Alliteration

Alliteration is a stylistic device of sound-writing consisting in the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds in adjacent words or lines for the sake of intensifying the expressiveness and musicality of poetic speech. The repetition of consonants creates an additional sound pattern that may imitate phenomena of reality (rustling, rumbling, ringing), emphasise semantically important words, lend the line intonational unity and emotional colouring. Alliteration is one of the most ancient means of organising verse — in Germanic poetry it even replaced rhyme as a structural principle. In Ukrainian poetry alliteration was masterfully applied by Pavlo Tychyna, who created sound imagery. Together with assonance, alliteration forms sound-writing (the instrumentation of verse) — an important level of the phonetic organisation of a literary text.