Alliteration Examples, Alliteration: The following poem Spring and Fall by Gerard Manly Hopkins, is a poem that can be used as an example of alliteration. Alliteration is often used to attract attention to important points in the poem by slowing the pace. Hopkins used alliteration to emphasize as you notice when you read will be weeping and ghosts guessed. How many examples of alliteration can you find in this poem?
Spring and Fall
Gerard Manly Hopkins
(1880)
For a young child
Margaret are you grieving
More unleaving Goldengrove?
The leaves, like the things of man, you
With your thoughts care costs, can you?
Ah! as the heart ages
He will come to sites like cold
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Although the worlds of leafmeal wanwood lie;
And yet you will weep not know why.
Now, regardless of the child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no spirit, or, expressed
What heart heard, the soul divined:
He is the man was born to burn,
It is Margaret you mourn.
See a musical version of the poem, Spring and Autumn, in this video