The Blue Bowl

Throughout the poem Kenyon employs rich sound texture, relying heavily on assonance, or repeated vowel sounds, and consonance, or repeated consonant sounds. Kenyon pulls in her reader in the beginning lines, “Bare-handed / we scraped sand and gravel / back into the hole” (Lines 2-4), repeating “a” sounds across the imagery, and creating echoes of the “b,” “s,” and “h” sounds as well. The repeated “s” sounds mimic the “hissing” (Line 4) sound Kenyon describes next, adding to the richness of the description and creating an auditory sense of the experience. The density of these repeating sounds draws the reader’s attention, pulling her into the rhythm of the poem and making the image of the burial precise and surprising.

Kenyon employs these devices throughout the poem to great effect. After the reference to the “sorrows much keener than these” (Line 10), she describes the speaker’s silence, and then says, “we worked, / ate, stared and slept. It stormed / all night; now it clears” (Lines 11-12). The sibilance of the repeating “s” sound lulls the reader into the rhythm of the day and sets up the shift that comes next.