Adrienne Rich's poem "A Ball is for Throwing" describes a ball sitting on the shelf of a shop.

Though the colors are bright and the ball is beautiful, she suggests that it is not alive for as long as it sits there. She says a ball can only live when it is in motion, when it is being thrown, caught, and played with. She argues that it is then when it becomes more alive and beautiful. Let's dive into some of the figurative language that helps make her point.

Alliteration is when you start several words close to each other with the same letter, for example, "beautiful ball."

The b sound is useful here because it forces your mouth to open and close. The poem is all about movement and play, and the words "beautiful ball" force your mouth to move if you are reading it out loud.

Consonance is the repetition of similar sounds and letters. It's different than alliteration because it isn't just about the letter at the start of a word. Instead, the repeated sound can be in the beginnings, middles, or ends of words.

In Rich's poem, we see consonance with the letters b and d in the lines

Is it red? is it blue? is it violet?
It is everything we desire,
And it does not exist at all.

We have this sound repeated in "red," "blue," "desire," and "does." These sounds are fairly harsh. It creates shorter sounds in the poem, symbolizing repressed movement.

Later on Rich writes the line "Like a word we are waiting to hear," which uses alliteration of the w sound to create movement. When you read this line, the sounds are wave-like and bring to mind the curve of a thrown ball.

Finally, assonance is the use of vowel sounds repeated in a poem. The line "Rounder than sun or moon" uses the "u" and "o" sounds to mimic roundness. In saying both "round" and "moon" your mouth forms a circle, and these vowels look rounded on the page.

She repeats this again with "round" and "longing" in the lines

In the rounding leap of our hands,
In the longing hush of air ...

In addition to assonance, the use of letters like o, d, p, and g create a rounded visual effect and the repetition of ing helps create movement in the lines that resembles the movement of a ball.

Alliteration, assonance, and consonance all refer to the repetition of sounds within words. In "A Ball Is for Throwing," these tonal repetitions mimic the movements of the ball in the poem. The spinning and throwing motions are illustrated in the sounds of the words as much as by the words themselves. For instance, the line "We know what that ball could be"—when the ball is spinning until it looks violet—starts and ends at the same sound ("we" and "be"), and each word has sounds that mimic both the word before it and the word that follows it: "know what," "what that," "that ball," and "ball could" are all word pairs with some sound repetition. This phonic pattern represents the colors on the ball spinning into each other, and the we/be beginning and ending represents the way that, when a ball spins, it starts and ends at the same place.