A term you'll meet in sound in poetry.
Euphony and cacophony are opposite qualities of sound. Euphony is language that sounds smooth, pleasing, and harmonious; cacophony is language that sounds harsh, jarring, and discordant. Poets choose between them to make the music of a passage match its meaning.
Euphony tends to come from soft consonants (l, m, n, r, soft f and v, the sibilant s) and long, open vowels. The effect is mellifluous and flowing — think of Tennyson's "The murmuring of innumerable bees." Lines built for euphony feel calm, beautiful, or lulling, and invite the reader to slow down.
Cacophony comes from hard consonants — especially plosives (b, d, g, k, p, t) and harsh clusters — that make the line difficult and clattering to say. Writers use it for chaos, violence, ugliness, or comic roughness. Browning and Hopkins deliberately roughened their verse to convey strain and force.
The reason to notice euphony and cacophony is that good poets match sound to subject. A serene landscape rendered in euphony; a battle or a machine rendered in cacophony. When the music and the meaning pull together, the line works on the reader twice — through what it says and through how it sounds saying it.
Read aloud and judge the texture: does the passage flow or clatter? Then link that texture to the content. Labelling a line "euphonious" or "cacophonous" is only the start; the insight is showing how its sound reinforces — or pointedly undercuts — what it describes.
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