Multimodality in “The Bells”: New Explorations in Poe’s Symphonic Poem

Abstract This article explores multimodality in Poe’s famous poem “The Bells,” contending that the poem not only thematizes the music of the bells but also generates a quasi-musical acoustic event, much like a score envisions a musical performance. The article considers the poem as an instance of verbal musical ekphrasis—intersemiotic transposition of a musical performance or a compex acoustic event into the linguistic medium, to paraphase Roman Jakobson. The article attends to the poem’s musical potential, showing that the poem develops its central theme of the ephemerality of human happiness and the conquering power of time not only on the thematic plane but also through the organization of its sound structure. The poem’s sound texture reveals how repeated vocalic and consonantal configurations, equivalent to keynotes in a work of music, assist in developing a poetic argument in each stanza. The article also shows how the metrics, the shaping of the verses, the rhyme pattern, and the refrain-like features contribute to the poem’s music. This article also demonstrates that the text is designed as a structural analogue to a musical composition—to a symphony, in particular.