Sound & Diction
Alliteration
Repeating the first consonant sound across nearby words. The shared sound binds the words together before their meanings do. The oldest structuring device in English verse, and the fastest way to make a phrase stick.
"would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world" — Melville's w's
Don't confuse it with Assonance. Assonance repeats vowel sounds; consonance repeats consonants anywhere in the word, not just initially.
In the Reader — 7 excerpts
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
And be one traveler, long I stood
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.
The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with alliteration most often — company reveals character.
Anaphora 4 Antithesis 3 Personification 3 Simile 3
The rest of the family
Assonance Onomatopoeia Tmesis Neologism Archaism Solecism Epithet