Week Two: After-Glow – The Interior Music
Or: sounds and other stuff that separates poetry from prose
After-Glow by Raymond Carver
The dusk of evening comes on. Earlier a little rain
had fallen. You open a drawer and find inside
the man’s photograph, knowing he has only two years
to live. He doesn’t know this, of course,
that’s why he can mug for the camera.
How could he know what’s taking root in his head
at that moment? If one looks to the right
through boughs and tree trunks, there can be seen
crimson patches of the after-glow. No shadows, no
half-shadows. It is still and damp…
The man goes on mugging. I put the picture back
in its place along with the others and give
my attention instead to the after-glow along the far ridge,
light golden on the roses in the garden.
Then, I can’t help myself, I glance once more
at the picture. The wink, the broad smile,
the jaunty slant of the cigarette.
This week, rather than talk about a poem’s meaning, we will concentrate
on the music that a poem creates. For whatever else poetry may be, like
all art it “aspires toward the condition of music,” as Walter Pater once
suggested. In a more literal sense, music—a stimulating, moving or
pleasing pattern of sounds—is at the very heart of what we mean by the
word “poetry.”
One of the main musical devices of all English poetry, but particularly
important in an age which has largely (as we discussed last week)
abandoned the earlier convention of end-rhyme, is internal rhyme, a
device used to good effect in “After-Glow.” The poems of Raymond
Carver usually have a “prosy” feel to them, and an untrained reader going
through this poem without much consciousness of the musical qualities
of the language might well wonder what makes this a poem, rather than a
All readings and exercises adapted from In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
piece of prose broken into verse lines. If the reader knew that Carver has
been one of American’s finest contemporary short story writers, the
impression that this is really prose might well be reinforced. But
Raymond Carver was as serious a poet as he was a fiction writer—and his
poetic ear was a fine and well-trained one. Knowing that, it will be worth
our while to look more closely at this poem’s internal rhymes so that we
can appreciate the rich orchestration of sounds in this poem that on the
surface seems so colloquial and prosy.
Assonance. In the first two lines of “After-Glow,” we find a great deal
of sound repetition. For example, in line one, the words “dusk,” “of,”
and “comes” have the same vowel sound. In line two, we have the same
sort of vowel repetition in the words “fallen” and “drawer”—an identical
“awe” sound, a sound that is repeated once more two lines further in
“course.” Similarly, the last two words of that line, “find” and “inside,”
share that long i sound. If you trace the long o sound through the poem,
you’ll find it cropping up a dozen times, beginning with “open,”
“photograph,” and “knowing” in lines two and three, and ending with
“golden” and “roses” in the fourth line from the last. This technique of
forming a partial rhyme by using identical vowel sounds is called assonance, and it
is one of the most important musical devices in English language poetry.
Repetition. All those o sounds reinforce what is arguably, the central
word in this poem—“know”—since the poem is about a man who is
looking at a photograph of someone who does not know he is going to
die soon. (In light of the author’s history, it is likely that it’s a picture of
himself.) The word appears, in one form or another, three times in the
poem—after which comes two uses of its homonym: “no.” The technical
name for the repetition of words or phrases in a poem is repetend.
Alliteration. The repetition of consonant sounds also plays an important
role in the internal music of poetry. The phrase “I put the picture back in
its place” contains three words that begin with the letter p and one that
begins with a b, a letter that has a very similar sound. The phrase “The
man goes on mugging” takes some of its grace from the repeated m
sounds, just as the final phrase, “slant of the cigarette” takes some of its
grace from the repeated s and t sounds. Alliteration is the repetition of the
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initial consonant sound in words or syllables. More loosely, we can say it is the
repetition, for musical effect, of any consonant sound in words.
Rich Consonance. In “After-Glow,” there is another technique of
internal rhyme that is more rare, but useful to know. The word “root” in
line six and “right” at the end of line seven both begin and end with the same
consonant sounds, but have a differing vowel sound between them. This device is
known as rich or full consonance. Other rich or full consonance rhymes
with “root” and “right” would be “rat,” “rate,” “wrote,” and “rout.”
