I've always loved Robert Frost's poems, and feel that anyone who thinks them simplistic hasn't studied them well. For many years I always had my students read them aloud. Somehow his poems (especially his long, narrative ones), like Shakespeare's work, must be read aloud. Now I know why.
Frost is all about the sounds of words and sentences - their tones and rhythms, what he calls "sound posturing." He says the best readers are the slow ones who sound out everything on the page to hear -- really, I think, to taste with the mind's ear -- the lusciousness, the flavors of the words. Just as flavors are spicy, sharp, creamy, sweet, bitter, so are words. Frost knew this deeply. It bothered him that most writers had little understanding of the importance of sound; they wrote for grammar and technical meaning. He calls this the "distinction between the grammatical sentence and the vital sentence." The real life of the sentence is in its sound.
If you want to read more of Frost's thoughts on this wonderful, freeing, enlivening idea, here is a link:
Robert Frost on the 'Sound of Sense'
This piece was written by Dr. Karl Maurer, I think, of University of Dallas. If you don't want to read the entire 19 pages, here's an excerpt from a letter Frost wrote:
"It is so [by listening to sentence-sounds] and not otherwise that we get the variety that makes it fun to write and read. The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They can get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
"Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words.
"I wouldn’t be writing all this if I didn’t think it the most important thing I know. I write it partly for my own benefit, to clarify my ideas for an essay or two I am going to write some fine day (not far distant.)
"To judge a poem or piece of prose you go the same way to work—apply the one test—greatest test. You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer."
This concept rang true like a clarion bell the instant I read it! I am not a bad reader because I sound the sentences out in my head. Rolling them around on my tongue and appreciating the voice of the writer is not a waste of time. Frost would say that's what reading is all about -- I am extracting additional meaning from the sentences that other people are sadly missing. What a thought!
All the writers I dearly love, I love for their voices. I hardly care what they write about. They can write about their potatoes in the garden, or a murder most grisly. Only give me their voice. What irony happens when a writer with gorgeous sounds describes a horrific scene? Faulkner shows us this in all his glory! What does that depth of irony in his novels tell us about the world he's painting for us?
Think of the times that language is stripped of its technical, grammatical meaning, and you are left only with sound: listening to a foreign language spoken, or listening to a nonsense story or poem. (Go read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut," for instance - it's hilarious!) The words themselves give no meaning at all. All meaning must come from the sound ... and not just inflection. We humans communicate so much meaning by that "sound posturing."
I don't know if I have any good poems left in me; I may have aged out of the poem-writing years. But if I do, I hope they will be gleaned from sounds. As Frost says of writing poems, "And unless we are in an imaginative mood, it is no use trying to make them, they will not rise." Perhaps I should start listening.
For more of Frost's lovely poetry, click here.
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