More Lit. Terms

alliteration, assonance, consonance

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euphony & cacophony

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alliteration

• Repetition of a sound at the start of a word
• Examples:
• Patty picked purple petunias.
• Marvelous Marvin the Martian

assonance

• Repetition of vowel sounds within words
• Does not need to be at the beginning of a word (like alliteration)
• Creates a soft fluency in sound and an internal rhyme
• Examples
• “…on a proud round cloud in a white high night.”

-e.e. cummings

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• “That solitude which suits abstruse musings.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

consonance

• Repetition of consonant sounds
• Within words, rather than at beginning
• Examples:
• All mammals named Pam are clammy.

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• "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" (contains both assonance & consonance)

-Edgar Allan Poe

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cacophony

• Harsh or unpleasant sounds
• often a meaningless mixture of sounds in successive frequence
• can convey meaning as much as the words themselves
• often produced by consecutive and discordant consonances

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• Different from onomatopoeia, which is words as sounds (like “bang” or “crack”)

cacophony examples

“It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene”

-Sylvia Plath

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Plaster nor spackle nor tacky wax

will patch this rift.

euphony

• Pleasant sounds
• often melodic and smooth on the ear
• enhances aesthetic appeal
• rhyme and alliteration aid in this as much as the sounds of the syllables themselves
• such as sounds that vibrate or whisper, such as S, Sh, Th, Z, or V
• typically comprised of softer sounding consonants and vowel sounds
• “Emma” vs “Clark”

Examples on next slide…

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euphony examples

So long as men do breathe, or eyes do see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

-Shakespearean Sonnet

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

-Dylan Thomas

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