The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses

The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses.” This line, from the first section of Wallace Stevens's "Things of August," has a distinctive ring to it. One notable effect is the clash in registers between the informal (honky-tonk) and the literary. Honky-tonk has a reduplicative construction characteristic of slang words, like "rinky-dink," "somnolent," the polysyllabic flavor we associate with Latinate vocabulary. The line stretches out in the final anapest and feminine ending:  "...the SOMnulent GRASSes." Part of the sound of the line derives from the meaning of the words and the sounds of the lines surrounding it. It has a contextual prosody, then. Later, he speaks of “the high poetry and low.”