Loud Music

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

In a 2004 interview, Dobyns meditated on the form of many of his poems: “If there's a consistency in any of the books, it's the fact that I like a long line. It runs from maybe eight to up to even sixteen syllables. In some books it's longer, in some it's shorter, but there's always the long line” (“Stephen Dobyns.” The Cortland Review: Spring 2004). This holds true for “Loud Music,” which is written in long lines ranging from 10 to 12 syllables. While “Loud Music” is a free verse poem lacking any set rhythm or rhyme scheme, the lines’ similar syllabic length achieves a musical quality. Dobyns heightens this via internal rhyme, repetition, and line breaks that “affect the rhythm of the lines, to affect the rhythm of the poem” (“Stephen Dobyns.” The Cortland Review: Spring 2004).

Internal and slant rhyme is apparent throughout the poem. The first and second lines feature a near rhyme: “My stepdaughter and I circle round and round. / You see, I like the music loud” (Lines 1-2), as “round” almost rhymes with “loud” (Line 2). In another instance, in Line 4, Dobyns breaks the line on the word “so,” which echoes the word “roll” (Line 4) and creates an internal rhyme.

Imagery

Imagery in “Loud Music” defines the tone of the poem and clarifies the characterization of the speaker and stepdaughter. “Loud Music” leaps into imagery in the final lines of the poem, beginning with Line 18 when the speaker raises the peephole box to their eye (Line 18) and sees an oceanscape with “a rocky coast” (Line 23), thick clouds, and the water “gray and restless” (Line 21). The speaker’s wish for this thrashing expanse of feeling and sound echoes his earlier desire to listen to deafeningly loud music. The ocean is a direct visual reflection of what the speaker described as the effect of loud music as “throbbing” and “jam-packing” (Line 3), and “blasting” (Line 9). The imagery in the final lines of the ocean erasing the self (Line 25) is paired with the image of loud music erasing the ego. The ocean as an image directly correlates to loud music, each larger than the self.

Simile

Dobyns uses simile in “Loud Music” to leap into hypothetical or fantastical moments throughout the poem. A simile is a literary device in which a poem compares two things, usually introducing the equivalency with the words “like,” “as,” or “than.” Dobyns describes his stepdaughter using her voice by connecting her to a sea creature: “at four what she wants is self-location / and uses her voice as a porpoise uses / its sonar” (Lines 11-13). The simile of the porpoise’s use of sonar compared to the stepdaughter's use of her own voice “to find herself in all this space” (Line 13) is striking because it creates the poem’s first link to the ocean. Here, his stepdaughter relies on echolocation to understand and locate herself within the world; later, the speaker will rely on the ocean to erase his sense of self rather than enabling a way to create identity.

The large marine creature will recur in the poem’s other major simile. In the peephole box, the speaker would wish to see the ocean as “gray and restless / as if some creature brooded underneath” (Lines 21-22). This comparison of the imagined waves being churned up by a dark, unhappy beast (Line 22) points to the reason why the speaker might prefer loud music. By listening to loud music, one can disappear and become “lost within the blare” (Line 10). The “turbulent water” (Line 26) and stormy sea, like loud music, have the ability to “[wipe] out the ego” (Line 25). By establishing this comparison, Dobyns clarifies the speaker’s reasoning for preferring the dissolution of self via loud music.