Hear Meaning Before Explaining It

In a poem, meaning lives in the act of saying as well as in the words: stress, length, repetition, the place where the breath stops, what the sentence does grammatically. Sound can mean harshness, hesitation, drag, a stammer, so it needn’t be pretty, and the dictionary sense stays in play. A draft poem is often a paraphrase with line breaks, a statement chopped at arbitrary points. Revision then tends to swap words for better words, and the reader is left with sense and no event. (Practice 57 treats the mouth as an editing tool.)

Emily Dickinson’s editors tidied her poems when they first printed them after her death. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” appeared in 1896, in the third series of Poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, under a title the editor supplied, “Dying,” with most of the dashes turned into commas and semicolons and several of the words altered. Its last stanza there reads: “With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, / Between the light and me; / And then the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see.” Ralph Franklin’s edition, based on the manuscripts, restores her capitals and dashes, and the same lines become “With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz— / Between the light—and me—”. The dictionary meaning has not changed.

The two texts sound different, though. In Franklin’s the line stumbles. The dash after “Blue” is a small stop inside it, so that “uncertain stumbling Buzz” arrives as one halting phrase, and to our ear the sentence acts out the fly’s flight. The poem’s last line, “I could not see to see,” which the 1896 text closed with a period, is left open by a dash, as if the sight did not so much end as fail to arrive.

Other features of the poem owe more to arrangement than to vocabulary. The stanzas alternate longer lines of eight syllables with shorter lines of six, so that each stanza keeps drawing a short breath after a longer one. In the third stanza of the manuscript-based text, a line break cuts the legal word “Assignable” loose from the sentence that governs it, as the speaker’s self is being divided like property. At the stanza’s end, “There interposed a Fly” swerves into a new construction in mid-thought, so that the sentence is itself interposed upon. And “stumbling Buzz” seems to stumble in the mouth, because the cluster of consonants in the middle of “stumbling” asks the tongue to do it. These are our readings. Read the poem aloud and see whether you hear them.

Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” in the 1881–82 version, lets syntax do the work. In the first stanza the spider “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself” and the tripled word pays out the thread. The second stanza addresses the soul in a single sentence with no main verb. “And you O my soul where you stand,” it begins, and goes on through a chain of participles, “musing, venturing, throwing, seeking,” to the closing phrase, “Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.” The sentence is never completed, and the poem ends before anyone knows whether anything catches.

Not every poem is made to be heard first. Free verse often depends on line breaks that an eye sees and an ear can only approximate. Poems for performance take their music from a tradition: Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” (1925) comes out of the blues, in which sound and text cannot be pulled apart. It begins “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,” and to our ear the repeated d and the dragging stresses already sound like the tune. The danger is sound as ornament, a pleasing pattern laid over a statement that could have been made in prose.

Practice. Take eight to twelve lines of your own, a poem or a prose passage, read them aloud, and mark every place where you stumble, rush, or run out of breath. Then revise for sound only, in twenty-five minutes, without changing a fact, an image, or the order of ideas. You may reorder within a sentence, swap a word for a synonym with a different vowel or weight, change a line break or a punctuation mark, and add or remove one repetition. Do it twice, once to make the passage faster and once to make it heavier. Read both versions aloud and note each change that also altered the meaning.