Sound and Sense
by Alexander Pope, 1711
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!
Source: http://www.poetry-online.org/pope_sound_and_sense.htm
Analysis: Alexander Pope was an English Poet of the early 1700's. His work is most often identified with the Baroque period. To the student reader, Pope is often very accessible because of his use of heroic couplets, a form widely used by Dr. Seuss and still used in greeting cards. A heroic couplet is two lines of text immediately together that use end rhyme, they also form a complete thought. We can see in "Sound and Sense" that at the end of each couplet Pope ends either with a semi-colon, colon, period or at the end an exclamation point.
This poem comes from Pope's first collection, published when he was only twenty three years old, and as a man many described as arrogant, Pope apparently couldn't pass up the chance to praise himself saying that being a writer was not a matter of chance, but of being an artist. He uses a series of Greek mythological characters throughout the rest of the poem. Zephyr was the god of the west wind; Ajax the a tremendously strong warrior from The Iliad; Camilla a Roman character who walked across the corn fields so fast the grass beneath her feet burned; and Timotheus was a Greek poet who added a string to the lyre, bringing much praise and scorn.
Analysis: Alexander Pope was an English Poet of the early 1700's. His work is most often identified with the Baroque period. To the student reader, Pope is often very accessible because of his use of heroic couplets, a form widely used by Dr. Seuss and still used in greeting cards. A heroic couplet is two lines of text immediately together that use end rhyme, they also form a complete thought. We can see in "Sound and Sense" that at the end of each couplet Pope ends either with a semi-colon, colon, period or at the end an exclamation point.
This poem comes from Pope's first collection, published when he was only twenty three years old, and as a man many described as arrogant, Pope apparently couldn't pass up the chance to praise himself saying that being a writer was not a matter of chance, but of being an artist. He uses a series of Greek mythological characters throughout the rest of the poem. Zephyr was the god of the west wind; Ajax the a tremendously strong warrior from The Iliad; Camilla a Roman character who walked across the corn fields so fast the grass beneath her feet burned; and Timotheus was a Greek poet who added a string to the lyre, bringing much praise and scorn.
