SOUND

Oliver just astounds me on how much she knows on even small things like sound that are inside of the actual poetry itself. I've never really thought of the use of "hard" and "soft" sounds and how “A vowel forms a perfect sound when uttered alone. A consonant cannot be perfectly uttered till joined to a vowel.”

Oliver picks out a good example on the usage of different sounds, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. How Frost uses these soft sounds within and at the end of the lines enables the reader to sense a calmness about them, such as they would if they in fact stopped at this very place that Frost writes about.

As I was reading i wondered if the people who made up the English language were actually thinking of how the sounds of the words would affect whoever was hearing it. If this were so it would be an amazing feat, but i doubt it since the language for the most part (with some latin) originated in Britain in the time of the barbaric Anglo-Saxons. I was also wondering if poets actually thought of every time trying to set the mood with different sounds of words, and again I seriously doubt it.