5.B Alliteration, Assonance and Consonance (FIG-1.D)

A phrase with repeated opening sounds sticks because your ear catches the pattern before your brain finishes the meaning. Alliteration is that repetition of initial consonant sounds in words close together, and its real job is to glue those words into one unit. When Tennyson writes 'the fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,' the b of breeze and blew, and the f of fair and foam and flew, pull those words into a single gust and a single surge, so the line moves as two actions instead of six separate words.

Assonance and consonance work the same way but inside words rather than at their fronts. Assonance repeats a vowel sound anywhere in nearby words; consonance repeats a consonant sound anywhere, often in the middle or at the end. In 'the fair breeze blew,' the long e sound links breeze with the ee of each verb's feel, a quieter thread running under the alliteration. All three devices are matters of sound, not spelling: 'city' and 'cellar' look alike on the page but open with different sounds, s versus hard c, so they do not alliterate no matter how similar the letters look.

These devices sit next to rhyme in the sound toolkit, but where rhyme marks line endings and signals structure, alliteration, assonance and consonance work inside and across lines to thicken texture and mood before meaning fully lands. A poem can rhyme sparingly or not at all and still feel dense with sound, because these three devices are doing the work rhyme usually gets credit for.