Middle School Poetry

Middle School English · Poetry · Unit 1

Sound and Rhythm: How Poems Make Music

A train you can hear, bells you can almost touch, and snow that falls in four quiet beats.

Poems were made to be heard. Long before most people could read, they remembered songs and stories by their sound. Poets still use that music today.

In this unit you will learn five sound tools. Then you will hear them at work in three famous poems. Read each poem out loud, or press “Read it to me.” Your ears will notice things your eyes miss.

On this page: the sound toolkit, three poems with notes, a writing prompt, and a self-guided quiz.

The Sound Toolkit

Rhyme

Words rhyme when their ending sounds match, like snow and know. A rhyme scheme uses letters to track which line endings rhyme. The first rhyme sound is A, the next new one is B, and so on.

Meter (the beat)

Meter is the pattern of strong and weak syllables in a line. Clap along as you read. Each strong clap is a beat. Many poems keep the same number of beats in every line, like a song.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the same first sound repeated in words close together: “faster than fairies.” It makes a line easy to say and hard to forget.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia (say it ON-uh-MAT-uh-PEE-uh) is a word that sounds like what it means: buzz, crash, tinkle.

Repetition

Repetition means saying a word, phrase or line again. Poets repeat to build a rhythm, to stress an idea, or to create a mood.

“From a Railway Carriage” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Poem · from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)

Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle All through the meadows the horses and cattle: All of the sights of the hill and the plain Fly as thick as driving rain; And ever again, in the wink of an eye, Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles, All by himself and gathering brambles; Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; And here is the green for stringing the daisies! Here is a cart run away in the road Lumping along with man and load; And here is a mill, and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Text: Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), poem XXXVII. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #136.

Listen for the train

Read the first line fast: faster than fairies, faster than witches. Each strong beat is mostly followed by two quick, weak ones. Many readers hear wheels clattering over the rails.

Rhyme in pairs

The lines rhyme in pairs, called couplets: witches / ditches, battle / cattle, plain / rain. The rhyme scheme is AABBCCDD. The quick, steady pairs keep the poem rushing forward.

Alliteration and repetition

Listen for “faster than fairies,” “houses, hedges,” and “glimpse and gone.” In the second stanza, “Here is…” repeats again and again, as each sight flashes by the window.

“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe (Part I)

Poem · first published in 1849, shortly after Poe’s death · Part I of four

Hear the sledges with the bells— Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Text: “The Bells,” Part I, as first printed in Sartain’s Union Magazine, November 1849, via the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore (eapoe.org). Public domain. The magazine’s spaced dashes are set here as plain dashes. The later text on Project Gutenberg (eBook #10031) reads “In their icy air of night!” and adds a comma after “stars”; those are later variants.

Onomatopoeia

Tinkle, jingling and tinkling sound like small bells. Tintinnabulation (TIN-tin-ab-yoo-LAY-shun) means the ringing of bells. Say it slowly and you can hear the ringing inside the word.

Repetition

“Bells” appears again and again near the end of the stanza. The words pile up the way bell sounds overlap in the air. “Time, time, time” works like a ticking clock.

Rhyme everywhere

Poe rhymes at the ends of lines (bells / foretells) and inside them too. Find tinkle, oversprinkle and twinkle. Alliteration helps as well: “merriment their melody.”

Want more? The full poem has four parts: silver sleigh bells, golden wedding bells, brass alarm bells and iron funeral bells. Each part sounds different. Read the rest at the Project Gutenberg link above.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

Poem · from New Hampshire (1923)

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Text: Robert Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1923). Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #58611. The Gutenberg file’s table of contents lists “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but the heading above the poem drops the “a”; we use the full title. Its apostrophe is shown curly here.

Four quiet beats

Clap the first line: whose woods these are I think I know. That is a weak-strong pattern, four times. Every line in the poem keeps this steady beat, like a horse walking slowly through snow.

A rhyme chain

In stanza 1, lines 1, 2 and 4 rhyme (know, though, snow), but here does not: AABA. Then here becomes the main rhyme of stanza 2 (queer, near, year). Each stanza hands a sound to the next one. The last stanza rhymes all four lines: DDDD.

Soft sounds and repetition

“The sweep / Of easy wind” is full of hushing S sounds, after the jingle of the harness bells. The last line is repeated word for word. Why might the speaker say it twice? There is more than one good answer.

Your Turn to Write

Prompt: Write a short poem of 8 to 12 lines about a place full of sound: a lunchroom, a ballgame, a thunderstorm, or a busy street. Use at least:

  • two rhyming pairs,
  • one example of alliteration,
  • one onomatopoeia word, and
  • one repeated word or line.

Then read it out loud. Clap the beats in each line. Do they feel steady, or do they change? Fix any line that trips your tongue.

Write your draft on a separate sheet of paper.

Self-Guided Quiz

Six questions on the poems above. Choose one answer for each, then check your answers. You can try again as many times as you like.

1. Which word from “The Bells” is onomatopoeia?
2. What is the rhyme scheme of the first stanza of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?
3. In “Faster than fairies, faster than witches,” which sound repeats at the start of words?
4. Which line does Frost repeat word for word?
5. How many strong beats are in the line “Whose woods these are I think I know”?
6. Going by its title and its quick beat, what does Stevenson’s poem describe?

Sources and Credits

Colophon: the train-and-bells illustration and share image are original art made for Jugami.