The Sweetest Sounds I Ever Read
Hear the cadence of 'Call me Ishmael'
By MEGHAN O'ROURKE
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12
When a friend of mine recently called a novel "poetic," she didn't intend it as a compliment. She meant that it lacked plot and its sentences were overly ornate. But these qualities aren't what poetry truly has to offer the writer of prose. Novels that are merely lush aren't "poetic" in any meaningful sense.
At the heart of all great poetry is cadence—the way sounds chime off one another—and it is one of the most seductive aspects of any sort of writing. Writing prose without thinking about cadence is like trying to seduce a man by handing him your résumé. The facts are there, but the electric charge isn't.
The American literary tradition is filled with writers who have understood that the power of writing springs not only from the precision of sentences but from the feeling evoked by their rhythm.
Here's F. Scott Fitzgerald in the brilliant last sentence of "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Note those effortful "b" sounds—the way they intensify the meaning.
Rhythm isn't just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like "Moby-Dick," which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line "Call me Richard"—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn't sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence's strikingly stressed first word. What's more, "Call" and "el" chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that's as sonorous and inviting as "Call me Richard" plainly isn't.
Ernest Hemingway (a master seducer) understood that sentences instill feelings in us. That's why he developed his innovative style, which used few commas and lots of "ands" and one-syllable words. Consider this sentence—one of my favorites—which is the opening line of his short story "In Another Country": "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more."
Notice that all the words are one syllable except the key adverb "always"; the contrast conjures up the sense of a war that is dragging on. Notice, too, that there's little punctuation. Commas and semicolons break a sentence up into units of breath, offering the reader small chances to pause. In Hemingway's sentence, there's only one comma, and it creates an effective, slight break between the two clauses. It neatly separates the unchanging season of combat from the "we" who, newly distant from it, are plainly still mindful of it.
Deployed wisely, cadence also can make a reader slow down to understand a knotty idea. Marilynne Robinson, a contemporary writer who likes to explore abstractions, also pays more attention to rhythm than nearly any other living novelist I know.
Listen for the regular duh-duh-dum rhythm that settles in after the first two words of this sentence (from her novel "Housekeeping"): "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow." The sentence is a bit abstract, in truth, but the gorgeous, nearly regular rhythm of it makes you want to repeat the words, turn them over, and understand them.
Of course, it's easy to make a fetish of the musicality of prose. But a writer with an ear for cadence can turn a mediocre piece of writing into a sharper one just by asking if the sound of her sentence connects back to its meaning. All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.
—Ms. O'Rourke is a poet and essayist. Her memoir about grief, "The Long Goodbye," will be published in April.
By MEGHAN O'ROURKE
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12
When a friend of mine recently called a novel "poetic," she didn't intend it as a compliment. She meant that it lacked plot and its sentences were overly ornate. But these qualities aren't what poetry truly has to offer the writer of prose. Novels that are merely lush aren't "poetic" in any meaningful sense.
At the heart of all great poetry is cadence—the way sounds chime off one another—and it is one of the most seductive aspects of any sort of writing. Writing prose without thinking about cadence is like trying to seduce a man by handing him your résumé. The facts are there, but the electric charge isn't.
The American literary tradition is filled with writers who have understood that the power of writing springs not only from the precision of sentences but from the feeling evoked by their rhythm.
Here's F. Scott Fitzgerald in the brilliant last sentence of "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Note those effortful "b" sounds—the way they intensify the meaning.
Rhythm isn't just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like "Moby-Dick," which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line "Call me Richard"—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn't sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence's strikingly stressed first word. What's more, "Call" and "el" chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that's as sonorous and inviting as "Call me Richard" plainly isn't.
Ernest Hemingway (a master seducer) understood that sentences instill feelings in us. That's why he developed his innovative style, which used few commas and lots of "ands" and one-syllable words. Consider this sentence—one of my favorites—which is the opening line of his short story "In Another Country": "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more."
Notice that all the words are one syllable except the key adverb "always"; the contrast conjures up the sense of a war that is dragging on. Notice, too, that there's little punctuation. Commas and semicolons break a sentence up into units of breath, offering the reader small chances to pause. In Hemingway's sentence, there's only one comma, and it creates an effective, slight break between the two clauses. It neatly separates the unchanging season of combat from the "we" who, newly distant from it, are plainly still mindful of it.
Deployed wisely, cadence also can make a reader slow down to understand a knotty idea. Marilynne Robinson, a contemporary writer who likes to explore abstractions, also pays more attention to rhythm than nearly any other living novelist I know.
Listen for the regular duh-duh-dum rhythm that settles in after the first two words of this sentence (from her novel "Housekeeping"): "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow." The sentence is a bit abstract, in truth, but the gorgeous, nearly regular rhythm of it makes you want to repeat the words, turn them over, and understand them.
Of course, it's easy to make a fetish of the musicality of prose. But a writer with an ear for cadence can turn a mediocre piece of writing into a sharper one just by asking if the sound of her sentence connects back to its meaning. All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.
—Ms. O'Rourke is a poet and essayist. Her memoir about grief, "The Long Goodbye," will be published in April.