Partial Consonance. A more common sound device than rich
consonance is partial consonance, more generally just called
consonance and sometimes called terminal alliteration. It denotes the
identity of the final consonant sound in two or more words. In the first line of
“After-Glow,” the words “fallen” and “open” share the same en sound at
the end. In the line “light golden on the roses in the garden,” the words
“golden” and “garden” are also an example of partial consonance
because of their final en sound. Those two words are also highly
alliterative, sharing an initial g followed by a d at the end of that syllable.
The fact that there is an l in the middle of one word and an r in the
middle of the other keeps it from being an example of rich consonance.
The music of that line is, of course, further enriched by the assonance of
“golden” and “roses.”
If you are thinking that such repetitions of vowel and consonant sounds
are inevitable, given that there are a limited number of sounds in the
English language, you are right. Any passage of ordinary prose will also
exhibit these characteristics. But because poets tend to make
conscious use of these devices for musical effects, you will find
such repetitions of vowel and consonant sounds considerable more
frequent in poetry than in prose. Often when a passage from a poem
sounds lovely to your ear, it is precisely because of these devices we have
been discussing. These repetitions of sound tie the phrases together
musically and create a pleasure more subtle than, but similar to, that
which we take in ordinary end-rhyme.
Anaphora. Another musical and rhetorical device, one that is closely
related to repetend, is anaphora, which designates the repetition of the opening
All readings and exercises adapted from In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
word or phrase in several successive lines. It was a favorite device of Walt
Whitman’s, used extensively in his long lists. The following passage from
his poem, “Song of Myself,” is typical of the power that can be achieved
by this technique:
Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the longlived swan is curving and winding,
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs
her near-human laugh,
Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by
the high weeds,
Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with
their heads out,
Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh
at night and feeds upon small crabs,
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the
well…
Beginning each clause with the word where gives tremendous thrust to
the lines, impelling them forward with great energy. As you should be
able to see for yourself at this point, Whitman’s lines are also
extraordinarily musical because of the techniques of assonance and
alliteration, the repetition of vowel sounds. For one example among
many, notice the bird/curving assonance in the first two lines and the
alliterative w sound in “Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow.”
If you recite this Whitman passage aloud, you will hear the rich music
created by those repeated sounds.
Diction and Sentence Grace. These techniques are not the only means
by which a poet produces musical lines and sentences. In English, there
are harsh sounds and softer ones, phrases that seem quick and energetic
and other that are slow, deliberate, meditative or mournful, while still
others might seem to have a humorous and playful lilt. Every phrase has
its own peculiar tone and pace, an effect that is made up of the specific
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words and their sounds combined. Imagine if Carver has opened his
poem this way:
As the somberness of evening takes place
and after it had been raining for a while
but now the rain had stopped,
you open up a drawer in which, behold,
you find the photograph there of a man and that man
you know has, alas, got only two more years in which to live.
This writing is dreadfully awkward, punctuated by distracting rhetorical
mannerisms and gives the reader none of the feeling that Carver is able
to establish at the beginning of “After-Glow.” One is likely not to finish
reading a poem that begins with such poorly made phrases. One
immediately distrusts the author’s literacy and, fairly or not, one is less
apt to take his remarks seriously. The poor writing simply gets in the way
of what is being said and with any pleasure we might take in how it is
being said.
To some extent, we are talking about nothing more than the ability to
shape phrases and sentences gracefully and well. Serious poets are concerned
with every syllable they set to paper. They will search for just the right word or
phrase, rewriting their lines over and over until they have just the sound
they are after. They know that the right sound combination will help
establish a particular voice, or tone, or pace, or shade of meaning.
Perhaps the line you are working on calls for a particularly harsh or
jarring sound, or a sense of urgency, or a sense of quiet resolution.
Perhaps it is a particular word that you need with just the right
connotation, or the right number of syllables, or a word that has an
accented syllable in just the right place for the rhythm you’re after.
