*This blog was done remotely, no video conferencing occurred during the accompanying lesson.
RL: The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
Aim: How does Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Bells” convey and reinforce the meaning of the life cycle through his choice of poetic sound devices?
Do Now: (Team Challenge) — Create a list of ALL the kinds/types of bells you’ve ever heard. All of your information should be identical on your teammates documents. The Team to create a list with the most amount wins the points. You only have 2 minutes!
Since I wasn't able to be with my team during the do now, I had to come up with the bells on my own. I was only able to think of five bells in 2 minutes: school bells, door bells, hand bells, cow bells, and church bells. While just looking at the prompt, it may seem easy, but once you start thinking, you actually realize how difficult it is to think of different bells. It isn’t the most common thought.
Following this, we had to read “Oh, Woe is Poe”. In short, this was about the depressing life of Edgar Allan Poe. Some important details from this reading were that basically everyone he ever loved died and that his cause of death wasn’t definitely confirmed. Poe attended a lot of funerals, and when he wasn’t at funerals, he wrote stories about dead people or dying people, with no escape from their eerie locations. You can see in his works that the common themes are mostly misery, loneliness, and death. Almost everyone he loved died of tuberculosis, starting with his mother at the age of three. He watched her cough up blood and die, and sat in a room with her dead body before it was taken away to be buried. After this, his first girlfriend, stepmom, older brother, and first cousin died of tuberculosis as well. He was very poor and asked distant relatives and acquaintances for money. With this, he became an alcoholic, and was always drunk and often seen drinking his sorrows away. He died in a hospital in 1845, because of “congestion of the brain”. This basically meant nothing, so some speculate he had rabies or alcohol poisoning.
For more information, you can check out this video about Edgar Allan Poe https://youtu.be/x-387NMCR6w
Upon completion of the reading, we then started to learn about poetic sound devices. Here are some key terms to understand:
Musical or Sound Devices: convey and reinforce making (or experience) through the use of sound
Cacophony: Derived from the Greek word meaning “bad sound”. It is involved with producing a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds. For instance, cars honking, people yelling, dogs barking, etc.
With Cacophony, there are explosive consonants and hissing sounds which can be used in your word choice to convey dark feelings/thoughts, harsh or loud noises, chaos, violence or fear. Explosive Consonants are the letters k, t, g, d, p, b, q, c, x. Hissing Sounds are ch-, sh, and s.
Euphonious: Involving sounds that are soothing or pleasant to the ear. It is the opposite of cacophony. It includes all the vowels, and has harmonious consonants (l, m, n, r, soft f, soft v sounds) or semi-vowels (w, s, y, th, or wh) extensively to create more pleasant sounds. Euphonium is used to make language sounds beautiful and melodic. The best way to achieve this is to make the language sound harmonious.
In our teams, we had to highlight words that were cacophonous and euphonious.
Cacophonous:
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!” (“The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll)
“I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments…” (Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift)
Euphonious:
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (“Ode to Autumn” by John Keats)
“While the stars that oversprinkle/All the heavens seem to twinkle” (“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe)
These are some types of devices seen in writing as well, with examples so you can find them in your reading:
Alliteration: A stylistic device in which consecutive words or words that occur close together in a series all begin with the same first consonant letter or sound.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Alliteration help: https://youtu.be/brQfY8VtmyA
Onomatopoeia: A word which imitates the natural sound of a thing
“Crash! Bang!” Roared the thunder as it rippled through the sky.
Onomatopoeia help: https://youtu.be/0ST_SEOPcrk
Repetition: Repeating words, phrases, lines, or stanzas. Repetition is used to emphasize a feeling or idea, create rhythm, and/or develop a sense of urgency.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Rhyme: a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words (especially common at the ends of words). Rhyme is pleasing to the ear and also lends a sense of rhythm and order to the language.
Perfect Rhyme: Occurs when stressed syllables of the words, along with all subsequent syllables, share identical sounds
Car and Star; Cat and Bat; Chase and Place
Imperfect Rhyme or Slant Rhyme: Involved the repetition of similar sounds that are not quite as precise as perfect rhyme.
Street and Peaked; Uptown and Frown
Afterward, we had to read “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe. You can listen here: https://youtu.be/m75-812-sj4 The poem was very interesting and had a very impactful meaning behind it, which I will discuss later.
We were assigned to fill out a chart answering a few common criteria. We had to write about the usage of the bell, feelings connected to the bell, sound devices and literary devices used, analyze the effect of Poe’s use of these specific sound devices, and the overall mood expressed in each stanza.
For instance, I will use Stanza 3, the Brazen Bells, as an example of what the chart should have looked like. The bell seemed to be used for a warning for something bad. Feelings that were associated with this are fear, terror, and pain. After really dissecting the stanza, I found examples of repetition, diction, and rhyme. We were prompted to use textual evidence.
Repetition: “Of the bells-/Of the bells, bells, bells,bells”
Diction: “In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, / In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire”
Rhyme: “Too much horrified to speak, / They can only shriek, shriek
In addition to this, I mentioned how the effect of Poe’s use of these specific sound devices is that he makes the Brazen bells seem fear-instilling and frightful. The overall mood starkly contrasts from the previous stanzas, because those had a very positive, happy, joyous mood as opposed to this one.
Ultimately, our last task of the lesson was to answer a few questions as team group work. We were required to compare, in terms of similarity, the first stanzas; compare the bells in stanzas 1 and 2 with the bells in stanzas 3 and 4 and look for the mood shift; and to compile a list of sound devices Poe used. The last question contained three parts: 1) Why do you think Poe places a heavy emphasis on sound in this poem? 2) What message does it help to express? 3) How is this poem symbolically a metaphor for life?
I’ll include my response for the last question, since it covers the theme of the poem and talks about sound.
“I think Poe places a heavy emphasis on sound in this poem because the bells have different sounds and meanings, just like how life has many different occasions and feelings that go along with it. The message it helps to express is the feelings and experiences of life, and that nothing good lasts forever. This poem symbolically a metaphor of life because it shows the stages of life. Childish innocence of life is shown in the first stanza, succeeding at something big in life is the second stanza, the third stanza is death, and the fourth stanza is those who mourn your death or being dead.”
Reflection:
During today’s lesson, I learned about the backstory of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, literary and sound devices, and did a deep-dive into the meaning of the poem “The Bells”. I learned this information in order to expand my knowledge of poetry as we advance through the poetry unit, as well as to get a better understanding as to how to analyze poetry to find the speaker’s desired meaning. I will use what I learned to improve my poetry immensely by thinking about how the sounds of my words impact the mood and meaning of the poem. Furthermore, I can use cacophonous and euphonious words not only in poetry but in my other writing pieces to make them more meaningful and convey my ideas in a better way. Doing a close read of “The Bells” really helped aid my ability to look at poetry from many different perspectives, and this was great practice for analyzing other pieces of literature/poetry. Therefore, today’s lesson will overall be an immense help for my academic career.
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