The Pearl of the "D" Sound

on Dickinson, urgency, and letting the ear into a poem

To read this means you very likely have in your catalogue of memories... "The Alphabet Song." While tunes and phrasings vary a bit, the order doesn't - it goes from A to Z. The Alphabet Song is a tool that helps children learn the order of the letters in the alphabet and the names of the letters which is, very often, a foundational skill for reading.

But the song inadvertently teaches other skills, as well, in relation to speech and reading. The song has a simple enough tune but the rhymes are part of the pleasure of singing it. Also, singing the alphabet teaches breath control and phrasing. But maybe the most inadvertent skill that comes from The Alphabet Song is developing fine motor coordination of the tongue and lips. Consider how close in sound the names of the letters "B"and "P" (bee and pee) are when spoken aloud. But even more close are the sounds themselves "buh and puh". These are subtle differences that need to be learned.

Now in the first "verse" of The Alphabet Song are seven letters - A-B-C-D-E-F-G.

While we call the whole thing "learning our ABC's"...right there in the middle is the letter D. Three letters before and three after. The "D" is a bit of a hinge in the phrase. Usually the "C" gets hit hard so that it rhymes with the “G” at end of the phrase. No mystical significance to "D" of that location or the letter itself but it is the first plosive consonant where you really have to get your tongue involved. A plosive consonant is one where there is a sudden burst of air made to make the sound. Other plosive consonants are "B," "P," "T," and "K." All the plosives have a kind of abrupt clarity to them somehow once you learn how to sound them.

This came to mind when reading recently a striking poem by Emily Dickinson that my old friend David Marshall shared.

One note from
one Bird
is better than
a million words
a scabbard
has - needs - holds
but - one
sword

From a "meaning" perspective it is clear enough. A single note from the throat of a bird is better than millions of spoken words. We can assume she means human words. She goes on to deepen her case that a scabbard (a sheath for a sword or dagger, often made of leather or metal), has and needs only one sword to fill it. Implying that, perhaps, it is the purpose of the scabbard to be filled by that one single blade. Perhaps the blade and the note have a connection. You get to wonder about the questions that are proposed in the poem.

Now many folks have been struck towards poetry and song by the trilling of birds or the dimness of humans in comparison. That is common enough observation and one easily forgotten. The scabbard/sword metaphor is a unique one and a compelling image and proposition, perhaps. Does that make the poem "good" or "better" or worth noting? I wouldn't say so but I do think this poem is quite noteworthy. I'd like to propose that the skill of the composition of this poem by Emily Dickinson isn't just because she's made a small observation about birdsong and humans and relates them to scabbards and swords.

Let me change a few words in the poem but keep the meaning exactly the same and see how differently the poem reads to maybe illustrate something wonderful she fashioned.

One note from
one bird
is better than
a million terms
a sheath
has-needs-clasps
but- one
dagger

The "meaning" is virtually identical but the poem now reads so dramatically differently. Yes, in my altered version you lose the bird/word rhyme but the "ur" sound is repeated in "bird" and "term" and picked up in "dagger", but I don't think the poem's worth hinges on that rhyme.

I think that part of what makes this poem so fine is that this small observation that could have easily been forgotten is rendered as this little necklace around a few thudding “d” sounds pearled in with alternating “R” and “S” sounds. This is a very gentle consonance (a repeating of consonant sounds) that are far apart enough that one might not catch what they are doing… My “ur” consonance in my test revision isn’t nearly as crisp or as pleasant on the ear as Dickinson.

One note from
one Bird RD
is better than
a million words DS
a scabbard RD
has - needs - holds DS
but - one
sword RD

I think that part of the brilliance of this poem is this small feature of these D sounds that almost clears the air with punctuation of the breath behind it. This is why, I think, Dickinson’s version is so much more alert and upright than my modified version

Now the original poem itself is kind of a marvel because it was written on a torn piece of an envelope. It is difficult to separate poem from the form and the medium. The written poem itself has a kind of urgency. I am not a graphologist but it looks urgent to my eye. Feel free to correct me if you know better. The poem takes the shape of the triangular piece. The diagonal edge dictates line lengths and she seems to run out of room at the end. The “needs” gets crammed in like the last important shirt in an outside pocket of fully packed luggage. One could almost imagine that she heard the bird and was so deeply impacted, the verse came to her and she just had to reach for a pencil and whatever paper was handy to get it down and the paper had a conversation with her hand about how that would come out.

Dickinson published hardly much more than a dozen poems in her lifetime but had generated a tremendous amount of poetry that was marginalia, notebooks, letters, scraps that was collected after her death. So when this poem gets “published” the reader usually doesn’t get to see the original form. The poem gets turned into black text on white backgrounds on paper or the screen. Something is lost in deciding to make line breaks and further decisions about where those should fall. But no matter how you break the lines up the spoken quality of that line of plosive “D” sounds make it through any translation. You couldn’t really lose them even if it was one unbroken line. This effect of the sound is, to my mind, foundational to the “meaning” of this poem. What a demonstration and a thing to track or note when listening to poetry.

"... we miss the value of poetry if we think of its characteristic knowledge as consisting of 'messages'... The knowledge that poetry yields is available to us only if we submit ourselves to the massive, and subtle impact of the poem as a whole."

‘Understanding Poetry', 1961

Thanks for reading and all willing more poetry wonderings coming soon enough