illustrated portrait of English poet Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

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Student Question

What are two literary devices used in "I hear the bright bee hum" from Dickinson's "There Is Another Sky"?

Expert Answers

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The most obvious stylistic literary device used here is consonance. This is the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds are different. In "There Is Another Sky", for example, we have "I hear the bright bee hum." Consonance is used here to emphasize certain characteristics of the bee that buzzes about the speaker's Edenic garden. The brightness of the bee parallels that of this beautiful garden bathed in sunlight.

This line also provides us with an example of assonance, which is a similarity between vowel sounds that are close together. So to take the above example from the poem again, we can see "I hear the bright bee hum." It is appropriate that these vowel sounds are closely linked, as the bee's hum is what the speaker can hear.

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