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Sound and Sense
Chapters 1 and 2
Chapter 1: What is poetry?
• …a kind of language that says more and says it
more intensely than ordinary language…
• …to gain a greater understanding of the world…
• Its function is not to tell us about experience but
to allow us, through the imagination, to
participate in it.
• The primary concern of poetry is not with beauty,
not with philosophical truth, not with persuasion,
but with experience.
• In real life getting soaked in a rainstorm is not
pleasurable, but in poetry it can be.
• Poetry is a kind of multidimensional language.
Ordinary language is one-dimensional. Poetry
adds a sensuous dimension, an emotional
dimension, and an imaginative dimension.
Not in your book:
• Poetry is when an emotion has found its
thought and the thought has found words.
• Robert Frost
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
1. The speaker asserts that “so much
depends upon” the objects he
refers to, leading the reader to ask
how much and why. The glimpse of
a farm scene implies one kind of
answer. What is the importance of
wheelbarrow, rain, and chicken to a
farmer? To all of us?
2. What further importance can you
infer from the references to color,
shape, texture, and the
juxtaposition of objects? Does the
poem itself have a shape? What
two ways of observing and valuing
the world does the poem imply?
Chapter 2:
• To develop your abilities to understand and
appreciate poetry:
1. Read a poem more than once. Reading a
poem is not like reading a newspaper (to
gather info and put aside). It is like looking at
a painting or listening to a symphony.
2. Use a dictionary not just for unfamiliar words
but for words that may be used in an
unfamiliar way.
3. Read so as to hear the sounds of the words in
your mind.
4. Pay careful attention to what the poem is saying.
5. Practice reading poems out loud.
a) Read it affectionately, not affectedly.
b) Read slowly enough that each word
sinks in.
c) Read the poem so the rhythmical pattern is
felt but not exaggerated.
• Paraphrase: means to restate the poem in
different language; to make its prose sense as
plain as possible
• Theme: central idea
• Figurative Language: Language employing
figures of speech; language that cannot be
taken literally or only literally
• Metaphor: a figure of speech in which an
implicit comparison is made between two
things essentially unlike. It may take one of
four forms: (1) that in which the literal term
and the figurative term are both named; (2)
that in which the literal term is named and the
figurative term implied; (3) that in which the
literal term is implied and the figurative term
named; (4) that in which both the literal and
figurative terms are implied.