On Sound in Poetry

Poetry and music have a long history with one another. In Ancient Greece, for example, poetry was always accompanied by an instrument, typically a lyre—that’s where we get the phrase “lyric poetry” from. Other fun facts: a “sonnet” is a “little song,” and poetry forms like the aubade or the ghazal started as types of songs. Did you know Samuel Taylor Coleridge also composed music? Or that Leonard Cohen has several poetry books?

Why does any of this matter? Because poetry is, inherently, a musical form. Contemporary poets might not rely on instruments and vocals, but they do compose poetry through the musicality of language itself.

Let’s take a closer look at the power of sound in poetry.

Want more craft tips? Be the first to receive our writing advice in your inbox.

Close Study: “The Sciences Sing a Lullaby” by Albert Goldbarth

Retrieved from Poets.org.

This delightful, imaginative poem has so much happening at both the language and structural levels. At the language level, the poem sings like a lullaby, reconfiguring the natural world as metaphors for wakefulness. Don’t you just love the phrase “dancing the shimmy in silver shoes”? I can even see my genes tap dancing their way into new cells as they split down the center. And those final two lines, their cadence and rhyme, tuck me so quietly into bed, I might fall asleep writing this sentence.

At the structural level, the play with the sciences both scaffolds the poem and helps connect the universal to the particular. If the poem didn’t have the “[science] says” anaphora at play, the poem could still function beautifully on its own. But the poem here is making science intimate. It’s saying: even something as private as falling asleep echoes throughout the sciences. It is no different than the shifting of tectonic plates, the motion of the Earth, or the circadian rhythms of fish, gazelle, and atoms inside your cells. There’s something comforting about how this poem connects our lonely lives to the world around us, so much so that science, clinical and impersonal as it seems, agrees.

(Also, it’s no mistake that the final “science” is actually a field in the humanities. What do you think the speaker means by equating history with science?)

Many great poems connect the personal to the universal in both linguistic and structural ways. How can you play with structure in your own poetry to achieve this? This month, try writing a poem about something outside of yourself—the sciences, the arts, smells, colors, the oceans, the gridded streets of Savannah, GA, the Fibonacci sequence, etc. Help us understand one another through something outside of, but not disconnected from, ourselves.

Craft Perspective: “Sound Clusters” by Gregory Orr

Poetry is a sonic art. We cannot expect to move or delight the reader—or ourselves!—if we aren’t carefully attuned to the possibilities of sound in language. Many of the best poets use sound to replicate the topics and emotions of their poetry, and no study of verse is complete without understanding tools like consonance & assonance, euphony & cacophony, percussive consonants, sibilance, meter, rhyme, and even the effects of long versus short vowels.

Take, for example, Albert Goldbarth’s poem above. The poem uses sound like a lullaby does, with sounds that shush, soothe, slow, lilt, and murmur. Few words, if any, in the poem are loud and percussive. There’s no cracking, no explosive plosive, no whips or pows or words that strike the reader.

Conversely, take this excerpt from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

This is an example of cacophony—notice all the hard k and g sounds jostling against one another. The effect is language that’s deliberately loud and in your face. Lyrical, certainly, though not altogether pleasant.

Attunement to language’s sounds and possibilities is a lifelong study for any poet. A great place to start is to read poetry aloud. Words spoken only in our heads lack dimension: they have no shape, no space, no material reality. When we speak a poem, we slow ourselves down, allowing language to occupy our bodies, to be felt where we need to feel it.

Here’s Gregory Orr’s essay, which includes a craft exercise for all poets: https://www.pw.org/content/sound_clusters

Resources on Sound in Poetry

Here are some resources on using sound in poetry:

• https://writers.com/literary-devices-in-poetry
• https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry
• https://writers.com/onomatopoeia-definition-and-examples