Elements of Poetry:
Sound Devices
8th Grade English/Language Arts – Poetry Unit: Sound Devices - Blume
Alliteration
The repetition of initial consonant sounds, in two or
more neighboring words or syllables.
The wild and wooly walrus waits and wonders when we will walk by.
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees…
-- from Silver by Walter de la Mare
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
(almost ALL tongue twisters!)
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Alliteration examples
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“Hear the music of voices, the song of a
bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra,
as if you would be stricken deaf
tomorrow. Touch each object as if
tomorrow your tactile sense would fail.
Smell the perfume of flowers…”
- from “Three Days to See” by Helen Keller
Alliteration examples
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Assonance
A repetition of vowel sounds within words or syllables.
Fleet feet sweep by sleeping geese.
Free and easy.
Make the grade.
The stony walls enclosed the holy space.
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Assonance examples
Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far.
It is among the oldest of living things.
So old it is that no man knows how and why the first
poems came.
--Carl Sandburg, Early Moon
“…on a proud round cloud
in white high night…”
- E. E. Cummings
“I made my way to
the lake.”
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Assonance example
The Eagle
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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Consonance
Consonance is the repetition of two or more
consonant sounds within a line.
I dropped the locket in the thick mud.
Some mammals are clammy.
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Consonance example
He struck a streak of bad luck.
Buckets of big blue berries.
Slither and lather
Dawn goes down
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Consonance example
Zealots by Fugees
Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
Many styles, More powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays
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Repetition
Words or phrases repeated in writings to give emphasis,
rhythm, and/or a sense of urgency.
Example: from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells”
To the swinging and the ringing
of the bells, bells, bells –
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells
Bells, bells, bells –
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
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Onomatopoeia
Words that sound like their meaning --the “sound” they describe.
buzz… hiss… roar… meow… woof… rumble…
howl… snap… zip… zap… blip… whack …
crack… crash… flutter… flap… squeak… whirr..
pow… plop… crunch… splash… jingle… rattle…
clickety-clack… bam!
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