Sound Elements: Stevens & Moore

TEXT: Stevens – “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” pg. 1237
Moore – “Nevertheless” pg. 1332-1333

The Wallace Stevens poem I chose to look at is “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”. When strictly looking at the sound elements I noticed a couple things that seemed relevant. There is use of alliteration, which is when the beginning letters and sounds of words are the same. In line 3 we see the last part of the line is, “cups concupiscent curds” which is alliteration. I also found the use of assonance, which is the repetition of vowel sounds within a phrase or line. In line two there is the phrase, “bid him whip” which is the first place where assonance is used. Then in line 7, “Let be be finale of seem”, also is an example of assonance.
Although I didn’t seem a real rhyme scheme from start to finish there is a rhyme towards the ending of the poem. In the first stanza, lines 7 and 8 rhyme. Then with second stanza, line 13 rhymes with 14 and line 15 rhymes with 16. I thought this created sort of a sing-song feel towards the end of each stanza. The only line which I found that repeats in the last line of both stanzas, which is for the most part the title of the poem, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” (lines 8 and 16).

The Marianne Moore poem I chose to look at is “Nevertheless”. Unlike Steven’s poem I did not find a lot of different sound elements however, I found one big one – a rhyme scheme. In “Nevertheless”, the last two lines of every stanza rhyme. In stanza one, we see lines 2 and 3 which rhyme with “yet” and “met”. Then in stanza two “multitude” and “food” rhyme in lines 5 and 6, continuing on in the third stanza lines 8 and 9 rhyme with “in” and “twin”. That rhyme scheme continues on until the very end of the poem. The first couple of times I read the poem I got stuck in the ninth stanza with the words “under-” and “stir”. I wondered if they actual do rhyme, but in the end I decided that they do in fact rhyme. It’s just not a very clear rhyme like it is throughout the rest of the poem.

The easy part of this assignment was to identify the use of sound throughout the two poems and identify how they are similar and different. Stevens contains several other elements which contribute to the sound of the poem than Moore does. However, Moore is much more consistent with the sound of her poem than Stevens is. I did not find it easy to figure out why they made their poems sound the way they did. Then I realized that the way the poems sounded was much different than I would expect from modernist poetry. When I read the poems aloud, especially in the case of Moore’s poem, the poems seemed to flow very smoothly together. They didn’t sound too disjointed or fragmented, even though the phrases and lines were very fragmented when you just read the words on the page. Just looking at the two poems you can see that the ideas and phrases are fragmented and disjointed. So I thought the purpose of making a rhyme scheme and allowing the poems to sound like they do was to develop a sense of smoothness and a sense of whole amongst everything else that was fragmented and disjointed.