i need to know by either today or tomorrow how alliteration and assonance have affected robert frost's 'the road not taken' i see all the places in which alliteration takes place, but can't understand how it affects the poem. If someone could enlighten me, i would be very grateful. However, i am on a time limit, and if you cant answer by tomorrow, it will not really help me...
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
erin

Road Not Taken, The
by Robert Lee Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Erin, it's always difficult to know exactly what an author's intention is in using the various poetic devices. An author might be trying to get a musical cadence or to stress a certain mood within a poem.

In the first stanza here the assonance of "wood", "stood", "could" seem to me to stress the importance of the setting. Just as "long" , "one", "down", "bent", and "undergrowth" all contain an "n" sound. These negative "n" sounds emphasize the second line of this stanza.


If you look at the rest of the poem, stanza by stanza and look at the use of consonant sounds by Frost, I think you will be able to make your own conclusions based on your understanding of what the poem means to you.


Les

It's not a poem in which the effects of alliteration and assonance are intrusive. I agree with Les that one effect is just to introduce a certain musicality to make the poem more pleasant to read/listen to, and thus more memorable.

You might be able to make something of the rhyme sounds.

The first verse is the only one in which all the rhymes end with consonants. They give a feeling of standing still.

In the second verse the unconsonanted end sounds of 'fair', 'wear' and 'there' give a feeling of free forward flow, while the 'm' sounds in 'claim' and 'same' have enough continuing resonance not to interrupt that.

In the third verse, 'lay', 'day' and 'way' also have no end consonants, but their vowels are dipthongs, introducing a feeling of change; while 'black' and 'back' suggest the breaking of sticks underfoot, and give a feeling of something being irrevocably closed off or locked away.

In the final verse, the sounds of 'sigh', 'I' and 'by' are suggestive of a sigh, while the weaker rhyming of 'hence' and 'difference' suggests intellectual reflection.

These are just my subjective feelings about the sounds. I don't claim that they are correct. Others may well have different reactions. So please feel free to disagree. Much better anyway, if you can express your own reactions to how the words sound to you.

Ian



Post Edited (11-28-04 19:49)

John Frederick Nims, writing in Western Wind, says there are 15 basic vowel sounds in English, ranging from low to high below. Low-frequency sounds are more lullaby-like; high-frequency sounds give more excitement.

boo
bone
book
bought
boy
bough
bar
bud
bird
bat
bet
bit
buy
bay
bee

Compare Frost's choices and see if you agree. Alliteration and assonance/consonance are merely bundling similar sounds near one another.