Thursday, August 13, 2009

Please point out the language devices used in the Lord Byron poem "She Walks in Beauty."

Lord Byron starts the poem "She Walks in Beauty" with a figurative language device called a simile, with:



She walks in beauty, like the night


of cloudless climes and starry skies.



This simile characterizes the subject of the poem by comparing her to a beautiful, cloudless, starry night. These two lines also use the poetic sound device of alliteration with the repetitive “cl” sound in “cloudless climes” and the “s” sound in "starry skies."


The entire poem uses a rhyme scheme of ababab. In other words, the first line of each stanza rhymes with the third and the fifth, while the second line of each stanza rhymes with the fourth and sixth.


The fifth line in stanza two is an example of a sound device called consonance. The line reads,



Where thoughts serenely sweet express



Consonance is similar to alliteration in that it contains repetitive consonant sounds. However, in consonance the repeated sound occurs not only at the beginning of words (as in alliteration), but also in the middle and/or end. The lines above highlight the "s" sound by repeating it four times in the space of four words. 


In the third stanza, the lines



So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,


The smiles that win, the tints that glow,



are an example of parallel structure. Writers create parallel structure when they repeat specific patterns, as with the word “so” above, and “the –- that win” in the next line.

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