Sound devices are tools that help the poet convey meaning or experience to the reader/listener. By enlisting sensory memories and reactions, the poet is able to draw the audience in on a deeper, more visceral level. Here the poem can be felt and related to in ways that it cannot be merely, bookishly, understood.
The expected and the unexpected are equal but opposite ways into a reader's core connection to a poem. When you hear something you expect, as when you discover a rhyme pattern in a poem and are able to accurately predict the right word that will best continue the pattern, it is as if you were in collaboration with the poet, like a co-author, or at least on the same mental wavelength as the poet. Conversely, when you hear something that you don't expect, as the poet chooses to break the pattern (or to keep the sound pattern but break with the established meaning via different word choice,) the unexpectedness of the poet's choice surprises and delights, and you are impressed with the incongruity of the choice and thus either the mind and skills of the poet or else the amazing versatility of language. In essence, these devices work in two distinct ways, tapping into either the wish for comfort, the familiar and known, that which is similar; or else the appreciation of a surprise, the exciting and unexpected, that which is different. As students develop comfort with the poetry-writing process, they can be guided to practice writing rhymes and crafting poems with elements that are expected as well as those that are unexpected.
A wonderful poem that can be used to this end is
Le cheval chante
by Surrealist poet Alain Bosquet [http://ecprim.lefuilet.free.fr/b.htm#bosquetcheval]. The title,
The horse sings
, demonstrates how each short line starts with a noun and is then paired with an unexpected verb action. In this poem, it is the brook, and not the horse, that whinnies, showing concrete examples of unexpected meaning to lead the way for students to think about unexpected sounds. Some of the words rhyme, some do not, and just when you think there might be a pattern, it is broken. The first three lines address sounds animals make, and 5
th
graders love animals! (
Le cheval chante / Le hibou miaule / L'âne gazouille
or
The horse sings / The owl meows / The donkey babbles.
) After the fourth incongruity, the poet says to the reader "C'est bien, mon enfant: / joue avec les mots," encouraging the child/reader to play with words. The poem continues to describe objects with incongruous adjectives or actions and speaks of words as being friendly or biting. Both the format and the idea of being playful while combining vocabulary are well-suited to this unit.
Rhyme, Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance
Rhyme is the broad category of sound devices that relates to sound "echoes," or a correspondence among sounds within poetry. We are perhaps most familiar with
end-rhyme
, that is, when the ends of lines of poetry rhyme or have similar sounds, as in
Muffet
and
tuffet
in the popular nursery rhyme:
Little Miss Muffet / Sat on her tuffet.
Alliteration, also known as
head rhyme
or
initial rhyme
, is the repetition of initial consonant sounds or sound clusters, of stressed syllables in a stretch of writing. In the phrase "stressed syllables in a stretch of writing" for instance, the beginning "s" sound is repeated with the words
stressed, syllables,
and
stretch
. Two of those words share a further alliterative element as they begin with the consonant cluster sound "str" (
stressed
and
stretch
.)
Often the words whose initial sounds are stressed embody important characteristics or themes of the poem, and the stress draws attention to their importance. Alliteration can help in the memory process, as being able to narrow a word down to one that begins similarly to others in a section helps in word retrieval. It also can give a poem a musicality that can be very attractive. Alliteration appeals to that wish for comfort referred to in the previous section. Although overuse of alliteration is something to guard against in contemporary poetry, for our purposes, overuse is more or less the goal, as it will help students connect vocabulary without complex sentence structures they don't yet know.
Similarly, Pierre Brandao, in
Small Treatise on French Prosody
, differentiates between the French verbs
rimer
and
rimailler
, the latter denoting a contrived work in which a word's rhyme sound often supplants precise shades of meaning, the former in which words and ideas marry into a cohesive work that adheres to rhyme rules organically. It is the difference between choosing a word because it rhymes and will do just fine in the line and choosing words that fit just right together to convey full meaning while also participating in a rhyme scheme. For example, in the classic nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty,"
And all the King's horses and all the King's men
is followed by
Couldn't put Humpty back together again
. Well, the word
again
is actually redundant, as putting something
back
together already conveys the
again
-ness of the event, but it was added to maintain the rhyme.
As was addressed in the previous section, the ability to predict end-rhymes can draw a reader in by way of the comfort factor, but there is indeed a fine line between that and an overly obvious, simpleton's rhyme. No one wants to feel as if the rhyme has been dumbed down to ensure recognition. It is as if
rimer
is the goal, and
rimailler
the goal gone wrong. Yet, for our language practice purposes, the works produced herein will mostly, by design, fall in the land of
rimailler
. Our goal here is to explore and develop vocabulary through poem creation. Down the road, we can focus on poem creation via other linguistic goals.
Let's not forget about alliteration's siblings, consonance and assonance. Consonance is the repetition of those consonant sounds anywhere else other than at the beginning of words, and assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. These can be noticed either within a line, a stanza, or a whole poem. End-rhyme is a form of consonance.
To demonstrate assonance while visually exploring the way similar-sounding word parts can be spelled differently, see "Lesson Plan 2 -
Mon Petit Chat
and Assonance." This poem, about a cat that doesn't grow big because all it eats is junk food, is comprised of twelve short lines. Each line ends in the same vowel "ah" sound, and there are four other instances of the sound within the poem.
Maurice Caríme, the author of
Mon Petit Chat
, also wrote a poem called
Le hibou
which not only stresses the long O sound "oo" throughout the poem, mirroring the owl as main character both in the "oo" sound of
hib
ou
but also the
hoo
sound the animal makes. It also teaches a grammar rule: Some
ou
ending nouns take an
x
in the plural and some do not. http://ecprim.lefuilet.free.fr/c.htm#caremehibou.
