Connotation & Denotation

The main tool that poets can use to create an effect is, obviously, words. The words we use often work on two levels. The first and simplest level is their denotation and the more complex and interesting level is their connotation.

Denotation:

The denotation of a word is its basic meaning. For example the denotation of the word ‘black’ is simply the colour of the text on this screen. ‘Black’ means this colour. The denotations of words are useful for communicating ideas, descriptions and points of view clearly.

Connotation:

The words we use, however, do not stop there. They are rich with the shadows and echoes of other meanings that they have acquired over the course of history. The connotations of the word ‘black’ are therefore much more interesting than the mere colour of this text. In this case ‘Black’suggests ideas of death, evil, mourning, loss, sadness, darkness, fear, etc …

The important difference to notice is between what a word means and what that word suggests. Simply writing about the meanings of words will not get you a very good mark in your essays. Talking about all the different things that a word suggests, all the different connotations of a word, on the other hand, now that is how to score highly.

Here is a diagram that begins to trace all the different connotations of the colour white:

Symbols

One of the best ways to think of symbols is as shortcuts, kind of like emoticons, that help writers to express an idea really quickly instead of taking the long way around. Instead of spending ages trying to explain in detail a feeling or idea a writer can use a symbol to sum up that idea more quickly and often much more effectively.

The world in which we live is full of symbols: the movies that we see, the books we read, the songs we listen to … all of them contain symbols and we are so used to them that most of the time we don’t even notice when they are being used. For example: roses and hearts suggest love, doves suggest peace, lions suggest pride and power, etc …

It is only because we know these symbols so well that writers can take advantage of them in their texts. If we had to spend ages figuring out what a symbol meant then it would lose its effect. This is what makes symbols such powerful tools and such great shortcuts for writers and film-makers. For instance simply dressing a character in black and perhaps placing a swastika emblem on their clothes automatically singles them out as a villain without any further work having to be done.

A more technical definition would be that a symbol is ‘a word, picture or image which represents or sums up another much bigger idea, feeling or quality.

This is very similar to the difference between the connotation and denotation of a word. The denotation, the basic meaning of a rose is just the red flower but the connotations symbolise the ideas of love and romance.

When analysing a text keep your eyes peeled for symbols or objects that could have a symbolic meaning and don’t forget that one object can have more than one symbolic meaning. A rose does not necessarily suggest love; it might also suggest beauty or the idea of hidden danger because of the thorns.

Imagery

Imagery is often defined as something which creates a ‘picture in your head’. However, I have never found this useful because it seems to me that poems very rarely actually create anything like ‘pictures’ in my head that I can actually see.

As such, a better way to think about imagery is that it is just a form of comparison that helps try to explain one thing by comparing it to another. Now … you may ask why anyone would bother with this. Surely it would be simpler to just straight-forwardly describe something using adjectives rather than go to all the trouble of making comparisons. This seems sensible at first but have you ever really tried describing something accurately to someone else using just words? It’s actually a lot harder than you’d think, especially if you are trying to describe something new to that person or make them see the world in a new way, which is what poets and writers are often trying to do.

Making comparisons, then, is a good way of allowing us to use the knowledge that we already have to understand the new things that someone is trying to tell us. Take giving directions for example – it’s a lot easier to understand directions to an area that you’re already partly familiar with than directions to somewhere that you’ve never been.

There are three main types of comparison that writers often use. The simplest is simile:

Simile:

A simile is a statement that uses ‘like’ or ‘as’ to make a comparison.

For example when I say ‘the sun was as red as blood this evening,’ I have borrowed your already existing knowledge of the sharp and brightcolour of blood to give you an idea of how vibrant and stunning the sunset was.

Metaphor:

A metaphor is a direct comparison between two things where you pretend that one thing actually is another.

To turn the above example into a metaphor I would have to tell you about ‘the blood-soaked sun which set this evening’. Obviously the sun was not really bleeding so what I am saying cannot literally be true but it again conjures up the idea of a bright and shocking colour. You might notice as well that the metaphor is a little more powerful than the simile and has a more threatening feel perhaps because, without the words like or as, it is not so obviously a comparison.

Metaphors often work effectively as one-offs but sometimes writers try to push the metaphor as far as it will go and use different versions of it again and again throughout their text. In this case the metaphor has become an extended metaphor.

Personification:

Personification is when a writer gives human qualities to an animal / object / idea / any other inanimate object.

Often personification is achieved by using adjectives or verbs that we usually associate with people, particularly verbs that give objects desires, intentions, plans or emotions. We personify things all the time in our daily lives e.g. we might describe our mobile phone as ‘hiding’ in the bottom of our bag when we can’t find it or you might say that the traffic ‘hates’ you because it always decides to be busy whenever you go out. Time and luck are also often personified. Time can be described as running away from us or chasing us and luck can be on our side or against us.

Sound Effects

How would you pronounce the word ‘ghoti’?

George Bernard Shaw once complained that English spelling was so crazy that the word ghoti could actually be pronounced like the word fish. Confused? Here’s how:

• take the ‘gh’ sound from the end of ‘enough’ – this gives you the ‘fff’ sound
• take the ‘o’ sound from the word ‘women’ – this gives you the ‘i’ sound
• take the ‘ti’ sound from the word ‘emotion’ – this gives you the ‘sh’ sound

And if you put all three together you get the sound ‘fff-i-sh’

Aside from being a curiosity this highlights a mistake that students often make when they are writing about sounds: that is, they confuse sound with the alphabetical appearance of a letter but there are over 40 sounds in the English language and only 26 letters so some letters must be able to make more than one sound.

