Clark Ashton Smith: The Pleasure of Consonants and Vowels

Click on jpeg for a larger image.

A composer might study musical scores, a painter might study textures and the strokes of a brush, but a scribbler of my type will study poems.

For example, in this Petrachan sonnet by Clark Ashton Smith, we can hear a careful use of assonance, a play with sonorous vowels, the high sound of the long letter I, and a modulated use of alliteration. (In the jpeg, I've used the phrase "No M" to show lines where Smith has provided contrast to this alliteration by avoiding the letter M.)

Smith wrote by his own aesthetic principles, and I am not here to criticize the choices he made. What I have called an end-rhyme conflict is labelled that way only because I do my best to avoid such things. Smith would have had his own priorities.

On Facebook, someone told me that my analysis was "excrement," and -- as far as I could tell from his comments -- apparently rejected any need to look at poetry in terms of sound and rhythm. I replied:

"It should never surprise you that many of us read with passion, that we take a visceral pleasure in the sounds and rhythms of language, and that we love to share this pleasure by pointing out the ways in which consonants and vowels clash and harmonize in a poem. I would never call appreciation 'excrement,' but then again, I love to read."

Unlike a dissected animal, a poem, when taken apart, remains a living, joyous thing. The more we study it, the more lively it becomes.