What is the effect of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in Louise Glück's "Epithalamium"?

There really is not a lot of alliteration, or assonance and consonance, in this poem. The two main instances of alliteration here occur in the lines "green hill in gold light" and "here is my hand that will not harm you." As mentioned before, this alliteration adds a sing-song quality to the poem, which, to delve into this a bit more, could mirror the traditional vows of a wedding ceremony, especially the line "here is my hand that will not harm you." The way that this line mimics wedding vows is particularly bitter, since the speaker hints that her husband actually is harming her with either physical or emotional abuse. Thus, Gluck could be mocking the ways in which we often blindly take part in cultural traditions and rituals, reciting our vows without actually meaning them or understanding what they mean.

While the assonance and consonance in this poem definitely add to its sing-song quality, they also create a harsh, biting sound. For example, there is both assonance and consonance in the line "the terrible charity of marriage" with the repeated r's and the short e sound across terrible, charity, and marriage. As a result of this assonance and consonance, this line takes on, again, a bitter tone. We can almost picture Gluck's speaker spitting out her words here.