See Yourself Series
Sounds in Poetry. 1
Use of Sound in Poetry Part 1.
Poets use words not only for connotation and meaning but also to utilise their sounds to make patterns.
Sound is the most basic element of language. We learn to speak long before we learn to read or write, and the emotional response we have to sound is programmed in to our psyche very early on, during our pre-verbal development.
Because sound is made by the movement of air in response to muscular activity, speech and poetry are not just intellectual acts, but physical ones. When you read a poem aloud you are not just hearing the words and interpreting the stories, your whole body is involved in producing the sounds required to deliver the poem.
When reading a poem, your brain accesses both your knowledge of language, your knowledge of the sounds made by that language, and your previous experiences of sensations and feelings. Whatever you write, therefore, has sound. People hear your words in their heads, and so the sounds you create can draw people’s attention to your message.
“I may write in silence but my words will always be heard” – Marie Summers
Poets use a range of musical and figurative devices to achieve their effects. Some of these effects relate to the rhythm and metre of the words.
We use the sound of individual letters as well as the way we pronounce, read and decode the hieroglyphics of writing and speech.
Alliteration the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words are utilised as sound effects by poets.
Sweet birds sang
Susie picked seahells on the seashore.
Why do we write and why do folks read
Why is poetry an endangered breed?
When In a world of buy one – get one free
When fast furious games accompany life’s grand prix.
If you look at the four lines above you will note that not only have I repeated sounds at the beginning of some words I have used vowel sounds that are the same.
I have the i sound sprinkled along the lines
y sounds like i
why(i) write
why (i )
line three has repetition of the w … also o
world one
So this little poem is constructed to sound good to the ear… your brain loves patterns, those repeat sounds helps add a sort of rhyme that adds musicality.
The repetition of vowel sounds is called Assonance.
Onomatopoeia
The formation of a word from a sound associated with an action, object or thing or naturally associated with it’s properties such as plop, click, buzz, splat, hiss are attempts at imitating a sound. The interesting question is do these imitations, influence the meaning of the other words that they are combined with when we write or talk. Do onomatopoeic words throw up pictures in our minds, send our minds on a chase for other word associations.
In addition to the sounds they represent, many onomatopoeic words have developed meanings of their own. The word whisper not only represents the breathiness of people talking quietly but also describes the action of people talking quietly.
Snippets of Life
Pauses in poetry
Rhythmic pauses in poetry
The caesura plural caesurae.
It can be used in poetry and prose.
This literary device involves creating a break of a breath within a line where the two separate parts are distinguishable from one another yet intrinsically linked together. The purpose of using a caesura is to create a dramatic pause, which has a strong impact. The pause helps to add an emotional, or theatrical touch to the line and conveys a depth of sentiment in a short phrase.
Everyone speaks, and everyone breathes while speaking. For instance, when you say, “Josh has done his assignment,” you take breath or make a pause before further saying, “But Gideon did not.” Then again you take a little breath and say, “He ran out of ink.” Such pauses come from the natural rhythm of your speech.
Poetry also uses pauses in its lines. It uses them to indicate how a piece should be read, to help rhythm and speed and sense.
A comma, semi colon, full stop, dash, double space ellipse or exclamation mark often in the middle of a line would indicate a caesura.
In metrical poetry the caesura can be used as unstressed syllable.
Even if a caesura is not marked by punctuation, poets use the natural breaths and intonations of speech to get the rhythm right. Word choice is extremely important to get the intonation right to speed and slow reading, to heighten, reduce emotion.
How we speak using caesura
Caesura on the whole are not big pauses you are not going to pause for 3 seconds just slightly longer than normal speech transmission.
Like everything in speech caesura come in various degrees longer or shorter. Sometimes a caesura happens as we lengthen the syllables in one word as we speak.
If we look at the lines
‘Death, only death, can break the lasting chains ‘
We say the first death sharply and crisply then the second as deathhh. Say it out loud try it.
Examples of caesura
In the children’s verse, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence,’ the caesura occurs in the middle of each line:
‘Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.’
This caesura this pause would remain even without the coma its a natutal space to breathe.
In this piece there is no visable caesura but some occur naturally through word choice and speech patterns.
‘Do you wonder at the why of life
Heed the truth kick the doubt.’
Sometimes Caesura occur near the beginning of a line, for emphasis, not at a place we would normally pause for breath, unless our speech was dramatic or we wanted our listener to really tune in.
For example, in the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Mother and Poet’, the caesura occurs after the very first word of the poem:
‘Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east’
Sometimes poets use more than caesura in a line as in
Shakespeares Hamlet.
‘To be, or not to be — that is the question…’
Here there is a short pause with the coma but a longer more dramatic pause on the dash.
Sometimes near the end of a line.
‘Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!’
This stanza from John Ashbery’s poem “Our Youth” gives a more modern example of caesura using three different types of punctuation: ellipsis in the first two lines, a period in the third, and finally a comma in the fourth.
Blue hampers . . . Explosions,
Ice . . . The ridiculous
Vases of porphyry. All that our youth
Can’t use, that it was created for.
How we mark caesura in scansion
If we are analysing poetry we mark a caesura with ll called a double pipe.
Why use caesurae
Writers use caesurae to create variation in the rhythm of a poem, or to emphasize words in the middle of lines that might not otherwise receive attention. Since line breaks in poetry tend to serve as a natural pause regardless of whether the lines are end-stopped with punctuation, the rhythm of poems with lines of equal length can become somewhat monotonous and unvaried without the use of caesurae to create pauses in the middle of lines. The use of caesurae also allows writers to formulate their thoughts and images using more complex sentence structures with different clauses and a freer use of punctuation than is possible without the use of caesurae.
