2. Alliteration
ALLITERATION: Repeating a consonant sound in close
proximity to others, or beginning several words with the
same vowel sound. For instance, the phrase "buckets of
big blue berries" alliterates with the consonant b. The
line "apt alliteration's artful aid" alliterates with the
vowel sound a. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
employs the technique: "I lean and loaf at my ease
observing a spear of summer grass." Most frequently,
the alliteration involves the sounds at the beginning of
words in close proximity to each other. If alliteration
also involves changes in the intervening vowels between
repeated consonants, the technique is called
consonance.
3. CONSONANCE
A special type of alliteration in which the
repeated pattern of consonants is marked by
changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the
final consonants of the stressed syllables match
each other but the vowels differ. Examples
include linger, longer, and languor or rider,
reader, raider, and ruder. Do not confuse
consonance with a consonant.
4. ASSONANCE
• Repeating identical or similar vowels (especially in
stressed syllables) in nearby words. Assonance in final
vowels of lines can often lead to half-rhyme. Deutsche
notes that assonance is a common technique in the poetry
of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomasp, and more generally in
popular ballads; an example appears in the second and
fourth lines of this stanza from "Fair Annie":
• Bind up, bind up your yellow hair,
And tie it on your neck;
And see you look as maiden-like
As the day that first we met. (qtd in Deutsche 140).
• If combined with consonnance, assonance can create
actual full rhyme
5. REFRAIN
A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a
longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals
in other stanzas or sections of the same work. Sometimes
the repetition involves minor changes in wording. A refrain
might consist of a nonsense word (such as Shakespeare's
"With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" in the song from As
You Like It), a single word (such as “__________" in Poe's
"The Raven"), or even an entire separate stanza that is
repeated alternating with each stanza in the poem. If the
refrain is meant to be sung by all the auditors listening, the
refrain is often called a chorus. The device is ancient.
Examples are found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the
Bible, Greek, Latin, and Provençal verse, and in many, many
ballads
6. RHYME SCHEME:
• The pattern of rhyme. The traditional way to mark these patterns of
rhyme is to assign a letter of the alphabet to each rhyming sound at
the end of each line. For instance, here is the first stanza of James
Shirley's poem "Of Death," from 1659. I have marked each line from
the first stanza with an alphabetical letter at the end of each line to
indicate rhyme:
• The glories of our blood and state --------------A
Are shadows, not substantial things; -----------B
There is no armor against fate; ------------------A
Death lays his icy hand on kings: ---------------B
Scepter and crown -------------------------------C
Must tumble down, --------------------------------C
And in the dust be equal made ------------------D
With the poor crooked scythe and spade. -----D
7. INTERNAL RHYME:
• A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line
rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line.
Internal rhyme appears in the first and third lines in this
excerpt from Shelley's "The Cloud":
• I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
• In the excerpt above, the word laugh is an internal rhyme
with cenotaph, and the word womb is an internal rhyme
with tomb. Other examples include the Mother Goose
rhyme, "Mary, Mary, quite contrary," or Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, ("We were the first that ever burst / Into
that silent sea"). Contrast with interlaced rhyme, above.
8. ONOMATOPOEIA
The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they
represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, buzz,
click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin to the noise they
represent. A higher level of onomatopoeia is the use of
imitative sounds throughout a sentence to create an
auditory effect. For instance, Tennyson writes in The Princess
about "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And
murmuring of innumerable bees." All the /m/ and /z/
sounds ultimately create that whispering, murmuring effect
Tennyson describes. In similar ways, poets delight in
choosing sounds that match their subject-matter, such as
using many clicking k's and c's when describing a rapier duel
(to imitate the clack of metal on metal), or using many /s/
sounds when describing a serpent, and so on.
9. ONOMATOPOEIA (a higher level)
• Robert Browning liked squishy sounds when
describing squishy phenomena, and scratchy sounds
when describing the auditory effect of lighting a
match, such as in his poem "Meeting at Night": "As I
gain the cove with pushing prow, / And quench its
speed i' the slushy sand. / a tap at the pane, the quick
sharp, scratch / and blue spurt of a lighted match."
The technique is ancient, and we can find a
particularly cunning example in Virgil's Latin, in which
he combines /d/ and /t/ sounds along with galloping
rhythm to mimic in words the sound of horses he
describes: "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit
ungula campum. . . ."
