The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently essay
Reading is one of the very important steps to self-perfection. A poem “The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently” written by Thomas Lux demonstrates many interesting aspects of possibility to read silently, opening people the truth about their inner world. Thus, the main aim of the assignment is to interpret the poem, and to explain what message the poet is trying to convey.
First of all, it is necessary to state that according to the poem’s author, “the voice you hear when you read silently” is not silent in literal sense because when the person is simply reading the words, he is speaking to the own inner world. For instance, when the poet writes “it’s the writer’s words, / of course, in a literary sense / his or her voice, but the sound / of that voice is the sound of your voice,” these phrases mean that the one can obtain a kind of specific privacy or even intimacy in literature, when he or she reads quietly. The statement also shows that no one has the right and possibility to move into the person’s head and to understand personal feelings and emotions, and only the person is able to interpret own feelings.
The poem has many metaphors and other literary devices to deeply influence the reader. For instance, the concept of “constellation” is used to cover a whole array of things. The author is saying that when somebody reads silently to itself, he or she is exposed to many sensations as well as it allows to experience many things. The person can not only “see” everything, but also this kind of reading helps to be engaged in the process of interpreting the text with all other senses. According to the poet, such a kind of reading also helps to smell things and to feel them. Of course, everything depends on the previous experience of the person because all visual images are taken from the person’s memory but reading of the new concepts also allows to create new images or to add some details to the existing picture of reality. The voice the person hears when he or she reads silently can be very loud inside the mind, and the poet mentions through litotes that this is the own voice of the reader, the voice that can be heard when the words are pronounced during the process of reading.
Moreover, the poem reveals inner secrets of human soul, when the author conveys the reader that the voice he or she hears when reads silently is ‘true’ voice, the voice that really knows everything about the reader because this voice appears from the deepest level of human personality. This voice helps the reader to make some subconscious associations; let’s pay attention to the word ‘barn’, especially in a case when the voice gives this word positive or negative meaning, while the poet leaves the word without explanations. All the above mentioned devices serve to move the poem because they make the reader to be interested in the poem and forced not only to read the poem and forget it immediately but to listen to inner feelings and to think some time about the text for the purpose to understand the meaning of it and to make some conclusions.
The poem also shows that there exists one word that creates an image, but all other words are also important because they fill the image with all the necessary details, or make the image to be full of visual imagery. In addition, the voice of the reader is the thing that he possesses and it is impossible to loose it because it is a part of human personality. It allows to suppose that a so-called inner voice is not an intuition as some people think but this voice is a result of individual perception of the text that is modeled precisely on the basis of the experience that a person has had in the past. By the way, this phenomenon explains the fact that, after reading the book, the film is not already look interesting. As a result, Thomas Lux understands and explains this fact about the presence of inner voice and its influence on human soul, proving that the human brain forms own images and pictures.
In conclusion, the poem “The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently” by Thomas Lux deals with one of the mysterious phenomena in the world such as human mind. The mystery lies in the fact that every reader is able to hear the own inner voice in the process of reading, and Lux’s poem shows the way how the process of reading silently influences on the person’s attitude to one or another information as well as the person can interpret everything on the base of the past experience.
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