Question

Write an original line of poetry in at least trimeter, containing consonance and assonance.

Answer 1

All right, let's start with meter. Meter, in English poetry, means the pattern of syllables that are stressed and unstressed. That's just natural to the way you speak. For instance, in "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." notice how you put STRESS, or emphasis, on "SAY," "SEE," "DAWN'S" and "LIGHT." Read it out loud to test it. The stresses in a line of poetry won't necessarily just be words, either—check out the next line:

"what so PROUDly we HAILED, by the TWIlight's LAST gleaming."

Those capitalized syllables are stressed. Meter is the pattern of those stresses, and trimeter is a kind of meter. Now trimeter.

TRIMITER means you have three FEET in the line. A foot is a metrical unit—but to ditch the technical lingo, it's a few syllables that, when you're reading poetry, seem to go together. For instance, read this line out loud:

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks..."

Read it a couple of times. Notice how you say a bunch of those groups of syllables together naturally. Like: "This is the," "Forest pri-," "meval The," etc, up to "hemlocks". It's because you naturally put stress on certain syllables and not on others, and thus naturally group certain clumps of syllables together. Similarly:

I balanced all brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath.

Even if it seems stupid, read those lines like 10 times out loud. See how you naturally grouped "I bal-," "anced all" "brought all" "to mind" "the years" "to come" "seemed waste" and "of breath" etc etc? Each one had an unstressed and a stressed syllable. Each of those groups of two syllables in quotes is a FOOT. "Forest pri-" is a foot with three syllables, cuz it goes stressed-unstressed-unstressed. We call it a dactyl. "anaced all" is a foot with two syllables. We call it an iamb, because it goes unstressed-stressed. The point is, they each form a metrical UNIT.

A line of trimiter has three feet. Let's look at two examples from Sir Walter Raleigh. I've capitalized the stressed syllables and kept the unstressed syllables lower case even when grammatically inappropriate.

"upON a THANKless ERRand"

"the TRUTH shall BE thy WARRant"

See how each one has two feet? Each one unstressed and then stressed. We can divide the feet with slashes:

"the TRUTH / shall BE / thy WARR / ant"

A trimeter line, as tri- suggests, has three feet. Most typically, these lines go unstressed-stressed three times. Here's are a few example lines of trimeter I came up with—not the most beautiful or poetic, but technically lines of trimeter nonetheless:

my CAT is NAMED mauRICE
i WISH i WERE in SPAIN
my GIRLfriend COUGHT the FLU

See the pattern? You could sing them all to the same tune. You could also vary the meter of the line, using different kinds of feet, like all dactyls:

HARRy is GOing to SYRacuse
THIS is my FINal per FORMance here
SADly i WRECKed you in BOCCee ball

That's what you need to do for meter. Three feet. Your assignment says "at least," so you could add more. Make it, say, four feet:

i USED to PLAY the NUMbers ONCE
SUSan is WORKing this SATurday TRAGically.

Now for consonance and assonance. Both of these refer to a particular sound that is used for effect. Usually this effect is to make you _hear_ something. For instance, in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" we find this line:

"The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain"

Notice when you read that out loud that you hear a whole bunch of "s" sounds. It actually SOUNDS like a curtain rustling, doesn't it? That's the idea. It's just repeated sounds. That's consonance, because it's a consonant sound.

Assonance is a repeated vowel sound. In "Try to light the fire, my Delilah," we hear a bunch of "I" sounds on the beats. Same thing as consonance, but a vowel instead of a consonant.

I hope that's helpful. You need to write a line that has three beats (at least) and a repeated consonant as well as a repeated vowel sound. If you're still baffled, post again and maybe we can come up with some examples together.