Imagine you’re in a hotel room.

You’ve just slipped the keycard into the handle and clicked open the door. You’ve parked all your bags on a corner of the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. As you admire the nondescript furnishings, the smooth counters and office-supply art on the wall, you can overhear a couple in the room adjacent to yours. Their voices are muffled. You can’t make out the words, but you can make out the sounds. You can make out, not what’s being said, but the manner in which it comes across. It turns out you can tell a lot about a conversation without understanding the words at all, for the manner of it bears its own meaning.

Maybe you think you can tell how old they are, or how smart, or from where they come. You can probably tell their moods. Whether they’re being pleasant with one another, or if one of them is upset. If they’re worried, or excited. If they like the thing they’re talking about, or not very much. You can tell whether they’re in the middle of a conversation, or if one has just begun, and whether what they’re talking about is new to them, or if it’s a conversation that’s played out before. You can tell if they’re talking at each other, or with. You can tell if they’re making plans for tonight, or looking back on the day.

You can pick up on a lot without knowing what the words are. Through tone and pitch, loudness and softness, timbre, rhythm, tempo. Through the music of the voice, but also through the music of the sense bestowed by the speech itself. The melody and cadence of a conversation, the motifs that reappear, the harmony and discord. The way a thought unravels, or a story gets told. The way an idea is conducted in a dialogue, like a symphony, that has many movements, and reaches the end of many conclusions. To hear these things from behind a wall, and understand them without the words, is to hear what Frost called “the abstract vitality of our speech.”1

He called this music the raw material of poetry, and in so far as we can say that Frost had a philosophy of poetry, it was this theory of versification, this Sound of Sense. He returned to it frequently in his letters, and took pride in having been, according to him, its sole practitioner.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.2

Such sounds are produced by the audial imagination, and may be figured by the poet just as a metaphor may be cast to impress in the mind a striking image or a simile employed to bridge a gap between two things.

To use these sounds is to shape a line in such a way that we can imagine, aurally, its character. It is the dramatic slant inherent in speech which an “imagining ear” intuits.

What is Voice?

In a lecture given to the Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Frost sketches the dramatic slant of each line of his famous poem “Pasture” that opens North of Boston.

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Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

The first line, he says, has “a light, informing tone,” while the second is one of “reservation” (what Frost calls an only tone, and which I take to mean just). The third line is “supplementary,” while the fourth is “free and assuring,” spoken as if an afterthought, yet still inviting.

He describes the second stanza as having what he calls a 'Rather well for me' voice, and similar notes of persuasion, assurance, and invitation.3

While the poem was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1914, it later served as the introductory piece to Frost’s second collection, North of Boston, the book that established his reputation. The poem sets the tone for the rest of the book. Its voice is something like that of a young farmhand about to set out on his chores. We, the reader, the audience, are invited to participate in the beauty and simplicity of country living. We are asked to enjoy the act of cleaning out a pasture spring and fetching a calf whose mother loves it. The child who speaks (for he must be a child, or else no older than a teenager) must on some level enjoy the pleasure of his work, and perhaps knows of our apprehension in joining him. He is perhaps aware of our suspicion of being tricked into doing work, the way Tom Sawyer tricks other boys into whitewashing fences. But unlike Tom Sawyer, the speaker in “Pasture” really does believe that such chores are a privilege, and he hopes that we will too. The double invitation of “you come too” is an earnest enticement.

The poem is understood partly by the information contained in the words, and partly by the sense carried by the tone.

A good sentence does double duty: it conveys one meaning by word and syntax, another by the tone of voice it indicates. In irony the tone indicated contradicts words.4

Frost, himself a master of irony, used the juxtaposition of these two meanings to great effect, playing one off the other. The implication is that there exists such a thing as a sound of sense apart from the meaning of the words. It’s how we’re able to understand a conversation on the other side of a hotel wall to the extent that we can.

