For Poetry · With a Note for Prose

The Music of the Line

W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” · Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
With a working example by James Mulhern: “Please Call Me”

Lessons in Poetry

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Questions on the Classic Readings

W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

  1. Read the first stanza aloud. Which sounds repeat, and where do you hear them?
  2. Yeats hears the lake water “in the deep heart’s core.” Why might he build that phrase from short, heavy words?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

  1. Find three places where Hopkins begins neighboring words with the same sound. What do they add?
  2. After so many crowded lines, the poem ends with two words, “Praise him.” Why might it end so briefly?

A poem is heard as well as read. Yeats lets the long vowels of his lake slow the line; Hopkins packs his lines with repeated consonants until they ring. The example below, a poem about a voice on the telephone, tries to let its sounds carry some of what it misses.

The classic readings come first, and they are the heart of the lesson. A poem by James Mulhern follows as a working example, for a practical reason: he can tell a class what he was trying to do in it, and where he is still unsure he managed it.

The complete poemas published in Crossings

“Please Call Me”

I miss the avocado-green rotary phone

and its coiled cord,

the cadence of your speech,

your wandering words.

We talked of trivialities—

our jobs, our foolish acts,

complaints of coworkers,

disappointments,

dreams.

Even pauses pleased me—

our breathing replaced

when voices halted,

like the chirping

of sparrows at dusk.

Our talks comforted me.

I’m sad at their end.

Now you text—

“Thinking of you,”

with a random photo.

I reply, “Thinking of you, too.”

Thoughts of you—

mist fading in snowy air.

I no longer know you

as I once did.

I long to hear your voice

when my iPhone’s old bell rings.

From Crossings.

The first stanza leans on repeated sounds: the hard c of “coiled cord” and “cadence,” the w of “your wandering words.” Later, “Even pauses pleased me” and the “chirping / of sparrows at dusk” keep that music going. The stanza about texting is plainer, and the hope was that the reader would hear the difference before noticing it, and then hear the old voice return, faintly, in the last line’s “old bell rings.”

A suggestion. You might read a draft aloud and mark the places where the sound goes flat, then change a word or two for sound alone and ask whether the meaning changed too.

Questions on James Mulhern’s Example

“Please Call Me”

  1. Which words in the first stanza share sounds? Read them aloud.
  2. How do the sounds of the stanza that begins “Now you text” differ from those of the first stanza?
  3. The poem ends on “old bell rings.” Why might it end on a sound?

Activities

These draw on the classic readings and on the example on this page.

  1. A sound map. Choose one stanza from a classic reading and underline every repeated sound. Then write four lines about a place you miss, repeating one consonant and one vowel.
  2. Read it aloud. Read a draft aloud to a partner, change three words for sound alone, and discuss whether the meaning changed.

—Silver Current Press

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