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What are some examples of onomatopoeia in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?
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Examples of onomatopoeia in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" include words like "cracked," "growled," "roared," and "howled" to describe the ice surrounding the ship. Other instances are "groan" and "sigh," which mimic the sounds they represent. Additional examples include "burst," "drip," "thump," "whizz," and "rumbled," which create auditory imagery throughout the poem.
To a certain extent, what is onomatopoeiac and what is not is a matter of opinion. Onomatopoeia is a technique wherein the sound of a word seems to reflect its meaning. This can include words which are wholly onomatopoeiac, such as "splish" or "tick-tock," where the word has no other purpose but to indicate a certain sound, but it can also include words like "rumble," which can indicate a sound, but can have other meanings too. In this poem, we can identify several instances of onomatopoeia, more on the latter end of the spectrum than the former. The description of the ice which surrounds the ship early in the poem, for example, uses a variety of onomatopoeiac words:
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled
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"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a lengthy, narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Onomatopoeia is defined as, "A figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates the sound it is describing, and thus suggests its source object. A word imitating a sound." Some general examples (not from the poem) are things like "crash," "bang," "sizzle," or "slurp."
In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," I don't see many examples right at the start. But then in the fifteenth stanza, Coleridge is describing a storm that the ship experiences at sea, and he uses the words "It cracked and growled, and roared and howled." These are all samples of onomatopoeia, to help the reader experience the icy ocean all around.
Part II, stanza 5 -- "burst"
"drip" -- appears several times
"thump" -- end of Part III, the sound of men's bodies hitting the floor as they die
"whizz of my crossbow" -- the sound of the arrow flying to kill the albatross
Part VII, stanza 8 - "rumbled," the sound of the waves hitting the boat
I'm sure there are others. This should be more than enough to get you started.
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