The Sound of Sense

It may seem obvious to say that such sounds play a role in inferring the meaning of what’s said. Obviously tone conveys meaning. The difference in meaning between 'you’ and 'you—' as a change in tone is easily apprehended. But what Frost is really interested in are those sounds that characterize entire sentences. This includes tone, but also pitch and stress and cadence, etc.—the totality of the sound pattern, such that a sentence has its own character. This is the difference between mere sound and the sound of sense. And Frost goes so far as to say that these sentence-sounds are more important to understanding the meaning of what’s said than the words themselves.

I shall show the sentence sound saying all that the sentence conveys with little or no help from the meaning of the words. I shall show the sentence sound opposing the sense of the words as in irony. And so till I establish the distinction between the grammatical sentence and the vital sentence. The grammatical sentence is merely accessory to the other and chiefly valuable as furnishing a clue to the other.5

Voice is perhaps a better word, although our idea of voice in poetry can be misleading. We often think of voice as being something personal and unique to us, as when we tell a poet they need to find their own voice as opposed to someone else’s. But the character of a sentence-sound is something that’s decidedly not unique to us, but rather is borrowed and reproduced in the aural imagination. Nor do we create any of these sounds ourselves, as our conception of poetic voice might imply. Frost makes it clear that these sounds already exist.

Just so many sentence sounds belong to man as just so many vocal runs belong to one kind of bird. We come into the world with them and create none of them. What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping. We summon them from Heaven knows where under excitement with the audile imagination.6

A better word, and one that Frost uses elsewhere, is “sound-posturing.” It refers to the meaning underlying words—a meaning which word and syntax indicate, but which are also shaped by all the qualities of music inherent in speech itself.

The reader must be at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence. The simple declarative sentence used in making a plain statement is one sound. But Lord love ye it mustn’t be worked to death. It is against the law of nature that whole poems should be written in it. If they are written they won’t be read. The sound of sense, then. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound—pure form.7

The simple declarative statement has a sentence sound. So, too, does the question, with its raised inflection. There is a character, also, to the complex and well-balanced statement, the parallel clauses a rhetorician might utter that ring with perfect pith. Or the exordium of a scientific essay. Or a tweet. Or Instapoem.

The reader doesn’t need written examples, because they imagine such voices without any words at all. They have a sense, a sound-posture, by virtue of the utterance we imagine aurally.8

The Sense of Sound

What Frost is getting at is a character of speech whose sense is intuited below the level of the Intellect. Just as music passes into us unmediated by reason, the sound of sense is something that affects us below the level of the words themselves.

In an interview with The Boston Evening Transcript in 1915, Frost further elaborates on the sentence sounds that underlie words.

Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [. . prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.9

Each sound-posture bears its own particular kind of meaning. The sound of a plain declarative statement, for example, or the sound of a question. The sound of tiptoeing around a question one does not want to ask, or the sound of a clause tacked on as an afterthought. We have a sense for innumerable sounds like these. They are the “vital parts of speech” that animate what we say, that give context, and effect expression. And our sense of these sounds is familiar, is intuited, because they have been with us a long time. Even before we had words, Frost claims, primitive humans had vocal gestures that conveyed their meanings. Words, then, in such a theory, are supplemental, are added on top of the sentence sound.

His view of language is an interesting one, reminiscent of Owen Barfield’s view of the progress of human language, and consciousness, borne along by the rhythms of Nature. Both conceive of meaning as inextricably linked to musicality. Frost claims, for example, that “all folk speech is musical.”

In primitive conditions man has not at his aid reactions by which he can quickly and easily convey his ideas and emotions. Consequently, he has to think more deeply to call up the image for the communication of his meaning. It was the actuality he sought; and thinking more deeply, not in the speculative sense of science and scholarship, he carried out Carlyle’s assertion that if you ‘think deep enough you think musically.’10

Consider how, when we have a thought, when we follow down the train of our thought, we’re often carried by melodious means. In conversation, sometimes even before we know what we want to say, we have the sound of it in our heads. Likewise, when we’re searching for the right word, when it’s on the tip of our tongue, we might have recourse to the sound of it first, before the word itself appears. Frost described just such an experience in the lecture mentioned earlier, recalling “distinctly the joy with which I had the first satisfaction of getting an expression adequate for my thought.”11

That act of trying to square our expression with our thought, to make our speech sound like we intend it to mean, is the musicality of deep thinking. For what we are trying to align speech with is a certain melody and rhythm that expresses what we mean. The very ability to express what we mean depends upon what we say sounding a certain way. That is precisely the sound of sense Frost is talking about.

