Phonological Devices In Poem

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A poem conceals lot more than what it reveals and it bears the most efficient and gracefully sensitive use of language. Phonology is the study of sound systems and the multiplicity of meanings in a text represented through ingenuity in the application of sound patterns. Peter Roach (2000) described phonology as the way “phonemes function in language and the relationship among the different phonemes” . Phonology explains the patterns in which speech sounds are ordered in English into a scheme. Phonology basically deals with the sound patterns, the rhyming scheme and pronunciation of words in the sentence. Rhyme elements, alliteration, consonance and assonance are some of the phonological devices a poet applies to bring in various layers of meaning in his verse. This paper is a close scrutiny of the phonological devices appropriated by A. K. Ramanujan in his poetry that render them replete …show more content…

Mother gives them milk (/m/) in saucers. She watches them suck (/s/) The snakeman wreaths their writhing (/r/) round his neck The clickshod heel suddenly strikes (/k/) and slushes on a snake: I see him turn (/s/) Similarly the poem ‘A Minor Sacrifice’ bears examples of cacophonic alliterations that depict the children’s repentance at their sense of the sin of killing the grasshoppers nastily. to scrub and scour with coconut fibre till the skins of our palms come off There are some other examples where Ramanujan employs consonance, especially in the last consonant sound of words. This imparts some of the poems with a lyrical feel. • I burned and burned. But one day I turned (/b/, /d/) and caught that thought (/t/) • I shook a little and took her, behind the laws of my land. (/k/, /l/) The consonance in the above lines occurs with a repetition of the plosive sounds /b/, /d/, /t/ and /k/. These sounds reverberate in the rebellion tone of the poem wherein the poet expresses his defiance against some of the stagnant orthodox ideologies of his native

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