The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Read Online Free PDF Page B

poetry is characterized by a kind of music. Accent structures in words naturally make a sort of melody. In the word melody itself the first syllable is stressed, which makes it louder than the others, and most native English speakers will give it a higher pitch than the other syllables. The word melody has a melody! Good poetry plays with speech sounds to create a pleasing set of pitch patterns, and good poetry contains rhythmic groupings that are songlike. When a poem succeeds, it is a sensual experience—the way the words feel in the mouth of the speaker and the way they sound in the ears of the hearer are part of the encounter. Unlike prose, most poems ask to be read aloud. This is why poetry lovers usually do so. Just reading the poem is not enough. The reader needs to feel the rhythms. Song lyrics ask to be sung; reading them doesn’t typically convey all the nuance of expression that was imbued in them during their creation.
    Occasionally, a song lyric can stand completely on its own, but Lee was quick to point out that this doesn’t make it any better than one that cannot; it is simply another feature of that particular piece of writing. But through our weekly meetings, I gained a deep appreciation for the interplay between sound and form, between meaning and structure, that characterizes both forms of writing.
    One characteristic of poetry and lyrics, compared to ordinary speech or writing, is compression of meaning. Meaning tends to be densely packed, conveyed in fewer words than we would normally use in conversation or prose. The compression of meaning invites us to interpret, to be participants in the unfolding of the story. The best poetry—the best art in any medium—is ambiguous. Ambiguity begets participation. Poetry slows us down from the way we normally use language; we read and hear poetry and stop thinking about language the way we normally do; we slow down in order to contemplate all the different reverberations of meaning it contains.
    The spiritual or emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities. Poetry is no exception—it is written in order to capture feelings and personal, subjective interpretations of events, rather than to deliver a mere description—you might say that it is the right-brain equivalent of a news report. As Helen Vendler (a Harvard professor and leading poetry critic) says, “Poems are hypothetical sites of speculation, not position papers. They do not exist on the same plane as actual life; they are not votes, they are not uttered from a podium or pulpit, they are not essays. They are products of reverie.”
    Once in a while we run into people who can recite poetry from memory. We all know people who memorize song lyrics and drop them into conversation at opportune moments. What makes a good lyric or poem? That it is easy to remember? I have lyrics bouncing around in my head all the time, and they are released from their neural prison at even the slightest provocation. During an uncharacteristic weeklong rainstorm at Stanford, it seemed as though my brain had a mind of its own (!), calling up one rain song after another. It began in one of those Jungian synchronicity experiences that Sting writes about. I was listening to the song “Rain” when I heard a crack of thunder followed by a few taps of light droplets on my roof. Within minutes, the rain was pounding. I raced outside to put the top up on my car (California—it was a convertible of course) and to bring in the dog, who was already cowering underneath the hydrangeas. I had the first verse of that Beatles song stuck in my head (“When the rain comes/they run and hide their heads”), and to get it unstuck I tried to think of another song. The first one that came to mind was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” by Bacharach and David, a great song, but one that—from hard-won experience—I knew would be stuck in my head for a solid week if I didn’t nip this one in the bud, and