Question

What are some examples of onomatopoeia in “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe?

Answer 1

Hint: Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia

Complete answer:
Onomatopoeia is mainly the use of familiar sounds into a poem. So once we read the lines we will be able to identify the sounds that are already familiar to us, and so those are the lines which contain onomatopoeia in it. Take care that there might also be some descriptive words where the sounds can be heard to us, they may be imaginary but they would mean to have onomatopoeia in them.

We know that to identify onomatopoeia we look out for familiar sounds that naturally occur in nature by various creatures and objects.

It is important to understand that in the given poem “The Raven” the lines are not completely written with the device onomatopoeia. We won’t be able to find them in individual words here, rather the poet has organized a bunch of sounds to compose the poem and that is where onomatopoeia really comes into the picture.

Let us take a few examples of onomatopoeia from The Raven;
“musically wells ….bells, bells,….” Here the sound of bells is denoted by ‘bells’, but when written once does not mean onomatopoeia, instead the poet has repeatedly used the word “bells” to depict its sound. In this way many sounds like “clattered”, “shutters”, “tapping”, “rapping”, “followed free”, “furrow”, “tlot-tlot” are the various sounds used in this poem.

Note: Just like we use onomatopoeia in certain poems, another poetic device or figure of speech which can be found in poems is called Hyperbole. If we want to make use of exaggeration or if we want to bring more emphasis to certain phrases then we can use hyperbole. It is used to bring forth strong emotional messages. In other words we can describe hyperbola as a figure of speech that can convey obvious exaggeration on extreme levels. Also to incorporate humor or irony it can be used. In a poem it is written “He knew every tree” which just means that the person knows the place (forest) well, not literally that he knows every tree.