Transcript Sound Devices

Sound Devices
Alliteration, Consonance, and
Assonance
Alliteration
• Alliteration: the repetition of a consonant
sound at the beginning of words
• Example: from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”
“While I nodded, nearly
napping, suddenly there
came a tapping…”
Your Turn!
• Identify the alliteration in the following poem
(“A word is dead,” by Emily Dickenson):
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Check Yourself (before you wreck
yourself?)
• Identify the alliteration in the following poem
(“A word is dead,” by Emily Dickenson):
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Assonance
• Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds in
words
• Example from Walt Whitman’s, “Song of
Myself:
I loaf and invite my soul
I lean and loaf at my ease…
Your Turn!
• Find the assonance in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Then look for
alliteration!
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully
Check Yourself!
• Find the assonance in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Then look for
alliteration!
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully
Consonance
• Consonance: the repetition of a consonant
sound NOT at the beginning of words
• Example: from “The Wreck of the
Deutschland,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
“World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me…”
Your Turn!
• Identify the consonance in Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold
can Stay.” Then find examples of alliteration and
assonance!
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Check Yourself!
• Identify the consonance in Robert Frost’s “Nothing
Gold can Stay.” Then find examples of alliteration and
assonance!
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
The “Test”
• Identify examples of alliteration, assonance, and
consonance in Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The Answers
• Identify examples of alliteration, assonance, and
consonance in Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
“The Bells” (Edgar Allan Poe)
Hear the tolling of the bells Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their
monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their
tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people -ah, the people They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone They are neither man nor woman They are neither brute nor human They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells,
Of the bells -
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells To the moaning and the groaning of the
bells.