Sound Patterning And Modality In Edgar Allan Poe‘s Poem “A Dream Within A Dream“

Sound Patterning and Modality in Edgar Allan Poe‘s poem “A Dream Within a Dream“.

First of all, sound patterning plays a big role in the poetry and it contains such basic things as rhythm, which accompanies metre, rhyme, alliteration and assimilation. To describe in what way this poem is written, there is a need to make clear the definitions of what is the rhyme, rhythm and others. “Rhyme is when two or more words have a sound in common or echo one another” (Meyers-Shaffer 2008: 83), it is affected by pronunciation where matching sounds occur. In addition to sound patterning, according to Wales, expressive manipulation of the form of language through rhythm, sound patterns, repetition, tends to express or emphasize feelings or attitudes, obvious example is poetic metre, which can be seen as foregrounded against the natural rhythm of speech, regularized into repetitive patterns (2001: 143), the metre can distinguish poetry from prose. The third important term to cover is rhythm and Simpson denotes it as a patterned movement of pulses in time, which is defined both by periodicity and repetition (2004: 15). Analyzing E. A. Poe‘s poem, it has an iambic rhythm. Simpson claims, that an iambic foot has two syllables, of which the first is less heavily stressed than the second (2004: 15), there could be iambic trimeter, tetrameter and etc. For instance, the line [3] “Thus much let me avow” consists of three feet iamb segments, where after unstressed syllable goes stressed (the stressed syllables are written in italics) “Thus much let me avow”. The same appears in the line [16] “How few! yet how they creep” and in many others.