Music in Poetry: Part I A reflective challenge.

This one is a bit different because it is a tad more difficult. I'm borrowing from Steve Kowit here because he does a marvelous job of explaining "music" in poetry in his amazing "In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop." If you don't have it get it.

Anyway, in poetry "music" refers to the interaction of consonant and vowels sounds, internal rhyme, and such. For the sake of this exercise, we will focus on assonance and alliteration.

Assonance refers to the repetition of the same vowel sounds. Look at the following words: open, knowing, photo, roses. Notice the long "o" sounds in each, and how they are the same. This is assonance.
Alliteration or consonance refers to the repetition of the initial consonant sounds. Peter Piper picked a peck...well, I don't have to go on but this is an easy example of alliteration in the "p" sounds. There are also two other forms of consonance that are valuable to know. The words reap and rope are an example of rich or full consonance because of the repetition of the initial and terminal (beginning and ending) consonant sounds in the "r" and "p". Partial consonance refers to similar sound of the terminal consonant sounds, the rhyme or near rhyme of the ending consonant sounds, such as golden and garden. Notice the rhyme of the "en" in both.

The challenge:

Here, what you need to do is simply post a single stanza of one of your own poems. Then, you either point out the assonance and consonance, or you rewrite that stanza with words that improve the music of the stanza. That is, pay particular attention to words that have assonant or alliterative properties. It doesn't have to be a rhyming stanza, in fact, the value of this exercise is in the idea that the poet find words to improve the internal rhyme.

I'll begin. Here is a snip of my poem called "The Straight Lines of Giza". Yes, kids, shameless promotion is welcome here.


While we test heaven with towers, He forms desert
perfection in dunes’ undulating, sweeping flow,
in caressing curves of wind-kissed rippled ridges.

Here, there is consonance in the "w" sounds of "while","we", "towers", and "wind". Also, the hard "c" sounds of "caressing" and "curves", the "r" sounds in "rippled", "ridges" and even "caressing" are all alliterative, as are the "er" sounds in "desert" and "perfection". Some more alliteration is found in the "n" sounds of "perfection", "dunes'", and "undulating". Look at the "in" sounds of "in", "wind"...all in the same line.

There is assonance in the "i" sounds in "wind-kissed rippled ridges." Also, in the long "e" of "we","He" and "sweeping."

Now, this is not simply my way of patting myself on the back. I posted this exercise to show the importance of taking time with word choice, and how it adds to the music of the poem. I could easily have written this with less thought to the use of words, but it would not have flowed the way it does. That's not to say, of course, that there isn't room to improvement. But the exercise is designed to show the importance of the words we use and the interaction within the poem, not just at the end-stopped rhyme.