I had great fun last year working on this poem, ‘Of the Seasons‘. It was an idea I’d started before, but it came time to submit work for uni so, naturally, time to dig up (and develop) old work.
The key idea is that each stanza correlates to a season, and each season has a ‘sound profile’. In writing metalanguage, the tool I worked with is called the sonic chain. Seamus Heaney referred to it as the ‘earscape’ of a poem. Each of the four seasons has the same line count and structure, with the final two lines of each five really hammering home the earscape.
Here’s the first stanza, Summer. Here, it is the /ɒ/ in ‘hot’ that creates that link, using the extension of that vowel sound to suggest lethargy and breathlessness.
The dry sun-sapped air forces even the most brave of creatures back to our air-conditioned cocoons. Too hot to think, too hot to bother Too hot that we’re all hot and bothered.
Here’s the poem, give it a read and then see if you can hear the sound of the season (yes, this may require reading out loud).
In the second stanza, autumn, it is the gentle, gliding vowel sound /iːv/ that brings on the image of gentle breezes and falling leaves that is iconic of autumn. For winter, the third stanza, the biting /ɒst/ sound, akin to gale force winds, is what creates an additional layer of texture and meaning on top of the words themselves. Finally, spring is where nature and the fourth stanza boom back into life with bold colours and sounds, something I achieved audibly with /aʊd/. What I succeeded in achieving in each of these examples is what Hutcheon (2006, p. 61) calls “a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second but not secondary.” The poem succeeds standing alone, but is enriched when transformed into a performed, audible work.
Hutcheon, L 2006, A theory of adaptation, Routledge, New York
Distilled Orthopraxy 