Today’s program is about how sounds may be used in poetry as essential structural motifs and as parts of organizing metaphoric and thematic literary frames. The program takes a look at the possible meanings of sounds, from their beginning as noises and as they take on personal and cultural significance as words. I use the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as perfect examples of how sounds work structurally in poetry, and then read a poem by Wally Swist and two of my own poems as examples of the ways in which sounds may be named and incorporated in poems.