Find alliterations in poem analysis

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Do you deal with poem analysis in school and don't know what alliterations are and how to find them in the poem? Find out how to do it.

This is how you understand alliteration.
This is how you understand alliteration.

What are alliterations

When you analyze a poem, sooner or later you will also come across rhetorical devices such as alliteration.

  • Rhetorical or stylistic devices have a very specific function in texts and poems. They are intended to have a special effect in the text. It should become more pictorial, livelier and more impressive.
  • A well-known stylistic device is alliteration. Alliterations denote successive words that have the same initial sound.
  • The same initial sound makes alliterations more sonorous and more memorable. That is why they are often used in advertising slogans, for example.
  • A well-known example that makes it clear what alliterations are is the sentence: Milk perks up tired men. Here all words begin with the same initial "m".
  • Recognize and interpret line skip in the poem - instructions

    Which pupil or student does not come at least once during their training ...

  • Terms like "terribly beautiful" are also part of the alliteration. In this example, the initial "sch" is identical.
  • The words are not always right behind one another. Sometimes they are also connected by a connecting word such as "and" or "but". Examples of alliterations with connective words are "beautiful and chic" and "poets and thinkers" or "small but clever".

Find and understand alliterations in the poem

Once you understand the principle of alliteration, it is easy to find it in the poem.

  • Read the poem carefully and underline it with a colored pen as you read it Words that follow each other directly or separated by connective words and have the same initial sound to have.
  • For poem analysis, however, it is not only important that you find alliterations, but that you can explain what they mean in the poem. To do this, of course, you first have to understand the meaning of the poem.
  • Think about why the poet put the alliterations in the respective places. Did he want to use it to create a certain image or to depict a situation or landscape in a more impressive way? Alliterations often underline or create certain moods.
  • The longer the successive initial word series, the more unnatural the sentence appears, which sometimes creates a certain comedy.
  • Just think about how the alliterations affect you as a reader of the poem. To find out the effect of the alliterations, it often helps to read the poem out loud. This will make you even more aware of the same-sounding initials.

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