What poets are after is precision. A dictionary and a thesaurus are handy
tools, but not for finding exotic synonyms, or words that you think
might make your writing sound more eloquent and learned. A good rule
of thumb is never to use a word that you’re proud of. If you’re not
certain of a word’s connotations or precise usage, don’t use that word.
All readings and exercises adapted from In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
Week Two Exercises
1. Recognizing Alliteration and Internal Rhyme
Go through the rest of the Whitman passage finding the alliteration and
assonance.
2. Describing Scenes and Brief Encounters
or: Stealing from Whitman
Whitman habitually kept a notebook with him, and we can trace the
inception of many of his poems and prose writing to those notebook
entries. Keep your notebook with you (starting now) through the
weekend. Write down brief descriptions of anything that catches your
eye—or heart!—in the manner of Whitman’s list of birds, animals, and
events. Describe various objects and creatures around your house, street,
campus, a restaurant, the party you’re planning to go to, etc., trying to
hold each to no more than two or three lines. Here’s what I really
want you to practice: Make your descriptions as accurate and richly
evocative (think: ORIGINAL) as you can without muddying them
with excessive language. Try to keep them from being too adjectival,
too flowery, too rhetorical. Rather, make your descriptions as concrete as
possible. Use sensory detail: sights, sounds, smells, and textures. Don’t
get lazy and generalize. Imagine, for example, if Whitman had written:
Where people go into cemeteries
Where animals cry out during the winter
instead of these two magnificent lines from the passage quoted above:
Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled
trees…
Don’t do the first one. Try to write like the second one. Here are some
things to notice:
- Whitman often describes the thing he’s talking about in two
segments: the beehives are on a gray bench in the garden AND
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-
-
-
they are half hid by the high weeds; the partridges roost in a ring
AND their heads are out. You get the idea. Try this technique on
a few of your sentences.
Whitman makes genuine observations—the products of having
looked, seen, and recorded. You might read that and think “well,
that’s simple.” It’s not so easy in practice. We are usually too
“busy” or sleepy or distracted (texting constantly, AHEM!) to
notice our environment accurately. But careful observation is a
HABIT OF ULTIMATE USE to a writer—one worth practicing.
Don’t be too judgmental about what you choose to observe.
Literally anything can be well observed—something new or old,
beautiful or ugly, mundane or flashy (actually, I would caution
you away from flashy).
Use your new found assonance and alliteration skills, but don’t go
crazy—a little goes a long way.
with “All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine.”
You might want to use a repetitive phrase to begin two-thirds of the lines
rather than every one of them in order to give the poem more variety and
make its language less predictable.
More examples of anaphoric poems:
“Forced Entry” by Jack Marshall
“Notes of a Return to the Native Land” by Aimé Césaire
“In November” by Harold Norse
As your putting your poem together, try the other things we’ve
discussed—precision, emotion, grace, and honesty. Don’t get to “poetic”
or wordy. Remember: You are trying to convince us and move us,
not impress us.
Lastly, you may find that some of your descriptions sand on their own as
complete poems. Here’s a two-line poem by Whitman: a description
followed by an observation that expands the descriptions into a large
perception about reality:
I last winter observed the Snow on a spree with the north west
wind;
And it put me out of conceit of fences and imaginary lines.
A careful reading of this poem reveals both alliteration and a surprising
amount of internal rhyme—some ordinary and some assonant.
3. An Anaphoric List Poem
As for all your other descriptions, the ones that do not stand up as
poems by themselves, try connecting several into a longer poem,
employing the device of anaphora. If all those scenes are located in one
physical area, you might want to use the word “where,” to begin each
new item, as Whitman does (steal! steal! steal!). Or you might start each
line with something like “I see the…” or “And here is…” or “How rarely
I see…” and them go on with your list of descriptions. Whitman ends
one list with “All of these I feel or am.” In another section, he ends a list
All readings and exercises adapted from In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
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