Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Before you do anything, read this sentence out loud.
The poet Robert Frost said, “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”
What does Frost mean? He’s talking about the sound of a sentence and how that sound can convey its own meaning, separate from the content. And sometimes the sentence sound says more than the words or maybe even something different.
The making of music with words is no small thing (can we call it Word Music?). When the body feels something, when we write and invoke the senses—smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound, for instance--the body feels it. It becomes a reality that a reader can believe in. Trust. That’s a big deal. In this day of intense and overwhelming divisiveness, in which it seems no one can agree on anything, here is a way to create a common reality. Through sensate details, the very sound of the sentence, we can create common ground because it’s hard to argue with a sound that is felt by the body.
OK, I'm getting a little too excited about this idea. I'm sure in future posts I'll come back to this because it's really amazing.
How Do You Make Music Like Hurston?
Hurston used a compound sentence, which has at least two independent clauses connected by a conjunction or a semi-colon.
The first independent clause is “Mind-pictures brought feelings”
The second independent clause is “feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart”
Each could stand alone, of course, but Hurston connected them with “and.”
Hurston repeated “feelings,” (the direct object) from the first independent clause and made it the subject of the second independent clause. If you want to sound like a smarty, it’s called anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word of one phrase or clause at the beginning of the next phrase or clause.
For those of you who like poetry and making music, you can go further. The ear likes repetition (the ear, that busy writer and reader). Hurston knew this and used alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words: “dragged,” “drama,” “hollows,” and “heart.”
She also repeated vowel sounds, called assonance, with the words “dramas” and “hollows.”
One more thing. Music involves rhythm, which is hard stresses and soft stresses. “Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures,” says Mary Oliver in her book, A Poetry Handbook, “and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, the sweet grows sweeter.”
So the brilliant Hurston knew this, too, of course, and created a rhythm in the sentence. When I read the sentence out loud, I heard the following (the hard stresses are capitalized).
MIND-PICtures brought FEElings, and FEElings DRAGGED OUT DRAmas from the HOllows of her HEART.
Do you hear how you slow down with the DRAGGED OUT DRAmas part? Doesn’t it feel like you’re dragging something? Doesn’t it feel like the sound is mirroring the content of the sentence? And there’s that little rhythm pattern with the two “feelings.” Feels like music to me.
Now your turn to make some music. Tell me: how did it go?
This sentence is exquisite. There's this sense in its rhythm of things tumbling out of those hollows, as if those mind-pictures were a key that opened a forbidden Pandoras's box, and out tumbled the feelings and the drama.
I gave the rhythm and alliteration a shot...
Cold water caused shivers,
and the shivers shook the shackles
of the cobwebs in her mind.
Here's my sentence. I've used a compound sentence, repetition of 'memories', and alliteration. I also tried to create a pleasing rhythm with stressed and less stressed syllables to enhance the meaning -
Her music was enmeshed with his memories; those memories tripped him up and sent him stumbling through his days.