This document defines and provides examples of various sound devices used in poetry, including rhythm, meter, scansion, feet, rhyme, assonance, and consonance. Rhythm refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Meter is the organization of these patterns into regular lines. Rhyme involves the repetition of similar sounds, often at the end of lines. Assonance and consonance refer to the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds within words. Examples are provided to illustrate how poets use these sound devices to reinforce meaning and create emotional responses in readers.

1. Sound of devices used in poetry
created by :
Diah Desti Lestari
Toni Hirsam

2. Definition of sound devices
Sound devices are resources used by poets to convey and reinforce the meaning or
experience of poetry through the skillful use of sound.
After all, poets are trying to use a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an
emotional response. The words and their order should evoke images, and the words
themselves have sounds, which can reinforce or otherwise clarify those images.
All in all, the poet is trying to get you, the reader, to sense a particular thing, and the use of
sound devices are some of the poet’s tools.

3. RHYTHM
The sound pattern created by stressed and unstressed
syllables.
The pattern can be regular or random.

4. Pattern of Rhythm
METER
The organization of voice patterns, in terms of both the SCANSION
arrangement of
stresses and their frequency of repetition per line of verse.
The conscious measure of the pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of
poetry.
FEET
The unit of meter. Metrical lines are named for the constituent foot and
for the number of feet in the line: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter
(3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7) and
octameter (8); thus, a line containing five feet, for example,
would be called iambic .

5. Where Are You Now? The rhythm in this
• Example:
I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.
The purple words/syllables are “stressed”,
and they have a regular pattern, so this poetic
line has “meter”.
When the night begins to fall
And the sky begins to glow
You look up and see the tall
City of lights begin to grow –
In rows and little golden squares
The lights come out. First here, then there
Behind the windowpanes as though
A million billion bees had built
Their golden hives and honeycombs
Above you in the air.
By Mary Britton Miller
poem is slow – to
match the night gently
falling and the lights
slowly coming on.

6. Rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two
or more words, most often in the final syllables
of lines in poems and songs.
Types of rhyme :
 End rhymes appear at the end of two or more lines of
poetry.
 Internal rhymes appear within a single line of poetry.

7. Example of end rhyme and internal rhyme :
Snow makes whiteness where it falls.
The bushes look like popcorn balls.
And places where I always play,
Look like somewhere else today.
By Marie Louise Allen
The Raven
Once upon a midnight DREARY, while I
pondered weak and WEARY
While I nodded, nearly NAPPING, suddenly
there came a TAPPING
By Edgar Allan Poe
First Snow

9. Example :
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver soon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees…
from Silver by Walter de la Mare
This Tooth
I jiggled it
jaggled it
jerked it.
I pushed
and pulled
and poked it.
But –
As soon as I stopped,
And left it alone
This tooth came out
On its very own!
by Lee Bennett Hopkins

10. ASSONANCE
A repetition of vowel sounds within words or
syllables.
Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far.
It is among the oldest of living things.
So old it is that no man knows how and why the first
poems came.
--Carl Sandburg, Early Moon
Fleet feet sweep by sleeping geese.
Free and easy.
Make the grade.
The stony walls enclosed the holy space.

11. CONSONANCE
The repetition of consonant sounds within
word.
Example :
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each
purple curtain.” –Edgar Allen Poe