Various devices can be used in poetry to enhance the sound of the lines. The following are just some of these technical flourishes.
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Onomatopoeia
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Alliteration
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Assonance/Consonance
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Masc/Fem/Triple Rhyme
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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With this device, a poet can imitate a specific sound by using a word that imitates the sound in nature. For example, when you say the word "drip" (say it very sloooowly several times and really flip the "p" sound at the end of the word), you can hear a faucet dripping.
In literature the device adds to the music of lines. Consider, for example, Tennyson's use of onomatopoeia in the following line from "The Princess":
The murmur of innumerable bees
You can hear the bees actually humming in this line.
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Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of words. Tongue twisters frolic in alliteration:
Suzie sells seashells by the seashore.
Peter picked a peck of pickled peppers.
No matter that peppers are not pickled until after they are picked, the ear delights in repetition of sound. Rap singers prove that idea to be true.
Alliteration was one of the basic ingredients of Old English verse because it helped the scop (poet-singer) remember lines. Beowulf is an epic poem thousands of lines long. To memorize it a scop needed all the help he could get. Notice how the poem often uses alliteration three times in a line:
So they went
on their way. The ship rode the water,
Broad beamed,
bound by its hawser.
Their mail-shirts
glinted,
Hard and hand-linked;
the high-gloss iron
Of their armor rang.
In modern poetry alliteration tends to be more subtle. The poet's ear will dictate occasional use of alliteration. Too much makes the poem wobble.
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If sounds are repeated not at the beginnings of words but in the middle or end, we call the repetition "assonance" if the repeated sound is a vowel and "consonance" if the repeated sound is a consonant. Poets can use either device to serve as a "near-rhyme" instead of using true rhymes for ends of lines. Emily Dickinson often used near-rhymes. In her poem on seeing a snake, she writes:
The grass divides
as with a comb,
A spotted shaft
is seen,
And then it closes
at your feet
And opens further
on.
Inside of lines, assonance and consonance add music for the ear. At the end of William Stafford's poem "Traveling through the Dark," assonance makes the line pulse with the same sort of pounding in the brain that the narrator probably experienced when he had to make a decision about a dead pregnant deer:
I thought hard
for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her
over the edge into the river.
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4. MASCULINE/FEMININE/TRIPLE RHYME
When two words rhyme single syllables, the result is said to be a "masculine" rhyme:
moon
June
When two words rhyme two syllables, the result is said to be a "feminine" rhyme:
crossing
embossing
Triple rhymes are scarce and usually silly. Here is Ogden Nash at work:
I shoot the
hippopotamus
With bullets made
of platinum
Because if I use
leaden ones
His hide is sure
to flatten 'em.
The only poet who gets away with triple rhymes often is Lord Byron.
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If every line of poetry let you stop at the end for a breath, you would find poetry pretty boring. Thus poets run a line over to the next line so the poem seems natural, like conversation. The effect is called "enjambment." When you do not observe enjambment, sometimes the poem says something ridiculous. For example, try pausing at the end of the first line of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees":
I think that
I shall never see
A poem as lovely
as a tree.
Stopping at the end of the first line makes your brain want to scream "I think that I shall never see—help, help, I'm blind!"
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and you would be surprised how few of them use enjambment. How did he get away without using enjambment? He was Shakespeare. Most poets need to use it.
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A caesura is a pause in the middle of a line. It was very formal in Old English verse where each line of tetrameter was divided into two halves with a pause in the middle. The French like it when it breaks up their beloved Alexandrine lines (twelve syllable line), as 6 + 6, or 2 + 4, or 4 + 2.
We need caesuras because we have to pause somewhere when poets use enjambment to run lines over. When Othello kisses his sleeping wife, he says the following:
Ah, balmy breath,
that dost almost persuade
Justice to break
her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou
art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after.
If you pause at the end of the first line, the speech is going to make less sense than if you run line one over to line two. Then you get a nice break when the caesura asks you to stop after "sword."
Can you find the caesura in each of the following lines in the opening stanzas of a poem by William Blake?
Piping down
the valleys wild,
Piping songs of
pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw
a child,
And he laughing
said to me.
"Pipe a
song about a Lamb."
So I piped with
merry cheer."
Piper, pipe that
song again."
So I piped; he wept
to hear."
Only one of Blake's lines uses the caesura in some place other than the middle of the line. Can you find that line?
There are many more musical devices you can spot in poetry, but the ones above are the ones most frequently used by poets.
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