The Most Common Element in Music and Poetry
Poetry and music have always been intimately related. Music for example can help children develop rhythmic intelligence and notice rhythm in poetry and in a broader sense in language, which are important skills in learning how to read and developing fluency as readers. Since poetry on the other hand has cadence, rhythm, and rhyme, music can readily integrate into it. So, the most basic feature shared by poetry and music is rhythm. Rhythm is also present in every aspect of human culture. Living things experience constant movement patterns in themselves and in their surroundings. Heart-beat of a living creature gives an intrinsic and universal ability to appreciate this sense of rhythm both in music and poetry. Poetry can provide many different kinds of rhythm at the same time. As it is the case with music, poetic expressions are written in certain patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. There is a rhythm between lines as the patterns are repeated or changed. In this vein, the tones of the reading a poem could be easily likened to a musical composition.
As T. S. Eliot pointed out that poetry begins with a drum being beaten in a jungle, retaining that essential of percussion and rhythm, should remind us of our eternal connection with rhythmic elements of music and poetry. The musicality of verse, its countable rhythm might as well function as a powerful aid to memory in terms of culture transfer and socialization. Counting rhymes, jump-rope rhymes, other kinds of formulated/metered language to accompany games, advertising jingles can take us to our primitive perceptions that have very much to do with our being alive, surviving and functioning bodies.
When you have a close look at the song lyrics or ballads, you can easily spot the fact that many lyrics are written in common metering style which is recognizable as the ballad stanza. Though ballads are not the only poems that can be sung. Other lyrics can be considered as a poem too. Some lyrics on the other hand may look different in some ways compared to the traditional poetry writing. Yet it does not constitute that lyrics are totally strange to poetry. On the contrary the features they have in common make them closely interrelated.
This interrelation is very much salient in the poems of many poets including Shakespeare, Yeats. They used their poems in musical theather and these poems worked very well with the wider audience.
Poetry with Music
Poems do not need to be written literally as songs to be associated with music. They can also be accompanied by music when they are read to an audience. If the practice of performing poetry with a musical accompaniment goes back to the early Middle Ages, it has flourished in the twentieth century as well. The Beat poets of the 1950s introduced the idea of listening to poems being read in the informal setting of a coffeehouse or a jazz club, often to the accompaniment of jazz. Allen Ginsberg, author of “Howl,” is the Beat poet who most fully explored the consequences of letting different kinds of poetry and music reflect and influence each other.
Music as Metaphor
What happens when the music is neither a part of the poem itself, as it is in a song, nor a background against which the poem may be heard? Sometimes music is only an analogy or a metaphor, a ghost we are invited to imagine we hear.
Music may also be present as an echo or a memory in a poem that is not otherwise a song.
Is Music Poetry?
When you add the lyrics, a story emerges from the music. Poetry like music exists to allow for the expression of human emotions and very often, people can connect through music or poetry by understanding a shared feeling that is difficult to express. Poetry can be defined as “condense, intense, experience.”
The distinction between music and poetry is a voice without words can still sing but, a poem without words is the one that hasn’t been written.
Conclusion
The language of music is understood by all cultures. All cultures use music and poetry to communicate, and the sounds and rhythms of music and poetry most of the time may cross cultural boundaries. Given these common features of music and poetry, these two have a great potential to offer us a powerful tool for human civilization to relate, to create, to collect, to interact, and to store a common heritage for posterity as well as sustaining our presence on this planet in a more meaningful way.