Sound Devices

Alliteration, Assonance
and Onomatopoeia
 Alliteration
• Alliteration: the repetition of a consonant
sound at the beginning of words
 Try this
• 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
• 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…
 Try this
• 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…”
 Try this
• 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.
 Do this, too
• 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.
To My Muse (Jose Rizal)
• Invoked no longer is the Muse,
The lyre is out of date;
The poets it no longer use,
And youth its inspiration now imbues
With other form and state.
• To My Muse (Jose Rizal)
• In the place of thought sincere
That our hearts may feel,
We must seize a pen of steel,
And with verse and line severe
Fling abroad a jest and jeer.
• My Last Farewell (Jose Rizal)
• Farewell, dear Fatherland, clime of the sun
caress’d,
Pearl of the Orient seas, our Eden lost!
Gladly now I go to give thee this faded life’s
best,
And were it brighter, fresher, or more blest,
Still would I give it thee, nor count the cost.
• My Last Farewell (Jose Rizal)
• Let the sun draw the vapors up to the sky,
And heavenward in purity bear my tardy
protest;
Let some kind soul o’er my untimely fate sigh,
And in the still evening a prayer be lifted on
high
From thee, O my country, that in God I may
rest.
• I love you
the way water loves.
Which is to say
I wish the world
were through with you,
so you could return to me
ravaged, upon this shore:
a shell
held tight
inside my palm.
• —from “Gift, 2” by J. Neil C. Garcia (The
Sorrows of Water, 2000)
• Most of the people we love, walking or dead,
Are sometimes in the dust we sweep out on
Sundays.
•
• —from “27” by Nerisa del Carmen Guevara
(Reaching Destination: Poems and the Search
for Home, 2004)
• Love is all proximity
And nothing, not even the thought
You are thinking of me, can
Equal your return.
•
• —from “Distance” by Ronald Baytan (The
Queen Sings the Blues, 2008)
Last Piece in the Puzzle of My life
Vic P. Yambao

The sweetness of your Voice

Your soul searching eyes
Throw in the smiling lips
Makes my life complete
• Tracing You
Kristina Aquino

• Imagine the train tracks,

the train speeding away from you.
We were somewhere
and someone else a minute ago.
 No rest
Kyo Zapanta
• I know it’s been in overtime
I shouldn’t be here anymore
But that workaholiart of me
Seem to like the stress in store
• Now I Know
Jose Paulo Tolentino

Seven months felt like seven years

and now I face my greatest fears
Why before I could never wait
but now I know the heavy weight.