At the bottom of the wellspring of our mind is music rippling in the very pool we draw from. If you think deep enough, you think musically.

Sound-Posture vs. Meter

Frost’s elaboration on his theory, in letters and lectures and interviews, is always in view of its application to the art of poetry. It’s an essential part of his poetics, and it’s not difficult to see how such a theory adds texture and dynamism to his verse, whether in dialogues like “West-Running Brook” and “Death of a Hired Man,” or dramatic monologues like “Mending Wall” and “Birches.”

“Even in lyric,” Frost says, “the main thing is that every sentence should be come at from a different dramatic slant.”12

Indeed, all of Frost’s poetry has this dramatic quality. His lines, whether dialogue or narration, are colloquial and animated. They sound like someone talking.

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

West-running Brook then call it.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.

A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

Each sentence embodies a posture of what Frost called “living speech.” And though the manner of the speech harkens back to an era that no longer exists, yet when we read it there’s little difficulty in reviving the sound in our imagination, because each line was written for the ear and not only the page.

This brings up an interesting question, which is the fact that almost all of what Frost wrote was written in meter. The regularity of meter and the music of human speech might at first seem contradictory. Two apparently different figures of sound competing for attention in the ear of the reader. Are they not at odds with each other?

The interviewer for The Transcript asks Frost about this potential conflict.

“But […] do you not come into conflict with metrical sounds to which the laws of poetry conform in creating rhythm?”

“No because you must understand this sound of which I speak has principally to do with tone. It is what Mr. Bridges, the Poet Laureate, characterized as speech-rhythm. Meter has to do with beat, and sound-posture has a definite relation as an alternate tone between the beats. The two are one in creation but separate in analysis.”13

That meter and the sounds of speech cannot harmonize together Frost’s work easily disproves. They are merely two different figures of sound, both of which are absolutely essential to the study and practice of verse. A skilled poet can weave them together and play them off of each other, now emphasizing one, now the other, as a conductor brings in different parts of an orchestra. In this way regular speech becomes lyrical, and the underlying measure of a poem is given variety and music. It’s a matter of conditioning and oscillation.

Whose Voice is Your Poetry In?

Frost’s theory asks us to attend to voice, to hear with the “imagining ear” the meaning of sentence sounds. Good readers already do this when they read. They get a sense for the voice of a writer after a few sentences, or lines, or paragraphs. They align themselves to the manner of speech, to word and syntax, and to the music underneath that characterizes what’s being said. And a writer is good in so far as they can condition the reader to hear what they’re trying to say, not only by means of the words, but by the manner in which they ought to be heard. If they don’t, or can’t, then the reader is likely to take them up in a manner in which they’re already familiar with.

For the imagination has a repertoire of vital speech sounds, and has figured voices out of them. They come from our everyday lives. Voices we’re familiar with, that have made an impression on us. Friends, family, celebrities, public figures. We bring their voices to our reading and our writing. And of course writers, too. The greatest among them have so impressed within us their manner of speech that we hear them even when we read other writers. The more one refines their taste, the clearer and sharper the aural image becomes, such that we can hear the difference between a Shakespearean line, or a Miltonic line, or a Popean line. And we can imagine the quaint, sardonic voice of Frost, the exuberant virtuosity of Hart Crane, or the spiritual sentimentalism of Mary Oliver.

As poets we’re always struggling against these voices swallowing up our own. To ‘find one’s voice’ is always to find it in relation to, and against, these. Which is why it’s worth asking: whose voice is your poetry in?

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