Sound Devices in Poetry and Literature

Although literature exists on the page, poetry and prose are both sonic artforms, each enhanced by the use of sound devices. Indeed, poems and stories used to be developed as live performances, and the sound devices that aided those performances now aid writers in the craft of good writing.

Sound devices help make writing memorable and engaging, while also building the mood and atmosphere of a work, helping it evoke stronger reactions from the readers. While the bulk of this article dissects sound devices in poetry, these same devices often appear in prose, and good storytellers know how to imbue their work with sound and musicality.

What literary devices are sound devices, and how do they aid your writing? Let’s define sound devices first before looking at great examples of sound devices in literature.

Sound Devices Definition

Sound devices are literary devices in which the sounds of words themselves impact the meaning and interpretation of the work.

Sound devices are literary devices in which the sounds of words themselves impact the meaning and interpretation of the work.

Take this literally—we mean that the use of certain vowels, consonants, and sonic qualities in words, as well as how the words sound next to one another, are sound devices that impact the writing as a whole.

There are plenty of reasons to employ sound devices in literature. They help build the mood and atmosphere of a work, they create formal restraints that improve the work’s resonance, and sometimes, they simply make a passage of writing more memorable. After all, it’s hard to forget the phrase “Sally sells seashells by the seashore,” even if that sibilance makes it hard to speak out loud.

Sound Devices Vs. Sonic Imagery

The one thing sound devices are not is sonic imagery. By this, we mean imagery of sound: descriptions of sounds intended to convey an experience we can hear in our minds.

An example of sonic imagery comes from Robert Hass’ poem “Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan”:

I can hear this moment in the poem, but it’s not because of the sounds of the words themselves, but what they evoke in the mind’s ear. Ears being stoppered by bee-hums transports me directly to the field where this poem is happening, and there’s a charming quality of Charlie “laughing wonderfully” that I can also imagine.

Admittedly, the word hum in “bee-hum” has an onomatopoeic quality to it, and one could argue that “hum” is being used as a sound device. But, this passage on the whole is evoking a sound-image without replicating that sound in the sounds of the words.

Sound Devices in Poetry Vs. Prose

Most discussions of sound devices revolve around poetry. Indeed, poetry is a sonic art form, and good poetry is enhanced by its attention to sound and musicality.

That said, the sound devices in this article can apply to both poetry and prose. While it’s true that prose is rarely, if ever, metered and rhyming, good prose can be enhanced by the intentional use of rhythm and rhyme. The best prose writers will also be poets—or, at the very least, be readers and admirers of poetry, as poetry pushes the limits of what language can accomplish.

Here’s a passage of prose I’ve always found particularly poetic—the opening paragraph from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

What makes this passage poetic isn’t its loftiness, though it certainly has a heightened quality to it, but rather the passage’s attention to musicality. Speak the words aloud and feel how they flow, both the words themselves and the lengths of sentences. Notice, also, how each word is carefully chosen and essential: there’s no excess, and the words that are abstract are still necessary. This stands in stark contrast to something like purple prose, which attempts to be poetic and lofty but is ultimately elaborate, overwritten, and communicates little.

Prose writers, like poets, will do well to understand how these sound devices can be implemented in their work. When prose is a joy to read, it invites the reader into worlds more richly built and real.

Learn more about poetry vs prose here:

https://writers.com/prose-vs-poetry

Sound Devices in Literature: Examples and Analysis

Let’s take a look at some actual sound devices in literature. In addition to defining each device, we also provide examples in published works of writing, and an analysis of what that sound device does for the writing as well.

1. Alliteration

Alliteration is the use of the same sound at the start of successive or closely placed words. It is specific to the beginning letters of words; two other devices, assonance and consonance, describe recurring sounds more generally.

It’s worth noting that the alliterating words need to be different. For example “bells, bells, bells” wouldn’t be noteworthy alliteration, since the words are just being repeated—but that would be an example of epizeuxis, a repetition device.

Alliteration, when employed effectively, makes a passage of writing more musical and memorable. Take Tracy Brimhall’s poem “Lullaby at 102º”. Words in alliteration with one another have been bolded and italicized:

This gorgeous, mystical poem has more going for it than just its alliteration, but those moments of repeated sounds create a textured, sonic experience for the reader. There are also moments of consonance, which we’ll define shortly, that work in tandem with the poem’s alliterations.

2. Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds in closely placed words. These vowel sounds can occur anywhere in the words themselves—beginning, middle, or end—but must be repeated in such a way that their repetition is resonant or echoic.

Different vowel sounds can emulate different feelings and moods. So, too, can the frequency of their repetition. Quick, successive, tall vowels might add a sense of energy or urgency; long and low vowels might create a sense of depth or somberness.

