Wednesday, September 23, 2015

What are some of the "sound devices" used in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray?

In his famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,"
Thomas Gray uses several forms of poetic "sound devices."  Here are some
examples.


1. Alliteration: The
repetition of initial consonant sounds.


Line 2: "The
lowing herd wind slowly o'er the
lea"


Line 4: "The
plowman homeward plods his
weary
w
ay"


Line 28: "How
bow'd the woods beneath their
sturdy
st
roke"


2.
Rhyme:


In most places, Gray
uses standard, "full" rhyme: day-lea, sight-flight, holds-folds, complain, reign,
etc.


Occasionally, though, Gray uses partial
rhymes.


Lines 29,31: toil,
smile


Lines 30, 32: obscure,
poor


Lines 58, 60: withstood,
blood


Some of these may indicate that Gray's pronunciation
was different than our contemporary pronunciation.  In other cases , he may simply be
"stretching" his rhymes.


Onomatopoeia:
words that imitate a sound (moo, meow,
etc.)


I have not been able to find examples of onomatopoeia
in Gray's "Elegy."  At first, I thought that the words "tolls," "knell," and "lowing,"
might be onomatopoeic, but the dictionaries I consulted do not seem to agree with this
theory.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Can (sec x - cosec x) / (tan x - cot x) be simplified further?

Given the expression ( sec x - csec x ) / (tan x - cot x) We need to simplify. We will use trigonometric identities ...