Cacophony and Beauty

 Cacophony in poetry is the unpleasant combination of pleasant and unpleasant sounds (1). Dissonance--unpleasant sounds--is typically created when you use a lot of hard consonants. Euphony is created when you have combinations of soft consonants and vowels, making pleasant sounds. 

For example, if we take a stanza from my poem "Barren Desert Cliffs," we will see a degree of cacophony:

Go swing, swallows--sudden arcs up in the sky,

Away, cliffs with nests they hid from wind--They fly,

They dip, fly up, eating insects in the dry,

Barren desert cliffs.

Euphonic words: swing, swallows, sudden, away, with, they, nests, hid, from, wind, fly, in, the

Dissonant words: Go, arcs, up, sky, cliffs, dip, eating, insects, dry, barren, desert, cliffs

Note that the final five-syllable line is all dissonance. My intention here was to create the starkness of the desert's barrenness and the sharpness of the cliffs. In the rest of the poem, there's a violence in the eating, there's a crunchiness in insects (not just in the eating, but in their exterior hardness); arcs and dips are sudden, and suddenness is, metaphorically, sharp. There's a lot of unpleasantness and surprises going on. 

However, this is all contrasted with the softness of the swallows, which swing and have nests hidden from the wind. The swallows are beautiful and pleasant, the nests are delicate, the wind--though dangerous to the nests--is nevertheless a relief in the desert and a way for the swallows to fly and feed. 

This stanza (and the poem as a whole) never settles on either dissonance or euphony, though any given stanza may be more euphonious or more dissonant than the others. 

Does this in fact make the stanza--or the entire poem--a cacophony? Perhaps, to a certain degree. If your purpose is to create a sense of chaos, then cacophony is a way to create that sense.

This effect of sounds--hard dissonance and soft euphony--is an example of embodied metaphors (a topic discussed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By*). Hard consonants are obviously not literally "hard" or "sharp," but we certainly seem to understand what is meant by using those terms. Yet, "hard sounds" or "hard consonants" seem to have a "pointedness" to them; they seem less "giving." Equally, and oppositely, the "soft consonants" and the vowels seem much more "giving," in the same way that a pillow is giving. 

We use the same metaphors in the visual arts. There are "hard colors" and "soft colors," "hard lines" (straight lines and corners) and "soft lines" (curves). If I were to say that Monet's paintings were "soft" and that Picasso's cubist paintings were "hard," you would understand exactly what I'm talking about. 

But surely not everything with a combination of hard and soft sounds (or colors/shapes) create cacophony. We typically think of a cacophony as equivalent to dissonance, but we're trying to come to an understanding of its use in poetry, and are thus using it in a more specialized form. We can rather think of cacophony as the opposite of beauty. But it's an opposite that uses the same tools. The question is really whether you are creating increased tension with your contrast between hard and soft sounds or if you are trying to create something beautiful through the creation and release of those same kinds of tensions. 

Beauty, then is something akin to having a piece with resolution, to the raising of tension and resolving it through a catharsis (as Aristotle said tragedy is to do). Whether one is simply raising tensions or raising and resolving tensions is what makes the difference between cacophony and beauty (think of the end of "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles, with and without the final piano chord--without it, the song ends on cacophony; with it, the piece ends as beautiful). 

Both beauty and cacophony can be used in your poetry, though obviously with different effects. What may be surprising, though, is the relationship between the two, that the two are not entirely unrelated. Indeed, sometimes what appears to be cacophony one time may sound harmonious another--as sometimes happens when someone hears "foreign" music for the first time, but then grows used to it over time. Remember that sometimes, your audience has to grow to appreciate new sounds in poetry. 

Footnotes:

1. Here, I am using the definition used by Lewis Turco in The Book of Forms*, rather than how it's used here, in an article by Robert Longley--I, following Turco, am using "dissonance" where Longley uses "cacophony."