1. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Feature Menu
Introduction
Tone: It’s an Attitude
Rhythm
Rhyme
Other Sound Effects
Your Turn

2. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
What makes it so easy to remember the hundreds of lyrics to your favorite songs?
It’s the rhythm, the beat, the way the words flow.
It’s powerful words arranged in the best order.
It’s the strongest line—repeated for emphasis.
Poets, like songwriters, use rhythm, rhyme, and repetition to convey meaning and tone. 2

3. Tone: It’s an Attitude
Tone is the speaker’s attitude toward his or her subject or audience:
playful or serious, joyous or sad, mournful or humorous.
Tone is created by many verbal elements, including sounds and word choice.
To understand a poem’s meaning, you must first catch its tone.

4. Rhythm
Rhythm is the musical quality produced by repeated sound patterns.
All language has rhythm, but rhythm is especially important in poetry.

5. Rhythm: Meter
The most obvious kind of rhythm is a regular pattern or beat called meter.
Meter is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in the words poets put together.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold
from “The Cremation of Sam McGee”
by Robert W. Service
Can you hear the beat in the lines above? 5

6. Rhythm: Meter
If a poet decides to write lines with a regular beat, the lines will usually be of the same length and have the same number of syllables.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .
How many syllables are in each line above? 6

7. Rhythm: Scanning Scanning is a way of marking a poem’s meter.
Scanning a poem is easier than you might think:
Read each line of the poem aloud.
Mark each stressed syllable with the symbol ’.
Mark each unstressed syllable with the symbol ˘.
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .” ˘ ’
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats ” ’
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats ” 7

8. Rhythm: Scanning
Read these scanned lines aloud, and listen for the beat:
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats . . .” ˘ ’ 8

9. Rhyme
Words rhyme when they end with the same vowel or vowel-consonant sound.
dove
love
winter
splinter
Rhyme can
emphasize the tone of a poem—for example, the poem’s seriousness or humor
help convey the poem’s meaning

10. Rhyme Rhymes are based on the sound, not the spelling, of words.
Rhyming Words
Non-rhyming Words
gruff, tough
ice, police
trees, breeze
try, pantry
run, son
dew, sew
sew, toe
hour, your 10

11. Rhyme Rhyme is often very simple: moth / cloth
Other rhyming words are more complicated:
antelope / cantaloupe
Sometimes more than one word is needed to complete half of a rhyming pair.
“Ah,” says Zookeeper Jones—at seeing his clock a’ two—
“already again we need to feed
that loudmouthed cockatoo.” 11

12. Rhyme: End Rhyme
Most rhymes are end rhymes: The last word in one line is paired with the last word in another line.
What are the end rhymes in these lines?
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim’s pride
From ev’ry mountainside, 12

13. Rhyme: Internal Rhyme
Sometimes the last word in one line will be echoed by a word at the beginning or in the middle of the next line.
My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
This is called internal rhyme. 13

14. Rhyme: Rhyme Scheme
The pattern of rhyming sounds at the ends of lines in a poem is the rhyme scheme.
To mark the rhyme scheme, use the same letter to identify each word with the same rhyme.
My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride
From ev’ry mountain side,
Let freedom ring. a a b c c c b 14

15. A poet might also decide not to use a regular meter or rhyme scheme.
Rhyme: Free Verse
A poet might also decide not to use a regular meter or rhyme scheme.
Poems made up of loose groupings of words and phrases are called free verse.
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
[End of Section]

16. Other Sound Effects: Repetition and Refrain
Rhythm and rhyme are forms of repetition.
Ending sounds repeat to create rhymes.
Beats repeat to create rhythm.
Sometimes a poet may also use a refrain—the repetition of a word, phrase, line, or group of lines.
A refrain can emphasize a key idea and help create rhythm.

17. Other Sound Effects: Alliteration
Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together.
Alliteration often occurs at the beginning of a word.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Sometimes it is also within or at the end of a word. Can you hear all the /s/ and /sh/ sounds in this tongue twister?
She sells seashells by the seashore.
[End of Section]

18. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
1. Is this poem rhymed or unrhymed?
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. Does the poem have end rhymes?
3. Does the poem have internal rhymes?

19. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
1. Is this poem rhymed or unrhymed?
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This poem is rhymed.

20. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
2. Does the poem have end rhymes?
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Yes, the poem has end rhymes.

21. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
3. Does the poem have internal rhymes?
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
No, the poem does not have any internal rhymes.

22. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
4. Find two examples of alliteration in the poem.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
5. Does this poem have a regular meter, or is it more like conversation?

23. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
4. Find two examples of alliteration in the poem.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The poet repeats /c/ and /l/ sounds.
Other consonant sounds, such as /h/ and /w/, are repeated, too. Can you find them?

24. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
5. Does this poem have a regular meter, or is it more like conversation?
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This poem has a regular meter.

25. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
6. Give two reasons this poem is not free verse.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

26. How Do the Sounds of Poetry Convey Tone and Meaning?
Quick Check
6. Give two reasons this poem is not free verse.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This poem has
end rhymes and
a regular beat, or meter.

27. Analyze Sounds, Tone, and Meaning
Your Turn
Tone may be humorous, sarcastic, sad, joyful, playful, and so on.
Choose a favorite song. First, explain what the song means—what is its message?
Next, identify the way the songwriter uses sound effects.
Finally, describe the tone of the song. How do the sounds of the song reinforce its tone and meaning?
[End of Section] 27

28. The End