Poetry Requires Musicality

That which is often passed off as poetry is something else.

Skywards. Photograph by Richard Kuslan Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved

You can listen to this essay as you read along with me.

Poetry requires musicality.  What many pass off as poetry is not poetry, but something else, because its writer has evaded his poetic duty by eliding at least one of its requirements -- form, meter and rhyme; but every example lacks musicality.   

What differentiates poetry from prose, conversation or even rhetorical discourse is that poetry is a spoken song.  It may be subdued or ebullient; simple or complex.  But, read aloud, all poetry that is really poetry sounds out a tuneful melody.

Read aloud these stanzas I’ve chosen off the top of my head – the melody, a lilting refrain that sings itself even as one speaks it, is immediately heard:

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,   
The mother of months in meadow or plain  
Fills the shadows and windy places    
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;  
And the brown bright nightingale amorous  
Is half assuaged for Itylus,  
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,    
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

(from Swinburne’s, Atalanta In Calydon)

Or, this greatly differing musicality, which is still melodious:

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

(from Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time)

Examples of poetic musicality abound. They were on the whole written pre-Ezra Pound(cake), who did more -- as famed as he was in the public eye for reasons I will elaborate in a book-length essay on the arts (forthcoming) -- to destroy sonorous poetry, other than the Beats, than any writer of his time.

One can readily practice writing musicality in language and have some fun at the same time.  Without even attempting to create meaning, simply associate sounds in your own melody and see where it takes you.  Nonsense, in other words, just for the delight of the spoken music the language creates.  One then trains the ear to hear what most so-called poets of the day are deaf to.

I made up some this morning over my coffee:

subcutaneous cub function

ample rambling rampling family

tomăto grotto da blotto

sparingly but unerringly

massive gaseous ambassadorial crossbow

taped apiary asleep and agape

overweening preening with the leaning vacuum cleaning

flotsam and lotsa jetsam

bang a gong gangnam bring a king kong

treble-x hypersuperfluidity, did it he?

fratricide practicale percale sheets

doddering foddering slaughtering meats

I just wrote down what occurred to me without attempting to force or guide them.  They all are patently and intentionally meaningless. But, aside from being strongly rhythmic, alliterative and mostly consonant within themselves, these short phrases, most importantly, exude their own spoken melodiousness. Can you hear it when you read them aloud, as I can? 

If you haven’t yet heard musicality in real poetry, you will in time, with practice, if you choose to read what is really poetry and make a point to listen for it. Of course, my morning’s coffee scratch is nonsense. None of it can be construed to be poetry — though some would claim it is, wrongly. 

Listen for the music.  Without it’s own music, it can’t be poetry.