List of 65 Examples of Alliteration in Poems
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Poetry is the best possible words in the best order, and the sound is all-important. As well as rhyme, pairs of words with the same first letter are frequently used - see this list of alliteration in poems for examples.
| Poem Lines | Title | Author |
| "Torn turned and tattered Bowed burned and battered" |
The Labyrinth | Robert P. Baird |
| “A spot for the splendid birth Of everlasting lives, Whereto no night arrives; And this gaunt gray gallery A tabernacle of worth” |
In a Whispering Gallery | Thomas Hardy |
| "Or deeper a day or dance or doom bestride" | The Spider | Richard Eberhart |
| "Between the hands, between the brows, Between the lips of Love-Lily" |
Love-Lily | Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
| "Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges" | The Berg (A Dream) | Herman Melville |
| "A lumbering lubbard loitering slow" | The Berg (A Dream) | Herman Melville |
| "And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace, So that nobody ever could see the face Of the Quangle Wangle Quee." |
The Quangle Wangle's Hat | Edward Lear |
| "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea" | The Destruction of Sennacherib | Lord Byron (George Gordon) |
| "Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft" | Sonnet 5 | William Shakespeare |
| "Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear" | Lycidas | John Milton |
| "Better, then, the effort than preterite perfection" | Vowel Movements | Daryl Hine |
| "But Delilahs of darkness, darling, and the muscle of the mind giving in." |
Kind of Blue | Lynn Powell |
| "We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day." |
To His Coy Mistress | Andrew Marvell |
| "Call me Sweet Potato, Sweet Pea, or Sweety Pie" |
Blues for X | George Elliott Clarke |
| "Cared-for till cock-crow" | A Grammarian's Funeral | Robert Browning |
| "Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air" | That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes." | Flores Woman | Tracy K. Smith |
| "Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields" | Sir Galahad | Alfred Lord Tennyson |
| "For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead like a load on my weary eye" |
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
| "From a sunlit state of innocence where white sheets were hung to dry like clouds over paradise" |
Nomadology | Alissa Leigh |
| "From socks to shirts the selves we shed" |
Laundry | Ruth Moose |
| "Gladder to catch thee, than thou him." | The Bait | John Donne |
| "High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing" | The Windhover | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "I am hoping to hang your head" | I am Trying to Break Your Heart | Kevin Young |
| "I have no wit, no words, no tears" | A Better Resurrection | Christina Rossetti |
| "I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy" | The Copper Beech | Marie Howe |
| "I'm the student who still believes in the bad taste of the beautiful and the sadness of songs." |
Obbligato | Bruce Smith |
| "Had seen the mice by moonlight play" | The Prisoner of Chillon | Lord Byron (George Gordon) |
| "Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa" |
KM4 | Tom Sleigh |
| "Leveling, shaving on the bevel, the blade and fanged scraper had summoned sleepers— limestone loaves and blue slate, skulls of quartz" |
Scavenging the Wall | R. T. Smith |
| "they were made to be brushed back by the traffic of boxcars" | Tree Ferns | Stanley Plumly |
| "Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head" | The Seafarer | Ezra Pound |
| "No later light has lightened up my heaven" | Remembrance | Emily Brontë |
| "No novacaine? Nah. Then joke's on us, Jack:" | Tone Deficit | Kevin McFadden |
| "With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones?" | Carrion Comfort | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee" | To Sleep | John Keats |
| "O wandering water ever whispering?" | The Stream's Secret | Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
| O! wonderful for weight and whiteness! | Ode to a Blizzard | Tom Disch |
| "On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank." | Binsey Poplars | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "postures of stillness and reserve practiced cunning of the predator" |
A Cartography of Passions | Deborah Paredez |
| "Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine" | Abt Vogler | Robert Browning |
| "sandalled, cedarly, with scent of sandalwood haloing her" | Discourse on Pure Virtue | George Elliott Clarke |
| "Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone" | Hyperion | John Keats |
| "So sung a little Clod of Clay" | The Clod and the Pebble | William Blake |
| "Something not sayable spurting from the morning silence, secret as a thrush." |
Winged and Acid Dark | Robert Hass |
| "Still, though scuttling forces flee" | Nightwatchman's Song | W. D. Snodgrass |
| "Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank." | Pura Vida | John Updike |
| "That I could think there trembled through" | The Darkling Thrush | Thomas Hardy |
| "I am blind to other birds" | Tamer and Hawk | Thom Gunn |
| "And wait, and wait, a weary while" | The Flâneur | Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. |
| "The next day, our house— on its cinderblocks—seemed to float in the flooded yard: no foundation" |
Providence | Natasha Trethewey |
| "The silence waits, wild to be broken by hoofbeat and heavy harness slap" | Stable | Claudia Emerson |
| "The Soul selects her own Society" | The Soul selects her own Society | Emily Dickinson |
| "Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish" | Birches | Robert Frost |
| "they magnetize my man's hands. like a Wonder Woman blast" |
Love is Like a Faucet | Yolanda Wisher |
| "those no longer here to strike these strings like secrets of the most satisfying harmonies, as voices join in sadness and joy" |
Mountain Dulcimer | Robert Morgan |
| "While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping" | The Raven | Edgar Allan Poe |
| "Lurk late. We Strike straight. We" |
We Real Cool | Gwendolyn Brooks |
| "What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!" | Rabbi Ben Ezra | Robert Browning |
| "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim" |
Pied Beauty | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "Whether or not shadows are of the substance such is the expectation I can wait to surprise my vision as a wind enters the valley: sudden and silent" |
On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell | Geoffrey Hill |
| "Who is more happy, when, with heart's content" | To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent | John Keats |
| "Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver" | The Wreck of the Deutschland | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| "You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished" | Youth and Art | Robert Browning |
| "Blazing, it vomits smudge-smoke. Your mind chars Black because you yaw—moth-like—too near flames." |
Exile | George Elliott Clarke |
