Hearing Meaning: The Sounds of Poetry
The Special Value of Listening to or Reading Poetry Out Loud
Dec 23, 2008
Poems are meant to be heard. Whether the poem is in free verse or a precise form such as a sonnet, most of the power and much of the meaning can only be captured by the ears, not the eyes. The best way to work toward understanding a poem is to listen to various readings, including reading it out loud yourself, and then to look back at how the printed version works to produce its effects. While this process may sound long and involved, it ends up being more fun and more useful than slogging through numerous visual readings.
If the poem or poet are well-known, there are probably several versions available on the internet, as well as from the library. A quick search on youtube.com brings up an intriguing assortment for “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, everything from Thomas doing the reading to Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School” and even an orchestral version.
Each reading has a different rhythm and tone, a different approach to the meaning or the impact of the poem. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other, simply that most poems are complex enough to have faceted meanings, different aspects that give the poem more depth than a greeting card. This interaction of ideas is one of the things that can make poetry difficult, but it also creates an opportunity for experimentation and play.
Structure, Linebreaks, and Rhythm
If you listen to several versions, you’ll notice that some readers let the structure, especially line breaks, control the rhythm, while others read with more emphasis on the punctuation. When there is a strong beat, such as with Shakespeare’s sonnets, some readers let that beat control the reading, and others let that beat move to the background, still clearly there if you listen, but other aspects of the language dominate the reading. Listeners are likely to prefer different readings, but quite often it’s the comparison of the readings that helps understand the poem more fully.
To understand this better, try reading several lines of a poem out loud, paying particular attention to the line breaks and pausing at the end of a line whether there’s a period there or not. Now, write those same lines out in prose form, no line breaks, just the punctuation as it is written. Read it out loud in this form and see how it changes the rhythm and emphasis. In some of those differences, you’ll find keys to the feelings or meanings the poem elicits.
Interaction of Multiple Meanings
Once you’ve found some of those critical spots, it’s much easier to work out from there toward other ideas, different meanings and levels of meaning. What makes poetry effective, and sometimes difficult, is that poems aren’t so much about meaning as they are the interactions between meanings. They aren’t “this or that.” Instead, they are what happens when “this” and “that” talk with each other. That’s why looking at a poem is not as fun or effective as hearing it. It’s the same difference as listening to a conversation or joining in and becoming part of the discussion. By making the poem a conversation, you change it from an inanimate object into an animate creature, something you can interact with, something flexible and much more fun than just words sitting on a page or screen.