There are a few lovely examples from Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays”:

This poem aches, and that ache can be felt in the poem’s vowels and consonants. (We’ll look at consonance next.) There are a lot of tall vowels in the first stanza, and in my experience reading it, those vowels lift the language up, but in a spiked and urgent way. This stands in contrast to the poem’s melancholy ending, whose low, long vowels draw out that sense of loneliness and regret. Assonance, here, creates a feeling that echoes in the body, that lasts long after it’s read in the mind.

3. Consonance

Consonance is assonance, but with consonants. Specifically, it’s an echoing of similar consonant sounds in closely placed words. This, like assonance, can impact the mood and feeling of a poem.

Also like assonance, there are no hard and fast rules for how different sounds will replicate different feelings. But let’s look again at Robert Hayden’s delightfully sonic poem, this time with attention towards repeated consonant sounds:

What do you notice in this poem, now that you’ve paid attention to its consonance? This poem nearly runs the alphabet, but there’s a recurrence of “b”, “k”, and “w” sounds that each offer a different emotional texture to the work. K’s and hard C’s feel sharp and percussive; “B’s” and, to a lesser extent in this piece, “D’s” are also percussive, but duller and more spread out, melancholic; and those soft, ruminant “W’s” seem to stretch this poem’s melancholy even further. I also notice that “cold” recurs in each stanza, though each use of the word feels new somehow.

4. Dissonance and Cacophony

Dissonance and cacophony are essentially the same thing, so we’ll include them as one device. There is a slight difference between the two, in that cacophony is an instance of dissonance; if cacophony is a singular use of sound, dissonance describes a work that is artfully replete with cacophony.

Both words describe writing whose sound is intentionally unpleasant or harsh to the ear. The key word, of course, is intentional: it’s not writing that’s accidentally rough, but writing whose harsh sound is resonant with the writing’s subject matter.

A rather obvious example of dissonance comes from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The language is musical, but has a sense of discordance, and though the vowels are somewhat assonant, there are a lot of different, cacophonous percussive consonants mirroring the speaker’s harsh cry.

Sometimes, dissonance simply helps call attention to a single stand-out word. For example, the poem “Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper” by Richard Siken has a lot of beauty and craft in it, but I’ll call your attention to the word “compartmentalization”, which occurs a little more than halfway into the poem. It’s an ungainly word, hideous in its context and hideous to pronounce, but essential to understanding the psychology of this poem’s speaker.

Retrieved here.

5. Elision or Syncope

Elision is a useful sound device, especially for poets trying to fit their language into the rhythm and meter of a formal poem. What elision refers to is the intentional erasure of a sound or syllable.

A lot of old-timey poetic words are the products of elision. For example:

These forms of elision rarely occur in contemporary poetry, as contemporary poetry is more interested in replicating how people think and speak in the 21st century.

However, elision is common in a lot of everyday speech. Taking the g off of a gerund word, for example—you might say you’re “goin’” to the store, not going. Contractions like “can’t” and “won’t” are also elisions in their own way, since they elide sounds by conjoining words together. (Some of the above examples, like t’other and ‘tis, are also contractions.)

6. Euphony

Euphony is cacophony’s opposite. It is the use of musical, melodic sound to enhance the beauty or quality of a poem’s language. It is, put simply, the lyricism and musicality often found in poetry.

Euphony is not a singular device—it is something achieved in the gestalt of sound devices, and so any example of euphony may contain various iterations of alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, meter, sibilance, repetition, etc.

Consider this poem:

We Have Not Long to Love
By: Tennessee Williams

Pay attention to what makes this poem flow off the tongue—you should even read it out loud to fully feel the language. The poem’s movement and rhythm, its odd but wise syntax, and its noticeable but not-annoying rhyme scheme all combine to make a poem as delightful and interesting as its choice of words.

7. Homophony

Homophony is the use of homophones, which are words that sound similar to one another but have different definitions. Think: bear/bare, there/their, wear/where/ware, etc.

Sometimes, writers use homophones as puns or forms of word play. I could say that the bear bares its face, or I could give someone a box of powdered grains and call it a “bouquet of flours.”

But homophony can also be used to simulate the sound and feeling of language in new and surprising ways. Some contemporary poets write poems that are “homophonic translations,” or poems written to emulate the sound of a source text, but use different words to create wonderful accidents of language.

Here’s an example of a homophonic translation, which attempts to sound like the opening of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot.

By taking the sound and feeling of a poem but using different words, poems like these call into question how language can communicate through sound instead of meaning, and what happens when words say what they don’t mean.

