Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from our number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping.
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s sentence is deceptively simple and yet rhythmically beautiful. It’s a compound sentence, with two base clauses joined by the coordinating conjunction “and.” Monosyllabic words compose most of this 38-word sentence; there are only eight polysyllabic words. This sentence is emblematic of Hemingway’s style. I could open any of his novels or short stories and find a similarly constructed sentence. (From “Hills Like White Elephants”: “The hills across the valley of the Ebro' were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.”)
Simple syntax, short simple words. So how is the beautiful rhythm created?
It’s the proliferation of monosyllabic words, many of which are heavily stressed results in a sentence that swells with rhythm.
As Francine Mayes writes in The Discovery of Poetry, “All of life on earth is rhythmic.” Put your finger on your wrist or neck, and you hear your pulse. “Tides, breath, electromagnetic fields, sound waves, sleep… each has its own pulse rate.” Rhythm is our first language, which we hear as a fetus curled close to a mother’s heartbeat. We listen for it, even if we think we’re not. Regardless of whether you read Hemingway’s sentence out loud, studies find that the area in the brain that processes sound lights up.
We are once again talking about writing that appeals to the body.
Here’s how the sentence looks with the heavy stresses in bold:
“Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from our number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping.”
There is a pattern of a soft stress followed by two heavier stresses, or a soft stress followed by three heavier stresses.
Punctuation, too, creates style. There are no commas in this sentence, so there’s propulsion; at the same time, because of the many heavily stressed words, there’s a slowing down. It’s an intriguing tension between these two forces.
I love how the heavy stresses of “rain stopped” mimics the feeling of stopping. I slow again with the two heavy stresses of “two posts” as if Hemingway wants me to stand beside the narrator and look out over the land. The next cluster of heavy stresses, “bare wet autumn,” makes me really see this. So, too, with “straw screening.” And “roads wet.”
Another aspect of rhythm is sound patterns, in this case, assonance. In Hemingway’s sentence, I hear throughout like a ringing bell, the short “o” sound in stopped/from/saw/autumn/tops/straw.
Hemingway also uses repetition, repeating the word “wet” twice, to emphasize this particular aspect of the landscape, ensuring you feel it.
Your turn
Write a compound sentence with two base clauses connected by a conjunction.
For the first base clause, can you include two heavy stresses placed next to each other to slow the sentence down? Hemingway’s subject and verb are monosyllabic and heavily stressed, creating a double heavy beat.
For the second base clause, you’ll get busy clustering heavy stresses. If you want to follow Hemingway’s sentence, the pattern is two heavy stresses, “two post” in the prepositional phrase. The rest of the heavy stresses come in the direct object (what did the narrator see?). There are three heavy stresses with “bare wet autumn,” then two, “clouds over,” then two, “straw screening,” and finally two, “roads wet.”
For more rhythm, can you go back through and choose words to invoke assonance, ringing a little bell of vowel sounds?
Try it!
Let me know how it goes!
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivate Your Prose Style” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with the practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books, www.ninaschuyler.com.
You’ll find my book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and my new book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal, published by Fiction Advocate. I’d really love it if you preordered my novel, Afterword, which Clash Books will publish in May 2023.
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I love the way he takes you there reeling you in.
Our favorite Hemingway quote: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."