Sound and Sense Rules and Order Quotes

Art (or practice), not chance (or talent), decides the way these lines strut their stuff. As the speaker compares writing to dancing, he uses elision (the skipping of a syllable to conform to the number of feet per line). It's like he's showing off his fast step and enforcing the idea that writing verse and using techniques like elision are learned. It's also interesting to see how language and rules change over time: you probably wouldn't have pronounced learned with two syllables anyway, but you would pronounce easiest with three.

The speaker links prosody with content, but it's as if the term "sense" starts to mean more than just meaning or content. In connection with sound, which is one of the five physical senses, the use of "sense" begins to take on this other connotation. Poetry is a kind of "sound sense" that combines thoughts and prosody into one way of coming to know and experience the world.

The rules of prosody become one and the same with nature – the soft wind, the smooth stream. These lines combine with lines 7-8 to highlight natural images and the way the meter of poetry can be shaped to sound like them.

These lines begin the transition from images of nature, to Greek and Roman poets. The prosody in these lines is made to imitate the actions of classical figures. This slight change from nature images to classical allusions serves to make the two appear to go together: the ancients were enacting the rules of nature so their rules of prosody, too, come from nature.

We notice the strong verbs in these last two lines: hear, surprise, bid, fall, and rise. The speaker commands us to hear and be surprised. The poem bids, or orders, the passions to move. The speaker attributes great power to prosody – even moving the passions. The emphasis on hearing can sometimes be overlooked because we often read poems. But here we must "hear" in order to be surprised and have our emotions moved.