(Sound Devices Used in Poetry)

(i) Define alliteration.
Ans. Alliteration is a stylistic device in which a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur close together in a series of multiple words. For example, A big bully beats a baby boy.
(ii) Define assonance.
Ans. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds or diphthong in non-rhyming words. Assonance is merely a syllabic resemblance. For example, "Men sell the wedding bells", "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea". (William Butler Yeats)
(iii) What is consonance?
Ans. Consonance is the repetition of the same consonants within a sentence of phrase. This repetition often takes place in quick succession. The repetitive sound is often found at the end of a word. For example, "He struck a streak of bad luck", "All mammals named Same are clammy".
(iv) Define resonance.
Ans. Resonance is the quality of richness or variety of sound in poetic texture, as in Milton's: "and the thunder .......... cease now / To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep".
(v) What is cacophony?
Ans. Cacophony is the use of words that combine sharp, hard, hissing, or unmelodious sounds. These words have jarring and dissonant sounds that create a disturbing, objectionable atmosphere. For example, "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, / Agape they heard me call." (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge)
(vi) What is euphony?
Ans. Euphony is the use of words and phrases that are distinguished as have a wide range of noteworthy melody or loveliness in the sounds they create. For example, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;" (Ode to Autumn by John Keats)
(vii) Define onomatopoeia.
Ans. Onomatopoeia is a word which imitates the natural sound of a thing or action. It creates a sound effect that mimics that thing described, making the description more expressive and interesting. For example, "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees ....". (Come Down, O Maid by Alfred Lord Tennyson)
(viii) What is repetition?
Ans. Repetition is a literary device that repeats the same words or phrases a few times to make an idea clearer. For example, "Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn .... (Ash-Wednesday by T.S. Eliot)
(ix) Define rhyme.
Ans. A rhyme is a matching similarity of sounds in two or more words, especially when their accented vowels and all succeeding consonants are identical. For instance, the word-pairs listed here are all rhymes: skating/dating, emotion/demotion, fascinate/deracinate, and plain/stain.
(x) What is an internal rhyme?
Ans. Internal rhyme is a rhyme in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line. It is also called middle rhyme, since it comes in the middle of lines. For example, "Double, double toil and trouble. / Fire burn and cauldron bubble". (Macbeth by William Shakespeare)
(xi) What is a near rhyme?
Ans. A near rhyme is a rhyme in which the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, however, the preceding vowel sounds do not match. It is also called half rhyme, imperfect rhyme or slant rhyme. For example, "If love is like a bridge / or maybe like a grudge, (To My Wife by George Wolff)
(xii) Define rhythm.
Ans. Rhythm is the pattern of flow of sound created by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in accentual verse or of long and short syllables in quantitative verse. Rhythm is a pattern of beats, while meter organizes these beats in an understandable way.
(xiii) What is an accent?
Ans. Accent is a rhythmically significant stress on the syllables of a verse within a particular metrical pattern, usually at regular intervals. In basic analysis of a poem by scansion, accents are represented with a slash (/).
(xiv) What is modulation?
Ans. Modulation is the harmonious use of language relative to the variation of stress and pitch. It is a process by which the stress values of accents can be increased or decreased within a fixed metrical pattern.
(xv) Define meter.
Ans. Meter is the rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry is accentual-syllabic. Falling meter refers to trochees and dactyls while iambs and anapests are called rising meter. Each unit of stress and unstressed syllables is called a "foot".