Lately I have found myself, and once again, thinking along similar lines. Your title starts out this way: sound makes sense. The vector I’ve taken is maybe slightly different: sound bodies out sense. Somebody has mentioned Saussure and the modernist or post-modernist (or whatever) linguistic critique of poetry and, for lack of a better term, word value. I confess I tend to find the linguist’s critique of poetry lacking, since, reductive. What I mean is that poetry ain’t just a bundle of little particulated out packets of energy. But this is old news. Charles Olson stated the case well enough back in 1950, or was it ’51, when he talked about the field energy poetry creates.

There is, as you suggest, a sound-sense poetry effects. The logic of which brings us all back to early English poetry, or before the language got Continentalized following that famous invasion of England in 1066. (I do still love the alliterative Green Knight poem and the even older Anglo-Saxon Seafarer poem.) But this is an aside.

What you say is true. Sound makes sense. To paraphrase Eliot in a twisted sort of way, it just might be the poetry sense that passeth understanding, nes pas? And so I’ve been coming back to Hopkins lately and again. Specifically, to his ideas concerning sprung rhythm involving the hovering stresses, and lines roved over, and those delightful outrides gluing one line to the next quietly. This is not the stuff your article speaks to exactly. You talk about sound making sense. I guess I figure that, rhythmically, sound bodies out sense too.

Terreson
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Is this not cultural? Long ago, I hired a brass quintet for my wedding ceremony. My mother and I went to listen to them play so we could all decide on which pieces of music to use. They played what they thought would be good. All of it was in minor keys. My mom and I were looking at each other thinking, this all sounds like dirges. We suggested maybe the musicians could play stuff in major keys. They said okay, but looked flummoxed. Later I figured out, duh, they happened to be Jewish musicians, and that was they type of music that would normally be played at a Jewish wedding, and it obviously wasn’t meant to be sad. So I wonder here about nature vs nurture in finding minor keys sad.
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This was, indeed, my mission. “Windfall” is actually written as a prose block. Make what you want of that. The point was that a student in a POETRY class came to me trying to heighten the power of his own POEMS. As I wrote about the experience on the POETRY foundation website I wanted to talk about the pleasure of watching someone familiarize himself with the powerful, musical potential of written LANGUAGE as several poets employed it in poetry that didn’t need a soundtrack. Sure, great language shows up in prose all the time. Great musicians can also be great lyricists and great poets can also sometimes enlist actual musical instruments. I’m not refuting any of those facts.
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Precisely.

Thank you.

Thomas
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Same with “the lengths of her sentences and phrases” and “her choice and arrangement of words.” Syntax, sentence rhythm, and diction are all just as operative in prose as in poetry.

So Camille was really awakening the student to the power of effective literary writing, rather than to the power of poetry per se.

Is that a correct interpretation, Thomas?
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Let me get this straight.

You reject, then, what Camille says about how ‘my tongue seemed to grow thick and slow just as we came upon the overgrown pond’?

Here’s her whole paragraph:

“Talking about the poem afterwards, we noted the section of “Windfall” when Kelly introduces us to the density of the landscape she explores: “No one tends the land now. The fences have fallen and the deer grown thick, and the pond lies black, the water slowly thickening, the banks tangled with weeds and grasses.” When I’d spoken the poem to him, he was aware of the fact that my tongue seemed to grow thick and slow just as we came upon the overgrown pond. From the lengths of her sentences and phrases down to her choice and arrangement of words, Kelly dictates how I move through her lines.”

Are you saying words like ‘thickening’ and ‘tangled’ do not make the tongue slow down?

‘Loose, slippery, slide, slip, etc’ (The ‘s’ sound literally has the tongue ‘slide’ in one’s mouth)

‘Stop, stump, stunted, stuck, still, etc’ (The ‘t’ sound after the ‘s’ literally ‘stops’ the tongue.)

Sure, there are many exceptions, but what I (and Camille) have noted is not really that unusual.

My chief point was that prose makes as much use of this phenomeon as poetry does.

Thomas
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And some musicians use poetry to sustain their music:
Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday” comes to mind.

Imagine (no pun intended) if they had released that song (“Yesterday”) with its original verse, “Ham and Eggs.”

There is an excellent book about how the English language developed called The Stories of English by David Crystal.

“English is often called an “agglomerative” language, which means it has absorbed words from many different languages. Those words often kept the spelling of their original language, but have come to be pronounced differently (often because English speakers were unaware of the correct pronunciation after a word’s introduction).”

and the Smithsonian has an onging project (for younger students of poetry) regarding this:

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/music_in_poetry/index.html

Didn’t Vachel Lindsay come pretty close to developing the music of the word in “The Congo”?

“Walk with care, walk with care,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.
Beware, beware, walk with care,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay,
BOOM
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Camille,

I just want to make a very small point.

The passage you quoted from Kelly’s “Windfall” features words such as ‘thick,’ ‘thickening,’ ‘banks’ and ‘tangled. ’ There is a whole science of how word-origins and word-sounds correspond to physical properties which those words describe. It is unique to *words* like ‘thickening’ and ‘tangled’ that they sound like what they describe; you aren’t *really* describing a function of Kelly’s *poetry* then; it is not her *poetry* that makes a swamp seem thick; it is the word ‘thick’ that makes the swamp seem ‘thick.’ I know that poets need all the help they can get these days, but Kelly describing a swamp in *prose* would likely choose the same words as Kelly describing a swamp in her *poetry*—there’s no difference, really, and yet you may be giving your students the false idea that it is the poetry which is performing this marvel. Poets can use these words skillfully, but there’s nothing preventing the writer of prose from doing exactly the same thing.

The verse of Hardy, of course, is a different matter.

Thomas
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Minor keys sound melancholy for purely mathematical reasons: the harmonic ratios of minor chords are slightly less proportional than their major counterparts. The key phrase is ‘slightly less proportional,’ for the discord of sadness has no existence except has a slight, or minor, falling off in relation to happiness. Melancholy is actually sweeter than happiness, and thus “minor chord music” can sweep one away almost like a drug addiction; in fact, all aspects of human psychology and human sense experience and human addiction manifest themselves in music. This is why music can sound more profound than our actual selves, even though we are talking about a combination of a few discrete sounds. It’s quite amazing, really. D major sounds ‘happy’ and D minor sounds ‘sad,’ but now it makes the mind reel to think, ‘wait a minute, D major is ‘happy?’ That’s absurd! How can a *chord* be ‘happy?’ Such contemplation takes us over a magic threshold into a wonderfully solid-yet-liquid symbolism.

Thomas
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You might find this web site intriguing:

http://www.library.yale.edu/~mkoth/keychar.htm

–CTD
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