This is obvious when you think about it. Compare the sound the letters ‘ch’ make in the words cheap and choir. In the first example the two letters make a fairly predictable ‘ch’ sound but in the second they make a sound a little more like a ‘q’. And it doesn’t stop there: the same two letters in ‘chef’, for example, even make a ‘sh’ sound.

So, when talking about sounds, you have to bear in mind that really you are not just talking about the letters used but the sounds those letters make. However, don’t worry most of the time you will be able to identify sounds just by looking at the letters because English generally sounds like it looks.

Here is a list of some typical sounds that you might be able to identify in the texts you are studying:

Consonant Sound Effects

When you notice sound effects in texts you must not just simply point them out. Instead you must analyse how sounds are used by the writer to support the effect or Organising Principle that he or she is trying to create.

Consonant Sound Effects:

Here is a poem written by Alexander Pope that makes good use of consonant sound effects:

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.

When Ajax strives, some rock’s vast weight to throw,

The line, too, labours, and the words move slow;

Not so, when swift Camilla lightly scours the plain,

Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Notice how he chooses words with ‘s’ and ‘sh’ sounds in the first line to make the reader’s lips work at the hissing noise of the sea, then words with ‘r’ sounds in the second line, making the reader’s throat do some rasping work. These are forceful and vigorous sounds for a physically violent scene.

When he wants to create a calmer effect, he uses words which contain ‘m’ and ‘n’ nasal sounds, produced by letting air out through the nose, not working the tongue, lips, mouth or teeth. These sounds are soothing and mellow, fir for a description of gentle lightness.

Tennyson wanted to create the drowsy heat of a summer day in his poem In Memoriam, so he wrote the following:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms

And the murmuring of innumerable bees

He could have chosen other birds, trees and insects, as well as different adjectives and a verb. Would it have had the same effect if he had written the following?

The croak of crows in timeless oaks

And the buzzing of hundreds of wasps

The sibilance and harsh ‘c’ consonants in the second version make the scene seem much more threatening than the gentle nasal sounds in the first.

Repeating consonant sounds at the start of words is called alliteration. Repeating these sounds within words is called consonance.

Vowel Sound Effects

The main vowels are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, and ‘u’, although ‘w’ and ‘y’ can sometimes produce vowel sounds. All vowels can either be pronounced long or short:

Long: ‘ay’ as in ‘hay’

Short: ‘a’ as in ‘cat’

Lots of short vowels together tend to increase pace and give a sense of hurry or panic whereas repeated long vowels can often slow a line down and make it sound more relaxed or perhaps sad and weary.

An example of this can be found in the opening lines of this song from The Sound of Music, which, although it is a song about saying goodbye still manages to be sung cheerily by the Von Trapp children because of the short vowel sounds. In fact the song isn’t really a sad one at all because the children are only saying goodbye because it’s time for bed:

So long. Farewell. Aufwiedersehen. Goodbye.

In contrast, the long vowels in the following speech make it sound world weary and depressing:

Oh, woe is me, with hurt I moan and cry

Life holds no more, I’ll surely die.

Notice how in both cases the sounds support the meanings of the lines.

The repetition of vowel sounds is called assonance.

Onomatopoeia

Despite being the hardest word to spell in the English language, onomatopoeia is, very simply, when the meaning of a word is echoed by or similar to its sound. Basically, it is when words ‘sound like what they mean’. For example:

• fizz the ‘zz’ sounds a bit the noise something makes when it is fizzing
• buzz is similar
• crash the violent ‘c’ sound makes this sound a bit like a crash
• bang the harsh ‘b’ sound here has a similar effect
• whisper the sibilant ‘s’ makes you almost whisper this word out

It is often pointed out that fizzing things don’t actually make the sound ‘fizz’, in the same way that dogs don’t actually go ‘bark bark’. While this is true there is enough of a similarity between the ‘zz’ sound in fizz and the hissing sound that fizzing things make for the sound of the word to ‘echo’ it’s meaning.

Here is the first stanza of a poem called Breakdown by Jean Kenward that uses onomatopoeia to good effect:

Rackerty clackerty

clickerty BONG

the washing machine

Has gone terribly wrong,

Onomatopoeia can often be quite fun or used to create violent, loud, crashing, disruptive effects.

Tone

The tone of someone’s voice is very important in understanding exactly how they want you to interpret what they are saying. Compare for instance, your teacher when they roar ‘WHAT ON EARTH ARE DOING?’ with your friends when they enquire ‘What on earth are you doing?’ You know that the second one is a question whereas the first one really isn’t. The teacher’s tone of voice lets you know that, although what they’re saying looks like a question on paper, it’s actually more like a statement telling you to stop what you are doing right now. Indeed the teacher would probably not be pleased if you answered their question and would probably take it as a sign that you were being cheeky thus getting you into even more trouble.

The same is true in writing. The writer’s tone will tell you whether they are wondering, denying, accusing, preaching, confessing or whatever.

Some poems are written as if the writer is speaking confidentially to their friends. Others may be very direct or almost aggressive. In the following poem Dylan Thomas writes as someone desperately urging the reader to listen and take advice about coping with old age before it’s too late. He is being instructive, telling his reader how to behave:

Do not go gentle into that goodnight.

Old age should bun and rave at close of day.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In the last stanza of Dulce et Decorum Est (part of a Latin phrase which roughly translates as 'It is a good thing to die for your country') Wilfred Owen personally accuses his reader, challenging their thinking by directly addressing them and insisting that if they had seen what Owen had seen when he was fighting in the trenches in World War One they would not believe that war is a brave and honourable thing.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.