Check out caesurae in poetry and see how they work.
There are technical names for the different types of caesura you can look them up but to me it is important you understand the idea and ways to use pauses in lines. Technical terminology is not as important in the short term.
Samantha Beardon.
See yourself series.
Writing Love Poetry
Want to write love poems? Unless you are writing to give to a specific person you need to find an edge a new angle. Telling someone you love them they are perfect has been so overdone that it is boring. You need a new angle, so much of love poetry has been overdone it has become hackneyed and clichéd.
Don’t reach for a host of clichés to describe your love, think about going back to the emotions you want to portray that you want to hook your reader into. Does the reader want to hear I love you because you are perfect, I love you because you are beautiful, will they care? The sun and moon are in love with you – really? I will die without you.
Probably not! Most readers know in truth we are imperfect human beings and we love other imperfect human beings and it is sometimes those imperfections that make us love or endear that person to us. We all know that love is not perfect that love is a roller coaster! (cliche) That the first flush of romantic love changes to something different and deeper. That love isn’t roses and champagne it might be be there are tensions, obstacles and its the handling of them that is the fulcrum of a lasting love.
Poetry is not a fairy story its also not about how we feel – its perhaps about how we feel about what we feel.
Poetry should have some authencity and many love poems fail because they are flights of fancy with no basis in fact. If your love poem is going to appeal to the reader as a perfect dream as the fantasy they wish love was then it’s got to work exceptionally well like the best love songs that stay in your head and make you yearn for that undefinable something.
Like any good poem a love poem needs to hook the reader and hold them, excite them. Telling the reader my heart gallops when I see him/her, I would die for her will most likely have your reader thinking ‘whatever’ and moving on, it would not make them give it to everyone to read, they wouldn’t wake in the night thinking of your lines and this dear poet is the essence of a great poet.
All good poetry needs an unfolding story, it might be a tiny moment in time but it should unfold take the reader somewhere. Readers need to connect to the narrator, or the subject of the poem. If someone is being adored I want to know why what is it about that person, if they are beautiful I want to know what that means. The reader needs to care.
Read some great love poetry.
See yourself Series
See yourself series
Let’s read and discuss poetry
Lets Read and discuss Poetry
Ode to a Nightingale
BY JOHN KEATS
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Check out his use of the senses.
The language in this is difficult because it was written in the early 1800s but if you can get past that it has much to offer as a piece.
Keats was looking at immortality and death. The death in his poem was related to consumption (TUBERCULOSIS). A disease with no cure in his time. We now have a parallel with Corona Virus.
Appropriate for a poem inspired by the sound of birdsong, there is much onomatopoeia in the poem. It is used to create a variety of moods. Notice how the harsh ‘t’ and ‘k’ of ‘heart aches’ and heavy ‘d’ and ‘p’ sounds at the beginning of the ode suggest the weightiness of Keats’ dreary mood. (Josh Pampam)
There is an obvious contrast with the light sounds in the second half of the opening stanza with words such as ‘light-winged Dryad’. The joy associated with the nightingale’s song is musically suggested by the repetition of the long ‘ee’ sounds of ‘beechen’, ‘green’ and ‘ease’.
The tone is difficult to pin down, making some readers unsure whether the poem is escapist or one which urges us to accept the human condition with all its suffering and uncertainty this could be about ‘dreaming room’ what do you think?
Feel the difference in mood and tempo between stanzas 2 and 3 think about he achieved that is it something you could use in the future?
Look at the juxtaposition of ideas in the poem.
Contrasting his personal unhappiness with the freedom of the nightingale.
He opens the poem with personal unhappiness versus the freedom of the nightingale.
Writing Poetry.
Poetry a Passion
We all love to write poetry but it is much more than scribbling words out of your head.
Poetry is writing using concentrated language to make specific emotional responses through meaning sound and rhythm.
To write exemplary poetry as opposed to ok poetry one needs to understand those elements… the ability to manipulate language, how words and syllables create sound and how to work with these – the rythmic quality of speech and of life.
So here are some thoughts on what you as poets need to do to write good poetry.
Tap into your own feelings and emotions
Poets instil parts of their psyche their beliefs and feelings into their poetry. If people don’t bring their emotions and passions then I tend not to be terribly interested in what they’re saying it ceases often to be authentic.
I don’t mean to say that they are writing bad poems, but those aren’t the poems that I like most. The poems I most like are where the heart of the poem is a very emotional one, where the warmth of strong feeling is very powerfully present. I think poetry is an emotional form and when it isn’t that, I’m not very interested in it
Write about subjects that matter to you
Choose subjects that interest you, you understand or you are prepared to research.
But if you want to write about love, death, sadness you need to find a new angle.
The best poems get written, not by going in the front door of the subject, but round the back or down the chimney or through the window.
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ said Emily Dickinson and that’s always been a very important remark.
Don’t try to imagine how someone else feels about something you can’t and it will come across as crass or mawkish.Write from a different viewpoint.
Celebrate the ordinary and be choosy
Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary. What we very badly need to remember is that the things right under our noses are extraordinary, fascinating, irreplaceable, profound and just kind of marvellous.
Look at the things around you and relish stuff that can lose its glow by being familiar. In fact, looking afresh at familiar things is a very important part of what poetry can do.
If you can, be choosy about what you do, so that the things you do write are the things that you do best.
Use everything in your toolbox
It is important to bear in mind that as poets we have a kind of toolbox, in which there are all kinds of different pieces of equipment, not available to any other kind of writer or at least not used in the same way
That means understanding words, their connotations, their sounds and relationships. It means understanding musicality and rhythm.It means understanding vowels and syllables and the sounds they generate.
Converging Lives. Sounds, Silence and Imagery 