Sound Devices in Poetry: What They Do, What They Don’t, and Why the Distinction Matters

The essay was only three paragraphs, not even filling the front of a piece of paper. Already a bad sign.

After declaring a theme in the thesis statement, the student launched into a detailed description of the poem’s rhyme scheme. No quotations, no reference to the poem’s theme, but an overly explained abab cdcd efef gg that apparently made the poem “relatable” to readers.

The next paragraph identified two words that started with the letter “b,” twelve lines apart, and discussed the poet’s use of alliteration to convey the poem’s theme. Unfortunately, the two words weren’t particularly important and certainly didn’t carry the entire weight of the poem’s meaning.

That essay is not an anomaly. Sound devices in poetry can be dangerous. Students learn them early on, so they feel comfortable with them by the time they reach AP Literature. Sound devices are, after all, much easier to identify than symbolism, irony, or tone. In the stress of a timed writing situation, faced with a centuries-old sonnet, our students grasp for anything to write about, often falling back on what’s familiar.

But writing an entire essay about sound devices in poetry just doesn’t work. When students over-rely on these devices, it often leads to disaster. In most cases, they would have been better off supporting their thesis with lines from the poem without referencing a single specific literary device.

In this post, we’re exploring why this happens and how to prevent it—without abandoning instruction on sound devices in poetry altogether.

“Icing on the Cake”: The Framing That Changes Everything

Ultimately, sound devices in poetry are artistic flourishes. They subtly reinforce the meaning already communicated through imagery, figurative language, symbolism, and structure. They do not carry meaning on their own. Teaching sound devices in poetry without this distinction causes students to overuse them—and overuse causes real damage on the AP exam.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach these devices, of course. Poetry’s unique use of sound is one of the characteristics that differentiates it from prose, so it belongs in our poetry unit. The terms alliteration, meter, and rhyme appear in the AP Literature Course and Exam Description, which means there may be references to them in the multiple-choice portion of the exam.

But their importance is far outweighed by that of imagery, figurative language, and symbolism—and our students must understand what sound devices can and cannot do.

When we taught sound devices in poetry—a lesson we combined with instruction on rhythm and meter—we started by making it clear that these devices are “icing on the cake.” They’re worth recognizing, and they can have powerful effects, but they’re not students’ primary tools when they approach a new piece of literature. When it comes to the AP exam, these are terms they need to recognize for the multiple-choice portion—not terms they should rely on when writing their poetry analysis essay (Q1).

The Terms: What They Are and How They Work

For the sake of understanding the impact that sound devices have on our experience of a poem, we covered more terms than are included in the Course and Exam Description. Below are the ones we considered most important for students to know.

Rhyme has several useful subcategories worth knowing (or at least introducing).

Because these terms were in our textbook, we also introduced them to students. However, these are truly “bonus content”—interesting but entirely nonessential.

• Phonetic intensives: our textbook included a section on a fascinating quirk of language in which certain letter combinations are often associated with certain ideas (e.g., the fl– words for moving light, the sl– words for smoothly wet; the long o for melancholy, etc.).

• Euphony (pleasant sounds) and cacophony (unpleasant sounds)
  • Teaching Tip: As part of our music-based lesson on sound devices, we used excerpts from Gustav Holst’s The Planets to illustrate these terms. “Mars” is perfect for cacophony, and “Jupiter” is perfect for euphony.

• Synesthesia: the stimulation of multiple senses simultaneously (e.g., Dickinson’s use of “Blue . . . buzz”).

We also introduced students to the idea that poets can also control the speed at which readers move through the poem. Have students practice saying aloud, “Watch dogs catch much meat,” and “My aunt is away.” The two lines are each the same number of syllables, but the second is significantly easier to say. The difference comes down to consonant clusters and vowel length. It’s a quick, memorable way to show students that word choice affects more than just meaning.

How Sound Devices Work Together: The Sound and Sense Connection

We covered these sound devices as the second half of a mini-unit: the first three days were spent using music to introduce rhythm and meter. You can get all the details here. In the last couple of days, we guided students through an activity recommended by our textbook that perfectly capped off the unit. 

The textbook presented students with two pairs of lines—one, the actual lines of a poem, and the other, an altered version. Students used all the terms they had used throughout the unit (including rhythm and meter) to determine which pair of lines better matched sound to meaning.

The activity showed students that sound device choices are not arbitrary. The poet made a specific choice, and a less skilled version of the same lines exists to prove it.

Here’s an example, from John Milton. We began by asking students to note which words had been changed (bolded below) before considering the effect.

Choice B is the better pairing of sound and meaning. In the second line, “crabbed” sounds harsher than “rough” (which actually sounds quite pleasant), and “dull fools” is spondaic (both syllables are stressed), making them harder to say and slowing the line’s speed. In contrast, “Apollo’s lute,” full of the liquid “L” sound, flows off the tongue far more easily (and musically) than “the lute of Phoebus.”

