The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin Read Free Book Online

line of the song, just one subtle element among many that create an internal consistency in this lyric. There is the semantic connection between a desert and a plain, both flat expanses of terrain, a connection implied by her choice of the homonym planes in the second line.
    Of course, some of these connections may be only coincidence, things the writer herself did not notice. But these sorts of connections are prevalent in all great poetry, displaying the subtle workings of and intricate connections among imagination, intellect, and the subconscious. Even if a poet wasn’t aware herself of all that could be read into a particular poem, great poems reward this sort of analysis, and lesser poems do not—the deeper you look, the less interesting they seem. And the imagery is palpable—a burning desert, white vapor trails, bleak terrain. The song draws pictures with words. It also has metaphor, the drive across the desert being a Lakoffian metaphor for a relationship.
    Many of Sting’s own lyrics have a literary sensibility, coupled with a real ease of expression—the very sensual quality I spoke of earlier. Take his song “Russians” for example:
    In Europe and America
There’s a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets
Mister Khrushchev said, “We will bury you”
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too
How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
     
    The lyrics roll right off the tongue, easily. They’re easy to say, and they feel good in the mouth. Repetitions of vowel and consonant sounds—the phonology — give the verse forward momentum. The meaning is artfully veiled in metaphors. The last line of the first verse mentions children, the first line of the next verse a “boy,” and then the atom bomb is described in terms of children and boys, “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” The poet delights in stringing together familiar phrases that reverberate in our collective memory—“rhetorical speeches,” “we will bury you,” “the political fence,” and so on. The message is cast in terms of a hope that the “monsters” that inhabited each opposing side of the Cold War (for that is how we were raised to see our enemies, as subhuman monsters) will find common ground and hopefully common sense in their love for their children. This echoes General William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War-era pronouncement (made famous in the chilling documentary Hearts and Minds ) that there was no shame in accidentally killing North Vietnamese children because “the Oriental mind doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.”
    As we saw that good poetry must, Sting’s words create a rhythmic pulse. We can see this visually by adding diacritical marks showing the accent structure. The first line begins somewhat leisurely with eight syllables, and only two of them are stressed. The second line picks up the pace with eleven syllables, three of which are stressed, and more than half of which (six) begin with consonants. This trend continues in line three, where nine of the ten syllables begin with consonants. The combined effect of all these consonants is like a series of small explosions (they literally are explosions as air is thrust out of your mouth, something it doesn’t do with vowels) and these serve to propel the lyric forward.

    In normal English speech, we tend to raise the pitch of syllables that are stressed or accented and lower the pitch of unstressed syllables, as is the case in many (but by no means all) languages. If we violate this in English, it becomes confounded with the rising intonation we normally use to