Blogpost #5 Poetry Sounds

The sounds of poetry provide the poem with a lot of meaning and emphasis on different aspects of the poem. Sound is the musical quality of poetry and it can be identified and created through techniques such as rhyme, caesura, and meter. Different literary devices such as alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia provide the poem with much more meaning and emphasis on different aspects of the poem whether it be in the beginning of the poem or at the end. Two poems that I can identify and analyze the sound used in each would be Fast Break by Edward Hirsch and Traveling through the Dark by William Stafford. These two poems are analyzed and written in very different moods and speeds. Fast Break is a very fast poem considering its use of words such as "spinning," "racing", or "gliding." Its use of descriptive words such as these provide the poem with a much faster motion and allow the reader to be more influenced and also allow him/her to read at a faster pace. Edward Hirsch has made his poem extremely descriptive and the reader can easily picture two teams on the court playing basketball. William Stafford on the other hand has very slow and monotonous descriptions in Traveling through the Dark. Stafford describes this poem in a very slow and dead tone when it describes how the deer has fallen on the ground in the dark and is automatically killed by the car. He uses words such as "dead", "stiffened", and "red" to describe the deer and also show examples of the monotonous tone that Stafford likes to use.