Onomatopoeia in poetry creates musicality and reinforces the theme. It approximates meaning through sound, used with other techniques to produce music through words alone. Examples include Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells and Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, which use onomatopoeia to create rhythmic cadences and themes. The choice of onomatopoeia can be lyrical or harsh in nature.
The function of onomatopoeia in poetry is to create musicality in the spoken words and reinforce the general theme of the poem. Onomatopoeia is the literary term used to describe words that approximate their meaning by their sound. The word “pop,” for example, can be used to describe the loud, screeching sound a cork makes when a bottle of champagne is opened. This literary device can be used in conjunction with other techniques to produce music through words alone. It can be used to force the reader to pronounce the poem in exactly the way the writer intended to illustrate the full meaning of his piece.
Onomatopoeia in poetry is often used to create the rhythmic cadences of music, without adding any real instrumentation. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells uses onomatopoeia in combination with repetition to call to the reader’s mind the myriad sounds made by jangling sleigh bells on a cold winter night. He first asks the reader to “listen to the sleighs” (line 1) decorated with bells and promises that their sounds promise a “world of merriment” (line 3). As the sledges move across the frozen ground, “silver bells” (line 2) strapped to the sides create a “tinkling, tinkling, tinkling” (line 4).
The word “bell” itself, which is the focus of the poem and gives it its title, is also used onomatopoeically to suggest the resonant sound that a bell makes when first struck. The word itself is repeated ten times in the first stanza alone. The last six lines of the poem feature the word “bell” repeated 13 times to create the sense of a grand symphony of several bells ringing as the speaker finishes his tribute to their music.
The use of onomatopoeia in poetry can also be paired with other literary devices to create a theme. Musical sounding words when spoken aloud can repeat the primary concepts addressed by the actual words of the poem. Wilfred Owen mockingly pays homage to those who die young unnecessarily in Anthem for Doomed Youth. He asks whether the “passing bells” (line 1) will sound for those who have died needlessly, and answers his own question by stating that only the “quick clatter of stuttering rifles” (line 3) will sound for these unfortunates. The word “rattle” brings to mind the sound a gun makes when it is loaded with a bullet and ready to fire.
The choice of onomatopoeia word in poetry can be lyrical or harsh in nature. The word “bell” used by Poe is a soft one, drawing on an open vocal sound to reproduce the puffy music that is central to the poem. Conversely, Owen chose a hard consonant “t” to denote disapproval and disgust at the situation the young man claims. When combined with the consonance created by the three repeated guttural sounds of the “r”, an image of many cannons being loaded and fired is created, such as the reader might see on a wartime battlefield. This gruesome death scene lends to the overall theme of the poem that war brutally and ruthlessly too easily claims the lives of the young.
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