16 pages • 32 minutes read
Stephen DobynsLoud Music
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Disappearing
The motif of disappearing throwing the poem’s characters into relief. The speaker likes “the speakers / throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3) and “the volume cranked up so / each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut” (Lines 4-5). However, this discomfits his stepdaughter: “With music blasting, she feels she disappears, / is lost within the blare” (Lines 9-10). The speaker, an older man who has established a place in the world, wants to lose his sense of self within the loud sounds; the stepdaughter, however, is young—she has not established a place for herself yet, so being drowned out by the loud music is disorienting.
The motif of disappearing recurs when the speaker imagines his ideal view in a magical box: a “rocky coast with a road along the shore / where someone like me was walking and has gone” (Lines 23-24). While the landscape he sees is highly described and defined (“wind / and thick cloud make the water gray and restless” (Lines 19-20), the speaker has become a vague “someone” and then vanishes altogether, possibly insinuating the speaker’s eventual death. The final image of the poem praises the wildness of the ocean and listening to music loudly because each “wipes out the ego” (Line 25) and the sense of self. At the end of the poem, the speaker wishes for a kind of observing nonexistence, so all that’s left is “turbulent water and winding road, / a landscape stripped of people and language” (Lines 26-27).
The Ocean
In “Loud Music,” the ocean is a visual symbol of the same thing the poem describes as the effect of extremely loud music: the deletion of the self. The first hint of the ocean occurs when the speaker describes the stepdaughter using “her voice as a porpoise uses / its sonar” (Lines 12-13). The ocean then appears as the speaker’s ideal: in a magic viewing box, he “would wish to find / the ocean on one of those days when wind / and thick cloud make the water gray” (Lines 19-21). The ocean represents the wildness, emptiness, and erasure: its immensity wipes out life, so the space around it appears “stripped of people and language” (Line 27).
The ocean expands on imagery introduced in the beginning of the poem. Just as music allows the listener to lose their sense of self, so the ocean roar is deafening and “wipes out the ego” (Line 25). Once a person has let go of their identity and escaped into sound, “how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors” (Line 28).
The Peephole Box
The peephole box introduced in Line 14 expands the poem’s imagery into the hypothetical and surreal. We leave the mundane world in which a stepfather and stepdaughter dance to music and enter a fantasy realm of possibility. The stepfather imagines a device for displaying one’s most desired view:
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she’d like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study (Lines 15-18).
The image is phantasmagoric, as we picture the four-year-old peering at a miniature version of herself—a borderline macabre twist on a dollhouse that reproduces real life. The word choice reinforces the slightly sinister feeling, as “peephole” evokes stalker-adjacent behavior and unwelcome observation that would creep out its unknowing subject. The daughter is so young that she cannot think of anything but herself—she has not yet figured out who she is, and building an identity is serious, important work.
The speaker, however, does not want to be a peeping tom and has no interest in seeing himself in the magic box. Rather, in it, he wishes “to find / the ocean” (Lines 19-20)—something so much greater than the self that it creates the same kind of self-erasure he craves from loud music.
