Sound Before Meaning

Every time I've asked a poet how they wrote a particular line, the answer has had almost nothing to do with what the line means. I needed a long vowel here. The s carried over from the line before. It had to end on a hard stop. The sense of the line - what it says - was a problem I solved after the music was solved. Not before.

That's the part of writing poetry the thesaurus was never built to help with. The thesaurus assumes I've got a meaning and I'm looking for a word for it. Most of the time, when I'm writing well, I've got a sound and I'm looking for a word that fits.

The sound comes first

Hopkins didn't arrive at dapple-dawn-drawn falcon by looking up falcon synonyms. He arrived at it because the d's were already in the line - they'd been there since dappled in the previous stanza - and the falcon needed words that could carry the chain forward. The bird itself, the meaning of it, was a constraint roughly as important as the alliteration. Possibly less.

The example I go back to most often is Elizabeth Bishop's One Art. She locks herself into a villanelle whose rhyme word is master, and every third line for nineteen lines has to rhyme with it. Faster, last, or, vaster, disaster. The emotional climb of the poem is built on the diminishing distance between the perfect rhymes and the slant rhymes. The meaning assembled itself inside the sound. I don't know how else to describe it.

The sounds I'm actually searching for

"Rhyme" is the part of phonetic word choice that gets taught in school, and it's honestly the smallest part of what I do. When I'm working on a line, I'm searching for at least four kinds of sonic neighbor.

Perfect rhyme. The thing the rhyming dictionary gives me. Cat / hat. The stressed vowel and everything after it match. Useful in comic verse and traditional forms. Mostly I avoid it, because it lands too hard.

Slant rhyme. Worm / swarm. Bone / moon. Dust / last. This is what I actually reach for, and what most modern poets I read reach for too. It carries the satisfaction of rhyme without the predictability. Rhyming dictionaries handle this badly.

Assonance. A repeated vowel sound inside the line, regardless of what the consonants are doing. The long brown lawn. The aw repeats and the consonants do whatever they like. Assonance is the engine under most lines I've ever remembered without meaning to. No commercial dictionary lets me search for it.

Alliteration. A repeated initial consonant. Wild and willful waters. When I start a line with w, I often need a second w word in the next phrase, and the semantic thesaurus is no use to me at all.

What I want from a phonetic word-finder

Given a word, I want it to return not just words that perfectly rhyme, but words that share the vowel, the initial consonant, the consonant cluster, the syllable count. Each as its own separate small list.

For grief: brief, belief, reef - the perfect rhymes. Then grieve, green, greet - words that share the initial consonant cluster. Then leaf, chief, thief - slant rhymes, same vowel but different consonants. These aren't synonyms. They're sonic neighbors, and I want them side by side so I can see the neighborhood and pick.

The prose writer's secret

I want to be careful about one thing: sound-first writing isn't only a poet's problem. Any prose writer who reads their work aloud - and I think every good one does - is performing the same kind of search, just less consciously. The sentence is too soft. The two hard k's came too close together. The end of the line trails off.These are sonic judgements, and the revision I make is a phonetic substitution, not a semantic one.

Hemingway's prose lands hard because the words are short and the consonants are mostly stops. McCarthy's prose rolls because the long vowels carry across the commas. Toni Morrison's sentences slow down where the assonance gathers and quicken where it doesn't. None of these effects is in the meaning of the words. All of them are in the sound.

Before I had a way to search the sound directly, I was doing this by ear, badly, and only at the moments when my ear noticed something was wrong. I'd like to be doing it by ear and on purpose. That's the difference, I think, between a sentence that scans and a sentence that doesn't.