8. Meter

Meter refers to the rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a piece of writing—almost always poetry. Contemporary poets do sometimes utilize meter in their work, but it is far more present in classical poetry.

If you’ve read any poetry from before the 20th century, you have almost certainly encountered iambic meter, which is a pattern of unstressed-stressed syllables. The motion of an iambic poem is often compared to that of a heartbeat. You can see it in action from these lines of Shakespeare, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Again, read these lines out loud, and you’ll get a feel for iambic meter, including where the stresses are placed in the syllables.

You can read our in-depth guide on poetic meter here:

https://writers.com/rhythm-and-meter-in-poetry

9. Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeias are words that sound like the sounds they refer to. They are words made to emulate what they describe. Think bark, honk, meow, vroom, boom, or yackety-yack.

Onomatopoeias are rarely the central feature of any piece of writing, but they do add a kind of sonic texture to the work, and they’re useful for making a piece of writing feel more real and alive.

This excerpt from the poem “Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio” by Carl Sandburg demonstrates the value of onomatopoeias nicely:

Read the full poem here.

Notice how the poem feels livelier and more interesting, especially as those onomatopoeia words are bumping up against one another, practically in conversation.

Learn more about onomatopoeias here:

https://writers.com/onomatopoeia-definition-and-examples

10. Repetition

Repetition is the artful, intentional duplication of sounds and words to highlight or amplify a certain effect on the reader. Like euphony, repetition is not a singular device, but a set of strategies authors use for literary effect.

One type of repetition is called epizeuxis, which is the rapid, immediate repetition of a word. Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” gives us a great example:

The almost obnoxious, incessant chime of the word feels like there are bells actually jingling and tinkling around me. Repetition is more than just a sound device, but here, I think Poe is using the device in a sonic and interesting way.

Discover more repetition devices here:

https://writers.com/repetition-definition

11. Rhyme

You’re probably acquainted with rhyme, which is when words mirror each other’s assonance, or else have corresponding sounds. Examples of this:

• Score / store
• Whether / heather
• Interior / inferior
• Scarecrow / hair grow

There also exist such a thing as slant rhymes, which are rhymes that almost mirror one another, but the length or intonation of a vowel differs enough that the two rhymes slightly misalign. Examples of this:

• Boarish / boorish
• Worm / swarm
• Immigrant / monument
• Tall / toll

Rhymes can occur in both poetry and prose. They make writing more musical and can also call attention to the rhymed words themselves. In poetry, certain forms like villanelles and traditional sonnets require the end words of lines to be rhymed. A line can also have an internal rhyme, or rhyming words occurring in the middle of lines.

Edgar Allan Poe also gives us some great examples of rhyme in poetry. Here’s the opening stanza of The Raven, with internal rhymes italicized, and end rhymes bolded:

12. Sibilance

Sibilance is consonance with “s” sounds, so it’s delightful that sibilance is itself a sibilant word. This sound device gets its own shoutout because it has a unique impact on the feeling of a passage of writing. Sibilance can make writing seem sinister, slippery, tense, or eerie, particularly if the writing is complete with only “s” sounds.

However, repeated hushing and shushing “sh” sounds are also sibilance. If a piece of writing has a lot of “sh” in it, the passage might feel calming, soft, quiet, or windswept.

To be clear, sibilance is just as intentional as the other sound devices in this article. While plenty of words have s’es in them, and most plural words end in s, sibilance requires a certain amount of frequency and intensity in other to impact the mood, tone, and feeling of a piece of writing.

You can find many examples of sibilance in John Clare’s poem “The Wind”:

Why do writers use sound devices in literature?

Sound devices make writing musical, memorable, interesting, and atmospheric. A writer can control the mood and energy of a piece based on how they utilize sound.

Sound devices might enhance a piece of writing by:

• Generating a mood, tone, or atmosphere that enhances the subject of the work.
• Imbuing the work with a sense of musicality that’s pleasing to read and hear.
• Building a textured, sonic experience that the reader can hear and feel.
• Creating doorways into new ideas by attending to the accidents off language.

Really, sound devices are tools that help elevate a piece of writing from merely transmitting information to creating an artistic and intentional experience. The dullest writing thuds for its disinterest in sound. Think long, technical passages of prose with convoluted, abstract language.

Reading bad writing is like trying to drill through a prison wall—and finding that the other side of the wall is just as boring. Musical writing, on the other hand, has a gravity that you don’t want to escape from, and these sound devices help create that gravity.

For more on creating musical, stylistic writing, check out our article on the topic:

https://writers.com/writing-styles

Hone Sound Devices in Your Work at Writers.com

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