New York Rhapsody

This post was a poetic exercise in sound that I wrote many years ago. I was always fascinated by the sound of words and how that sound affects the meaning of the words together. Like the ancient Greek King Cadmus, who sowed dragon’s teeth into the ground to grow soldiers, fully armed and ready for battle, I too wished to sow words that would do the same thing.

When I was in college, a friend introduced me to the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. It seemed that Thomas too was as fascinated with words as I was; but it wasn’t until later in my life, that I really grew to appreciate his poetry. In his “Notes on the Art of Poetry,” he said the following about his childhood fascination with nursery rhymes:

…before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.

I wrote this poem, more like an exercise in sound, on my fascination with New York City many years ago. I don’t know what I want to do with it. Maybe expand on it someday, or maybe just leave it alone, and let it speak for itself.

New York Rhapsody
Christopher Bogart

Along the empty sidewalks and the streets,
Glimmering in the neon-tinted glow,
A city has its never ending birth,
Baptized by the moisture-laden steam
That rises in white wisps from tiny holes
Of large metal sewer caps in the street.

But then, amid the silence, comes the life …

Feet, feet that beat familiar rhythms
Rhythms of the city’s melody.
Wheels, wheels cause the metal caps to clatter
As if to keep in time with soft, clear strains
Of music seeping from beneath marquees.

A symphony, a symphony of sounds,
A symphony of city-scented sounds
The clamor, and the clatter, and the bang
Of city movement, city harmony.


One way or the other, I think that the fascination with sound and meaning that I have had all of my life, and, more recently, with the poetry of Dylan Thomas, has deeply affected my poetry and has set a direction for it in the future.