Musical Devices
• “music” in poetry
• Similarity of sounds
• Verbal music in poetry enables a poet to
do more than communicate mere
information
Musical Devices
• Poetry obviously makes a greater use of
the “music” of language than does
language that is not poetry
• The poet, unlike the person who uses
language to convey only information,
chooses words for sound as well as for
meaning.
• The poet uses sound as a means of
reinforcing meaning.
Music in poetry
• Edgar Allan Poe describes poetry as
“music….combined with a pleasurable
idea.’
• The poet achieves musical quality in two
broad ways: (1) by the choice and
arrangement of sounds and (2) by the
arrangement of accents.
Repetition
• An essential element in all music is
repetition.
• All art consists of giving structure to two
elements: repetition and variation
• Our love of art, then, is rooted in human
psychology. We like the familiar, we like
variety, but we like them combined.
Repetition
• The poet likewise repeats certain sounds
in certain combinations and arrangements,
and thus adds musical meaning to verse.
• Much of the appeal of a poem consists in
the use of rime – the repetition of sound
for example “turtle” and “fertile”
Repetition
• Poets may repeat any unit of sound from
the smallest to the largest.
• Repeating individual vowel and consonant
sounds, whole syllables, words, phrases,
lines, or groups of lines.
Purposes of Repetition
• Please our ears
• Emphasize the words in which the
repetition occurs
• Give structure to the poem
Repetition of sounds
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Alliteration
Assonance
Onomatopoeia
rhyme