16 pages • 32 minutes read
Stephen DobynsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
As the title of the poem “Loud Music” indicates, the central image running throughout the poem is volume. The speaker tell us, “You see, I like the music loud” (Line 2)—extremely loud, with “the speakers / throbbing jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3) and the noise buffeting listeners “like a hand smacking the gut” (Line 5). The speaker’s stepdaughter “disagrees” (Line 6), because she “likes the music decorous, pitched below / her own voice” (Lines 7-8). Their argument isn’t about the effect of the loud music: both agree that the noise is so deafening it prevents speech and thoughts. Instead, they have a different response to this effect: The stepdaughter finds it unpleasant to have something drown her out, while her stepfather relishes this feeling of disappearing.
The theme of music and volume is woven into the poem’s imagery. For example, in Lines 12-13, the speaker compares the stepdaughter to a porpoise using “its sonar” (Line 13) as a form of “self-location” (Line 11). Marine animals use echolocation to see their environment: They emit calls and observe the echoes of those calls bouncing off various objects nearby. The stepdaughter, at age four, wants to locate herself “in all this space” (Line 13)—the world is very big and she doesn’t have a firm sense of her place within it. However, if the music is playing too loudly, her sonar cannot work.
In contrast, the speaker’s ideal scene, an imagined view he’d see in “a sort of box with a peephole” (Line 14), would be a wild and unpeopled beach: “the water gray and restless” (Line 21), with loud wind whipping around. In this scenario, echolocation would no longer work: If “some creature brooded underneath” the water (Line 25), it would only be the observer’s fantasy—a way of explaining the waves. The loudness and barrenness of this seascape go together for the speaker: Just as blaring music erases him from his awareness, so the empty beach reveals “how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors” (Line 28).
Explaining his stepdaughter’s dislike of the loud music, the speaker discloses her age: “She is four” (Line 6). This sets up a clear difference between the two: One is an adult who is sick of being aware of himself, while the other is a child only just discovering that she is an individual and independent being. Because of this, the young stepdaughter prefers the music “pitched below / her own voice” (Lines 7-8) so that she can always hear herself and thus know who and where she is. Meanwhile the speaker prefers “the speakers / throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3), erasing him from the space and allowing himself to lose himself in the music.
The speaker analyzes his own psychology through his observations of—and possibly projections onto—his stepdaughter. We do not get her reported speech about either the music volume or what she would most prefer to see in the magic box that shows everyone’s ideal imagery. Instead, the speaker imagines that at her young age, considers herself “a proper subject / for serious study” (Lines 17-18)—still fascinated by what makes her a being in her own right, the stepdaughter loves noticing her preferences and daily routines. On the other hand, the speaker, whose age we do not know, but can assume to be a generation older, most wants to see in the box “a landscape stripped of people and language” (Line 27). He wants to lose his sense of self, either within sound or inside a barren seascape. Unlike his stepdaughter, he doesn’t want to see even a hint of himself in the box’s view; he would rather only the possibly that “someone like him” (Line 24) might have walked nearby at some point. Due to age, each character occupies a different place in self-existence.
The stepdaughter would rather listen to music “pitched below / her own voice” (Lines 7-8) because at four, she in the process of understanding herself in relation to the world. During this period of life, her “voice” (Line 8) is “that tenuous project of self” (Line 8), and sometimes a form of “self-location” (Line 11) that allows the little girl “to find herself in all this space” (Line 13). She can best perceive herself as existing if she can hear herself make sound: “With music blasting, she feels she disappears, / is lost within the blare” (Lines 9-10), which is disorienting and disagreeable. In contrast, the much older speaker would rather experience the dissolution of the ego. He agrees that the loud music is a kind of erasure, “which in fact I like” (Line 10). For him, this loss of self within the loud music is the point and the goal.
Dobyns extends this concept into the following lines, imagining “a sort of box with a peephole” (Line 14) that would show a viewer their most preferred subject. The stepdaughter would see in this box “herself standing there in her red pants, jacket / yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject / for serious study” (Lines 19-21). The four-year-old stepdaughter’s world is centered on herself, so she wants both to project her identity onto the world in the form of sonar and to have it become the sole focus of her observation and attention, watching herself in the box to discover her preferred colors, clothes, and daily activities.
On the other hand, the box would dispel the speaker’s identity entirely. Looking in the box, he would see “the ocean on one of those days when wind / and thick cloud make the water gray and restless” (Lines 20-21), a barren and deserted “landscape stripped of people and language” (Line 23)—the literal opposite of the two things that the stepdaughter needs to experience herself. The speaker, older, overly familiar with himself, and wishing to project his inner gaze outward in the world rather than inward, wishes to drown himself out: “Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego” (Line 25). For him, a loss of identity is a way of defining the self.