The Sound of Prose - Part I

Morning everyone. Thank you so much for all the support on Tahereh's post on Friday, I thought it went very well.

I've finished the novel I was reading and have yet to hit the library or the bookstore so over the weekend I was glancing back at Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, which is not my favorite book on writing but certainly in my top five. In it he talks about the SOUND of writing. I've always cared about this aspect of my words a lot so I thought a would devote a post or two to it.

To me sound (in writing) has always been about rhythm, cadence and diction. He also describes something he calls echoes which in its simplest form is only repeated words or ideas but also grows more complicated. I'm not really smart enough to explain it here so if you want to know more you should get the book. These topics may not seem very important in prose, especially since it is rarely read out loud, and it's true, they are quite subtle but can sometimes make the difference between good writing and great writing.

Diction in its simplest definition is only about the choice of word to use in a specific situation, but it's more than that I think. The illustrious Bryan Russell (Ink) wrote a great post with more in-depth analysis of the concept here.

Cadence would seem to only apply to writing read out loud, and certainly it is much more prominent in poetry, or spoken word, or song, but I find that I consider carefully the beats in a sentence and I hope that this will lead to better balance within a paragraph, a page, a sentence.

Rhythm is much more primal, of course, and in many ways is similar to cadence, but Lukeman makes a great point about the length of sentences and how altering the rhythm of a passage on purpose can make something stand out or slip behind some other ideas. A short sentence surrounded by longer ones can drive a point home with added emphasis.

He suggests that the best way to learn about the sound of prose (other than reading your work out loud or having someone read it to you) is to study poetry. So this week I'm going to feature some of my favorite poems that hopefully are all in the public domain and won't get me into trouble for posting here. I have no college degree and have not studied poetry since high school so I won't give much analysis but maybe I'll introduce someone out there to something new.



Today's poem is Ozymandias. It's a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in 1818. I believe that he was the husband of Mary Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein, but I could be wrong about that; please correct me in the comments if so:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The theme here is of course about the decline of civilizations and empires but that is not the point I'm trying to make. I'm not sure why I love this poem or why it has stuck in my mind all these years but I do think the rhythm of Shelley's words has something to do with it. The meter is decasyllabic, which means that there are 10 syllables to each line. It is interesting because it almost seems like the poem could do without the first line and a quarter, but that of course would throw the cadence all to hell.

So that's it for today. Please leave your thoughts in the comments and thanks for visiting!