A Good Line Is Worth Waiting For

One of my favorite song lyrics is rather fitting considering the season:

“Little old lady got mutilated late last night.”

It’s from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” and I wait for it every time the song plays. The same way dads from my generation wait for the drum break in “In the Air Tonight,” ready to do their part on air drums. Apparently, this is my version of that.

Not only is it alliteration, which I love, but it manages to slip that hidden “late” in “mutilated” into the march of l’s. Then comes “late last night,” and the whole thing keeps moving, exquisitely reinforcing the song’s established rhythm.

I also enjoy a good pun, so my taste is suspect. But hear me out.

It’s a gruesome little sentence that is an absolute pleasure to say. I know exactly what’s coming, and knowing doesn’t spoil it. The anticipation is part of why I enjoy it. That’s quite a lot for one line to accomplish.

Looking back through my journals, this fascination with how words sound keeps showing up alongside my own attempts at poetry. I’ve written about Lana Del Rey’s phrasing and uneven meter, about plain language and near rhyme, and about revising a line until it sounds right. Sometimes the interesting thing is where the emphasis falls. Sometimes it’s the way one word seems to invite the next.

I even have a poetry checklist: rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, verbs, line breaks. Start with the plain idea, then work on how it sounds. Of course, having a checklist doesn’t mean I consistently produce good poetry. It does give me things to play with.

That’s the kind of exploration I want Euphonics to help with. I’m interested in understanding why a line works, and in what happens when we start paying closer attention to the language in our own writing. How much do we find by ear? How much comes from knowing what to look for? When does working on a line make it better, and when have we fiddled with it enough?

In the spirit of putting my own questionable taste on display, here’s one of my little attempts, “Haiku to a Dead Spring Goose”:

Puffed-up gander guides
new, defiant feet through streets
too proud to be moved.

So, poets and musicians: what’s your favorite lyric of all time? Which line do you wait for, and what is it about that line that gets you?

And how do you find the rhythm in your own words? Do you start with something you need to say, a melody, or a phrase that simply feels good in your mouth? I’d genuinely like to hear how you do it.