Out.
The same pattern repeats within every one of us
The beat is built into the very fabric of our being.
Simply put, we're creatures of rhythm and repetition.
It's central to our experience,
And we delight in those aspects everyday,
or in the repetition of soup cans,
In language, rhythm and repetition are often used
as the building blocks for poetry.
There's the rhythm of language,
created by syllables and their emphasis,
such as, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see."
And there's the repetition of language at multiple levels:
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee,"
With so many uses, repetition is one of the poet's most malleable
It can lift or lull the listener,
a repeated pattern of stressed syllables,
is a form of repetition.
too much repetition can backfire.
Imagine writing the same sentence on the blackboard twenty times,
again, and again, and again, and again,
or imagine a young child clamoring for her mother's attention,
Not exactly what we might call poetry.
So what is poetic repetition, and why does it work?
Possibly most familiar is rhyme,
the repetition of like sounds in word endings.
As with Shakespeare's example,
we often encounter rhyme at the ends of lines.
Repetition in this way creates an expectation.
We begin to listen for the repetition of those similar sounds.
When we hear them, the found pattern is pleasurable.
Like finding Waldo in the visual chaos,
we hear the echo in the oral chatter.
Yet, rhyme need not surface solely at a line's end.
Notice the strong "i" sound in,
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
This repetition of vowel sounds is called assonance
and can also be heard in Eminem's "Lose Yourself."
Notice how the "e" and "o" sounds repeat both within in
Oh, there goes rabbit, he choked,
he so mad but he won't give up that easy,
he knows his whole back's to these ropes."
The alternating assonance creates its own rhythm,
and invites us to try our own voices in echoing it.
Similarly, consonance is the repetition of like consonant sounds,
"So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
In fact, this type of specific consonance,
which occurs at the beginning of words
may be familiar to you already.
It's called alliteration, or front rhyme.
Great examples include tongue twisters.
Betty bought some butter but the butter was bitter
so Betty bought some better butter to make the bitter butter better.
Here, the pleasure in pattern is apparent as we trip over the consonance
both within words and at their start.
Yet tongue twisters also reflect the need for variation in poetic repetition.
they're seen by some as lesser imitations of poetry,
or gimmicky because they hammer so heavily on the same sounds,
closer to that blackboard-style of repetition.
Ultimately, this is the poet's balancing act,
and in that balance, it may be enough to remember
we all live in a world of wild variation