Introduction

Tone: It’s an Attitude

Rhythm

Rhyme

Other Sound Effects

Your Turn

How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?

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• It’s the rhythm, the beat, the way the words flow.

What makes it so easy to remember the hundreds of lyrics to your favorite songs?

How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?

• It’s powerful words arranged in the best order.

• It’s the strongest line—repeated for emphasis.

Poets, like songwriters, use rhythm, rhyme, and repetition to convey meaning and tone.

Tone: It’s an Attitude

Tone is the speaker’s attitude toward his or her subject or audience:

Tone is created by many verbal elements, including sounds and word choice.

To understand a poem’s meaning, you must first catch its tone.

playful or serious, joyous or sad, mournful or humorous.

All language has rhythm, but rhythm is especially important in poetry.

Rhythm is the musical quality produced by repeated sound patterns.

Rhythm

•Meter is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in the words poets put together.

The most obvious kind of rhythm is a regular pattern or beat called meter.

Rhythm: Meter

Can you hear the beat in the lines above?

There are strange things done in the midnight sunBy the men who moil for gold;The Arctic trails have their secret talesThat would make your blood run cold. . . .

from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service

Rhythm: Meter

If a poet decides to write lines with a regular beat, the lines will usually be of the same length and have the same number of syllables.

How many syllables are in each line above?

Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .

“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats. . . .”

• Read each line of the poem aloud.

Scanning is a way of marking a poem’s meter.

Rhythm: Scanning

• Mark each stressed syllable with the symbol ’.

• Mark each unstressed syllable with the symbol ˘.

Scanning a poem is easier than you might think:

“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats. . . .”’ ’ ’ ’

’ ’ ’ ’ ’

’“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .”˘ ˘ ˘ ˘’ ’ ’ ’

’ ˘ ˘˘ ˘’ ’ ’ ’

’

Read these scanned lines aloud, and listen for the beat:

Rhythm: Scanning

Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .”˘ ˘ ˘ ˘’ ’ ’ ’

’ ˘ ˘˘ ˘’ ’ ’ ’

’

• emphasize the tone of a poem—for example, the poem’s seriousness or humor

Words rhyme when they end with the same vowel or vowel-consonant sound.

Rhyme

dove

Rhyme can

• help convey the poem’s meaning

love winter splinter

Rhyme

Rhyme is often very simple: moth / cloth

Other rhyming words are more complicated: antelope / cantaloupe

Sometimes more than one word is needed to complete half of a rhyming pair.

“Ah,” says Zookeeper Jones—at seeing his clock a’ two—

“already again we need to feed that loudmouthed cockatoo.”

Most rhymes are end rhymes: The last word in one line is paired with the last word in another line.

Rhyme: End Rhyme

Land where my fathers died,Land of the Pilgrim’s prideFrom ev’ry mountainside,

What are the end rhymes in these lines?

Rhyme: Internal Rhyme

Sometimes the last word in one line will be echoed by a word at the beginning or in the middle of the next line.

My country ’tis of thee,Sweet land of liberty,Of thee I sing;

This is called internal rhyme.

Rhyme: Rhyme Scheme

The pattern of rhyming sounds at the ends of lines in a poem is the rhyme scheme.

To mark the rhyme scheme, use the same letter to identify each word with the same rhyme.

My country ’tis of thee,Sweet land of liberty,Of thee I sing;Land where my fathers died,Land of the pilgrim’s prideFrom ev’ry mountain side,Let freedom ring.

aab

b

cc

c

A poet might also decide not to use a regular meter or rhyme scheme.

Poems made up of loose groupings of words and phrases are called free verse.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complainsof my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

Rhyme: Free Verse

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Rhythm and rhyme are forms of repetition.

Other Sound Effects: Repetition and Refrain

• Ending sounds repeat to create rhymes.

• Beats repeat to create rhythm.

Sometimes a poet may also use a refrain—the repetition of a word, phrase, line, or group of lines.

A refrain can emphasize a key idea and help create rhythm.

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together.

Alliteration often occurs at the beginning of a word.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Sometimes it is also within or at the end of a word. Can you hear all the /s/ and /sh/ sounds in this tongue twister?

Other Sound Effects: Alliteration

She sells seashells by the seashore.

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Quick Check1. Is this poem rhymed or unrhymed?

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;Close to the sun in lonely lands,Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

2. Does the poem have end rhymes?

3. Does the poem have internal rhymes?

How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?

Quick Check4. Find two examples of alliteration in the poem.

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;Close to the sun in lonely lands,Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

5. Does this poem have a regular meter, or is it more like conversation?

How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?

Quick Check6. Give two reasons this poem is not free verse.

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;Close to the sun in lonely lands,Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?

Your Turn

Tone may be humorous, sarcastic, sad, joyful, playful, and so on.

1. Choose a favorite song. First, explain what the song means—what is its message?

2. Next, identify the way the songwriter uses sound effects.

3. Finally, describe the tone of the song. How do the sounds of the song reinforce its tone and meaning?

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Analyze Sounds, Tone, and Meaning

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