Students worked through several of these examples. The key to this activity’s success is that students choose which version is better and explain why. That’s close reading.

This section culminated with a close reading of Alexander Pope’s “Sound and Sense”—essentially a full poem illustrating the point that, when used artfully, sound reinforces meaning. Or, as Pope more skillfully puts it, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” Whether it’s the strong Ajax, who “strives some rock’s vast weight to throw”—a description full of consonants and stressed syllables that you can’t help but read slowly—or the speedy Camilla, who “Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main”—a line full of triple meter and soft syllables that easily rolls off the tongue.

By the end of the lesson, even if students haven’t fully mastered sound devices in poetry, they have a firm understanding that, in poetry, sound reinforces meaning—a mantra we repeated throughout our weeklong exploration.

The Essay Problem (And How to Fix It)

The disastrous essay in the introduction to this post relied on sound devices as the meaning carriers in the poem, a function that these devices just don’t serve.

We taught our students that, when writing literary analysis essays, content always comes first. They need to determine the theme or purpose of a text (which they will include in their thesis statement), and then identify the quotations that best support that thesis. Then, they can determine which literary device is present in the evidence they have selected, identifying and explaining its use in the commentary that connects that evidence to their claim.

This is especially true for sound devices in poetry. If students happen to notice that one of the pieces of evidence they’ve already selected contains an example of a sound device, they can briefly acknowledge that the use of that device draws attention to key words. But identifying alliteration just for alliteration’s sake isn’t worth their time and energy.

When students treat literary devices—especially sound devices—as labels for meaningful quotations instead of the organizing principle that drives an essay, their writing becomes much stronger.

6 More Poems for Teaching Sound Devices in Poetry

While “Sound and Sense” was our primary text for this part of the lesson, these are our favorite poems to add when we have time.

“Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Wilfred Owen

Owen’s description of the cacophonous battle sounds that herald the deaths of young men at war is full of sound devices—onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme work together with a clear purpose. After the matching activity we described earlier, students did a nice job of identifying the ways that Owen reinforces meaning with sound.

“God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins’s reflections on a beautiful natural world corrupted by the pollution of human work—and yet somehow capable of renewal—is rich in its use of sound devices. When he writes, “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell,” the repetition and stress on “trod” reinforce the action he describes, and “bleared,” “smeared,” and “smudge” are almost onomatopoeic in describing the ways humans have defaced the natural world.

“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Robert Frost

Frost’s short poem about the fleeting nature of life uses alliteration and rhyme to beautiful effect. This one makes for a nice, quick practice in close reading.

“Five Songs — II,” W. H. Auden

Auden’s poem (titled “That night when joy began”  in our textbook after its first line) describes two lovers, drawn together by passion and nervously awaiting their inevitable breakup, only to find themselves in the growing peace of a lasting relationship. The musical devices reinforce the poem’s joy, and the use of approximate rhyme (“flash/flush,” “relief/laugh”) seems perfect for a poem about two lovers who think they don’t work together—until they do.

“We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks

A popular choice in textbooks to pair with a lesson on sound devices, Brooks’s description of a group of pool players evokes a perfectly appropriate jazz rhythm in its use of alliteration and internal rhyme.

“Woman Work,” Maya Angelou

Angelou’s gorgeous poem uses sound devices to highlight the sharp contrast between the relentlessness of the speaker’s workday and her dreams of peace and rest. We recommend playing the audio of Angelou herself reading the poem (2:47 in the linked video); she captures its musicality beautifully.

Your students can excel in AP Literature—and you can excel as an AP Literature teacher—without fully mastering sound devices in poetry. But exposure to these devices is worthwhile—not just for the handful of multiple-choice questions students might encounter, but for giving them a fuller introduction to poetry. Students who understand, however, that sound devices in poetry are “icing on the cake” rather than the cake itself are going to use them far more effectively (even in writing) than students who have merely memorized definitions.

It’s helpful to remember sometimes that our goal isn’t necessarily to create poetry scholars. Our goal is to give students as many tools as we can for experiencing literature—and to make sure they know when to put those tools down.

If you’re interested in seeing more of our materials for this lesson, send us an email at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @threeheads.works. We’d love to share the wealth, no strings attached.

Are you looking for a ready-made, student-friendly curated list that you can share with students? The curated literary terms list our students kept in their binders (and links to the Kahoots we used as bellringers) is available in our Free Resource Library. We also have a multiple-choice literary terms assessment based on this list that you can use as a pretest, a semester final, or exam review. It’s available on its own or in our AP Lit Jump Start Kit.