the first line: “What wondrous life is this I lead!” Many readers find the vowels light and delightful. This line is a good example of euphony. Marvell chose the vowels on purpose to create this lovely scene of a rich garden offering itself to the inhabitant. The phrase “luscious clusters of the vine,” with its u and s and sh sounds, is truly luscious!
Here are three lines of very ugly sounds from Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower.” Swfit is describing all the garbage swept up in a flood that washes through London:
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Can you hear the crowded, ugly pile of consonants (ng, g, bl) in phrases such as “dung, guts, and blood”? Swift wants you to be disgusted, and he uses these sounds to reinforce that effect. Poets sometimes actually want poems to sound ugly when ugliness is appropriate — as, for example, in describing war, suffering . . . or city trash. These three lines are a great example of dissonance.
The poet’s challenge is to orchestrate the sound properties of words. So in a poem, you’ll find patterns of sounds, repetitions, or combinations — all of which are there because the poet brought them together in that specific way.
Alliteration
When a particular consonant sound is repeated in a passage of verse, it’s called alliteration. (Some people use this word to mean repetition of the same sound at the beginnings of neighboring words, but we use it more generally.)
Read the following lines from Jackson Mac Low’s poem “Antic Quatrains”:
Granados labeled a gateleg table stable
As droll goaltenders tensed at tenebrist rites
See and hear all the l and t sounds in this passage? That’s alliteration (the repetition of the same sounds).
Assonance
When the same vowel sound is repeated in a group of neighboring words, it’s called assonance. Listen for the assonance in Barbara Guest’s poem “Red Lilies”:
snow erupts from thistle
to toe; the snow pours out of you.
Repeat Guest’s lines and feel and hear — especially in the second line — the deep vowels roll slowly over and over.
How alliteration and assonance work together
Just seeing alliteration and assonance is one step; the next is seeing how these patterns connect to the poem’s meaning and its impact on you. The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind” portrays the wildness of the spring wind, largely through its use of sound. Listen to these lines, in which he addresses the wind:
Thou, on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean
Spectacular pictures of the clouds, the sky, the storms, and winds. But what makes those images physical are the alliteration and assonance. Hear all those s and sh sounds? Those sounds are like the ones the wind makes. And different o sounds seem to dominate, although the second line gives a spasm of long e noises. Shelley adores this wind as a worshiper would adore a wild god, and the wildness and divinity come through in wind noises to accompany his ecstatic images.
The whole poem is available in hundreds of anthologies of poetry.
Recognizing the varieties of rhyme
Rhyme is the repetition of a sound; it’s an echo. In English, the most familiar kind of rhyme is called perfect rhyme, in which the echo is fairly exact, as in moose and noose, floss and moss, and sting and ring. The most familiar place for the occurrence of rhyme is at the ends of lines, which is called end rhyme.
End rhyme is what you hear in the Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion’s “When to Her Lute Corinna Sings”:
When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear
End rhyme helps organize poetry. It helps make it musical, songlike, and memorable. But there’s more: Rhyme very often helps carry out what the verse is doing. Corinna sings; we hear the strings revive. The ing sound that was in sings comes back around in the ing sound of strings, so the poem is doing exactly what it’s describing: Corinna’s voice really is reviving the strings. In the last two lines, her voice is made to appear, and it is like an echo, clear, just like the rhyme. Was Campion just lucky? No, he wrote the poem to have these effects.
Rhyme isn’t just an echo. Often it’s how the poet gives a physical impact to the pictures he is trying to create in your mind.
Many kinds of rhyme are not as exact as perfect rhyme. They tease and tickle the ear with almost-likeness. Many varieties of rhymes almost echo, but not quite. Poets can rhyme only the final consonant sounds in the accented syllable of a word, as in amaze and freeze; this technique is often called slant, near, or partial rhyme. Poets may rhyme only the vowel of two words, as in nose and mope; this technique is called vowel rhyme. And in English, which has wacky spelling, poets can rhyme words that look as though they should rhyme even though in fact they don’t, like bough and tough; this technique is called sight rhyme.
The names of these techniques are less important than the effects the poets use them to achieve. Good readers look for those effects and watch how poets achieve them. And good writers master the sounds of their chosen language to have full mastery of rhyme.
Emily Dickinson was quite an experimenter with rhyme:
I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Alcohol and pearl share that final l sound, and their final vowel sounds, although not the same, are close enough for a very interesting effect.
Rhyme is an echo. And such echoes can come anywhere in a line of poetry; they don’t have to come only at the end of the line. Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” features several lines in which there is internal rhyme — that is, rhyme occurring within lines, as well as at the ends: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary. . . .”
When reading poetry, watch for the poet’s use of echoing sounds. In Poe’s line, the rhyme is there for more than just pretty noise. The adjective modifying midnight rhymes with the adjective modifying I, which links the dreary night with the weary speaker.
Feeling rhythm and measuring meter
Rhythm is the patterns of stresses in a line of verse. When you speak, you stress some syllables and leave others unstressed. When you string a lot of words together, you start seeing patterns. Even in that last sentence, you can hear them:
When you string a lot of words together, you start seeing patterns.
Rhythm is a natural thing. It’s in everything you say and write, even if you don’t intend for it to be.
Traditional forms of verse use preestablished rhythmic patterns called meters.
The word meter means measure in Greek, and that’s what meters are — premeasured patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Much of English poetry is written in lines that string together one or more feet (individual rhythmical units). Feet are the individual building blocks of meter. Here are the most common feet, the rhythms they represent, and an example of that rhythm.
