If March comes in like a lion, they say, it’ll go out like a lamb and vise versa.  I’d like to combine this notion with an idea that Keats termed “negative capability.” He said that a good poem holds within it one thing as well as its opposite.  For example, when we eulogize someone’s death, we also celebrate a life.  When we ache because of unrequited love, we also celebrate the lover’s presence.  When we write about the unseen, we make it visible.  The sound of our words signals this holding of opposites.  Changes in a poem’s weather (the sounds may start off like lambs and end like lions or the reverse) bring discovery, insight, or resolution, as if negative capability results from weather fronts colliding.

Developing an ability to hear changes in the sounds of a poem and an ability with craft to create these sounds will enable more resonance in your poems.  To train your ear to hear where poems are on the road to their discoveries, you can do three things: listen for the lamb and the lion in other people’s poems, practice with alliteration, and practice with onomatopoeia.

Here are the first lines in Peter Meinke’s poem “Apples,” first published in Poetry Magazine and now put to use in his book, The Shape of Poetry:

The apple I see and the apple
I think I see and the apple
I say I see

I hear the quiet gentleness of the lamb in the long “e” sounds, the soft consonant sounds of the s’s, and the exhalation required to say the “a” in apple.  All contribute to the poem’s balmy start.  But by the poem’s end the lines read:

like some titanic idea
through the North Pole
in the apple of my eye

 The harsher consonant sounds of the lion are in the word “titanic,” especially in the ending “c”.  Saying North Pole creates more staccato than saying any word in the first three lines.  Then the vowel sounds in the phrase “in the apple” fill our ears with anticipation before “of my eye,” the definite sounds of three one-syllable words hammering disappointment.

Peter Meinke describes the poem from which these lines come as a love poem about something difficult happening in a relationship.  In the shift in sounds from the opening to the closing of the poem, I hear the lamb of love turned, for a time at least, into a disgruntled lion.

In “The ABC of Aerobics,” another of Peter Meinke’s poems discussed in his book The Shape of Poetry, the speaker is exercising.  He begins at the start of his exercise routine:

Air seeps through alleys and our diaphragms
balloon blackly with this mix of
carbon monoxide and the thousand corrosives…

I hear the lion in the three contiguous one-syllable words and the way these short syllables gain momentum.  The next words take over in a persistent boxing sound.  You can hear this particularly in the many syllables of “balloon blackly,” “carbon monoxide,” and “thousand corrosives.”

In the middle of this poem the lines sound different as the exerciser is remembering an old girlfriend he believes is most probably married to the wrong guy:

…God bless her wherever she lives
tied to that turkey who hugely
undervalues the beauty of her tiny earlobes…

The sound here is still one of boxing or marching or thumping out the rhythm of aerobics’ music but spit and fury are replaced by an evenness in the sound, a rhythm that seems to say, as we do of heart rate, “We’re in the zone.”

Then in the midst of the achieved plateau, the exerciser thinks of how he’d live longer if he had one look at his seventh grade love.  The poem ends with this rhythm:

zucchini for drinking and dreaming of her   breathing hard

It is hard to yell “zucchini;” it has to be more like a stage whisper at the loudest or the middle of the word gets caught in your throat.  “Dreaming” and “breathing” have gentle sounds and “hard” doesn’t sound so hard here placed more like a wedge to keep the gym door open for the breeze.  The words here sound to me like a cool down after all the exercise and the arousing memory.

We say of poetry that how a poem sounds is also how a poem means.  You can not separate the breath that is reporting in the poem from the poem itself.  In that way, the meaning in a poem can not be paraphrased.

Now that you’ve “listened” to Peter Meinke’s poems, training yourself to understand something more about what your ear is receiving and how the poet’s feeling is relayed through sound, work on introducing more sound into your poetry. By exercising with alliteration and onomatopoeia you can practice making the sounds of the lion and the lamb.  When you become used to doing this, more music will find its way into your poems.

Think of places you have been on a difficult day—the dentist’s chair, the freeway in a traffic jam, at home with cranky children or a broken appliance, at your desk with a stomach ache.  Describe the sound of something in the scene using the technique of alliteration, words in a row starting with the same letter.  For a garbage disposal, for instance, I might think of the words grind, gobble, gulp and gallop.  I might plead with my broken garbage disposal

Oh, sink jaws; please don’t chew so politely,
but grind and gobble, gulp and gallop.

I might say about the dentist’s drill that it whizzes, whines, and whinnies.

I sit with my mouth wide open,
My hands gripping the chair arms.
The drill is going to take me for a fearful ride
with its whizzes, whines and whinnies.

When you chose irritating situations you are more likely to hear the lion’s momentum in the alliteration.

Now think of places you have been on a joyful day—a forest after a rain, the beach at sunrise, on a road trip in your lover’s car.  Use alliteration to describe something in this day.  About a forest after rain, I wrote: Old pine needles glisten gold in the grand sunlight.

At the beach at sunrise I “heard breezes in the dune grass whistle to me and whisper your name.”  Of being in the car on a road trip I wrote: My feet flung fully uncovered on the dash board

In the first two of these alliterations, I hear the quiet sound of the lamb and, in the last, something of the proud pacing of the lion.

For more practice, try using onomatopoeia.  This is the term for when a word sounds like what it names—hush and hiccups, purr and pound for example.   Think of things that sound gently in this world:  a baby breathing when he is asleep; cookie dough onto a baking sheet.  See if you can describe this gentleness using onomatopoeia.  About the sleeping baby I wrote:  My grandson Toby is almost asleep in his car seat; figs, figs is the sound of his breathing.

Next use onomatopoeia to describe something harsh—the sound of a motorcycle starting up, a car without a muffler, a tree in a storm.  For a tree in the storm:  Its trunk creaks and it creaks, and although I expect a cracking sound, next there is silence like after I open the front door swollen with rain.

Now that you have practiced creating the weather of the lamb and the weather of the lion, make a point of noticing your poems’ changes in sound.  If you don’t hear changes, the poem may not have fully realized its meaning.  Perhaps the poem wants you to write longer so it can move from one mood to another, hold more opposites.  If you hear changes between the beginning and the end of your poem, think about the direction of those changes (i.e. cloudy to sunny, cold to warm, just before rain to the storm) and you will learn more about your poem’s true (as in the sound of a tuning fork) meaning.