While most people enjoy poems at their surface, few (myself included) can easily enjoy the poem for what the poet is trying to say. I want to take a little time to delve into a short poem I found, called “The Word” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and dissect what its meaning is. Truthfully, I want to gush about how true her words are for a writer.
A poem’s voice is how the reader is meant to hear the poem. The word choices, word placement, and any potential rhyme scheme work into the category of being “voice.” In this poem, a lilting tone gives it a sing-song value similar to that of a childhood tune.
By the end of the first reading, you should have an idea of what the flow of the poem is and how it would sound if said aloud, which means you should be able to tell that there is a different kind of voice for each stanza. Despite this, the poem still flows together with a tone that feels almost whimsical.
The first line, “Oh, a word is a gem, or a stone, or a song,” has our word transitioning from one object to a second and a third, insinuating that a word can be whatever you want, regardless of what it actually is. The first word, “Oh,” starts us with something like a breath the poet would speak to begin the reading, such as if the word is a song and we are singing it to the audience.
A word is called several things throughout the first stanza, each having a different tone associated with it. Even the similar words – like gem and stone – have slightly differing meanings.
A gem is something beautiful: something shiny and wanted. A stone is merely a rock: pretty to some and useless to others. Perhaps your dangerous word is a flame because it wants to devour and damage everything or it is a two-edged sword because its cuts are calculated.
Even the third line has its differences, with a rose in bloom being more fragile and natural and a sweet perfume having been made by the hands of man.
This stanza is more literal in that Wilcox is describing how, during the editing process, writers will attempt to choose new words and phrases to replace the old. Perhaps that glint of a flame in the villain’s eyes was more like a two-edged sword or the perfume our hero smelled was more like a rose in bloom.
Much as we would like to choose more elegant words, “the word that sways, and stirs, and stays” is really the right choice. The emotion here is that this word will bounce around your head, not leave your thoughts, because it knows it’s the proper word.
Those really were flames in the villain’s eyes, ready to swallow things whole and give nothing back; the hero really did smell the artificial sweetness of a perfume rather than the pureness of a fresh rose.
The voice here speaks to the reality many artists face: whatever comes most natural is oftentimes what is best, regardless of what our second opinions tend to be.
The final stanza continues what the second stanza started; no matter how much work you put into a word, the most beautiful words are the ones that “leap forth white hot, / When the fountains of feeling run.” The tone here gets more urgent, like Wilcox was letting the words spill onto her page as soon as they were thought, but it’s still restrained and thought out.
The word “leaps forth” from the mind, like it is calling to the writer to pick it specifically while it’s “white hot.” The “fountains of feeling” being described is any rush of emotion that elicits the need to talk, where all words tend to come leaping out of your mouth.
This poem’s overall voice is almost like that of a teacher telling her student the way a word works. Writers cannot command a word to work if it doesn’t want to, and generally the word picks us – like the wand choosing the wizard.