Anapest: duh-duh-DUH, as in but of course!
Dactyl: DUH-duh-duh, as in honestly
Iamb: duh-DUH, as in collapse
Trochee: DUH-duh, as in pizza
To build a line of verse, poets can string together repetitions of one of these feet. Such repetitions are named as follows:
1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
So the famous iambic pentameter is a string of five iambs, as in Christopher Marlowe’s line from Dr. Faustus:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
Duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH
Here you’ll notice that there are five unstressed syllables alternating with five stressed — in other words, five duh-DUHs.As you read more poetry, you’ll start to recognize feet and meters.
Rhythm is not the same as meter. The difference between rhythm and meter is the difference between the beat of a song and the rhythms played over that beat.
To see the difference between rhythm and meter, take a look at Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
This is a sonnet — 14 lines written in iambic pentameter. It also has an interesting rhyme scheme, which we’ve marked out at the end of every line. The poem has two quatrains in an ABBA rhyme scheme, and a sestet rhyming CDCDCD. Writing a poem like this is hard, because the poet has to come up with four rhymes for two of her chosen sounds. A couple of the rhymes — grace and ways; faith and breath — are inexact. Browning is playing with your ear, inviting you to delight in the difference between what you expect (perfect rhyme) and what she gives you (just this side of perfect).
Now take a look at the meter and how it compares to the rhythm. Iambic pentameter goes like this:
Duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH
Apply that to the very first line of the poem:
How do I love thee let me count the ways
A robot may say it that way. But reading it like this is more natural:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
The first foot, which we expect to be duh-DUH, gets reversed into DUH-duh. You can do that; there’s no rule against it. In fact, poets make substitutions like that throughout a metered line. What Browning is doing is varying the rhythm. Iambic pentameter is in the background, as steady as the beat in a song, but Browning is playing natural rhythms over the meter, just as a jazz soloist will play all sorts of different riffs and rhythms over a steady beat.
Certainly, this poem has lines that adhere closely to the iambic pentameter, such as this one:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
Although, you could read that line like this:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
Can you feel the emotional difference between the two? Those two strong stresses in love thee truly sell the notion that the speaker loves the beloved.
Consider this way of reading line 4:
For the ends of being and ideal grace
It’s still an iambic pentameter line. You can’t read it
For the ends of being and ideal grace
The first way is more natural. That first foot is actually an anapest (duh-duh-DUH) substituted for the iamb. You don’t necessarily need to know that — only hear the beat of the iambic pentameter meter behind the spoken rhythms of the poem.
Browning ends some of her lines with commas or periods, which we call end-stopped lines, but she also runs some sentences right over into the next line without intervening punctuation, as in:
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints
That is called enjambment — the practice of continuing a phrase or clause from one line to the next without intervening punctuation. You expect to pause at the end of each line, but Browning tugs you irresistibly into the next. Poets use enjambment to pull you into all manner of surprises — for example, the echo of lose with lost. Enjambment is a way to emphasize words and phrases, create tension, or lead the reader around the end of one line to a realization or discovery in the next one — as in “With my lost saints.”
Browning is working with rhyme and rhythm along with the words and images she’s orchestrating. The music is part of the words but also a world, so to speak, underneath the words, a physical world of sound and stress. Browning knows what rhythm and music do to you, and she uses them to elicit certain feelings and responses in you.
As a reader, sharpen your sensitivity to music and rhythm. Watch how poets use the words as well as the world under the words.
The Shape of the Poem: Visual Rhythm
Visual rhythm is a poem’s shape and the physical length of its lines. Much of the way you feel about a poem has to do with that shape, the ins and outs of its lines. So in reading a poem, you’re not only trying to figure out its sense (what it’s saying), and not only taking account the music and rhythm and how they contribute to the meaning, you’re also taking into account the visual aspects of the poem — the way it looks, its shape, the way lines and words are arranged on the page. That, too, has a lot to contribute to the poem’s impact on you.
Consider these lines from “Death” by George Herbert:
A long line contracts to a shorter line, which opens to a slightly longer line, a little less indented, and then back to a long line. The two shorter lines seem enclosed in the longer ones, and you’re invited to expand and contract your attention along with the lines.
See how the first line, containing the “uncouth, hideous thing,” contracts to “Nothing but bones,” as though it were a body decomposing?
Visual rhythm is supremely important in open-form verse, in which the poet sculpts each line to its perfect length. George Oppen, one of the finest of the Objectivist poets, handles the visual rhythms of these lines from “Psalm” with almost unbearable sensitivity. His theme is deer and the natural world:
Oppen, a master of white space, goes from a very short line, much indented, to a much longer one, perhaps giving the sense of how deer paths wander through the fields. (Note the motion of the enjambment in “Their paths / Nibbled thru the fields,” which makes you follow the clause around the end of the line all the way back to the word Nibbled, as if you were following a path, too.) The stanza contracts to “Of sun,” concentrating your imagination on the sun (he actually makes you look right at it) and how it illuminates distance. The small nouns, three small words, are isolated away from the other lines, again redirecting your attention to the words of which this poem is made. Again and again, the shape of the poem guides your understanding and experience, both of what the words are saying, and of the very words as objects in and of themselves.
Oppen uses enjambment to keep you unraveling the sentence all the way to the end and the final image. Constantly, he moves you in and out, left and right. That visual rhythm lends dramatic wonder to the poem.
We give you an arsenal of new terms, new ways into poetry, in this chapter. You’ll get better at using them — as both a reader and a writer — the more you practice.