English B1B Symbols and Sounds
Symbols A symbol is something that stands in for something else. These words, when their implications are agreed on by tradition, convention, or habit—stand for things beyond their most immediate meanings or significations and become symbols, and even simple words that have accumulated no special power from previous use may be given special significance in special circumstances—in poetry.
Traditional Symbols Traditional symbols have an agreed-upon significance because of past usage in literature, or tradition, or the stories a culture develops to explain itself and its beliefs. What would you say each of these images signifies? A dove A rose Bodies of water (rivers, lakes, etc.) Symbols help poets invoke particular responses. Symbolism makes things happen, but individual poets and texts determine what will happen and how.
The Sounds of Poetry Poetry began as an oral phenomenon. Often, poems that seem very difficult when looked at silently come alive when turned into sound. Poems that have no discernable rhyme pattern are called free verse.
Rhyme Scheme Rhyme scheme refers to a particular pattern of end rhymes End rhyme occurs when the last words in two or more lines of a poem rhyme with each other.
Internal and Slant Rhyme Internal rhyme occurs when a word within (and thus internal to) a line rhymes with another word in the same or adjacent lines.
Slant Rhymes Rhyme requires that words share consonants and vowel sounds (cloud and shroud). When words share one but not the other, we have a rhyme that is slightly “off” or only approximate. This is a slant rhyme.
Eye Rhyme Eye rhyme is as much a visual as an aural device. It occurs, as its name suggests, when words look like they should rhyme but don’t. Bear and ear Yeats and Keats Stone and none Dove and move
Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is a word that captures or approximates the sound of what it describes Splash Murmur Bark
Alliteration, Consonance, and Assonance Alliteration is the repetition, usually of initial consonant sounds, through a sequence. The Wicked Witch of the West. Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the end of words or syllables, without the correspondence of vowel sounds. Don’t eat in that tent. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains.
Meter The unit we use in measuring poetry is the foot. Most traditional poetry in English uses the accentual-syllabic form of meter—meaning that its rhythmic pattern is based on both a set number of syllables per line and a regular pattern of accents in each line. See box on pg. 619 Scansion is the technique of listening to and marking stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables and feet.
Practice Read Shakespeare’s Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore on pg. 628. In small groups, scan the poem and answer the question at the bottom.