Assonance and Consonance

Assonance and consonance help bring a poetic flair to Whitman’s language, which can sometimes strike the ear as a bit heavy and even cacophonous. Assonance and consonance are sibling concepts, in that they both refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Whitman uses both techniques throughout the poem, and the best example of simultaneous use can be observed in the poem’s frequently repeated keyword: “singing.” Here, the I sound and the ng sound each repeats within the space of a single word. Yet Whitman’s use of assonance and consonance also plays out on the level of individual lines. Consider line 8, for example. In terms of assonance, this line features several repeating I and O (unitalicized) sounds:

   The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing.

At the same time, line 8 also features repeating S, W (unitalicized), and NG (bold, unitalicized) sounds:

   The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing.

Whitman’s use of repeating vowel and consonant sounds here and elsewhere help bring a sense of melody to the poem’s long and sometimes heavy lines.

Parallelism

Parallelism is a rhetorical technique that coordinates separate ideas through the repetition of similar wording or phrasing. Generally speaking, parallelism helps to bring a sense of order and balance to the arrangement of ideas. In the particular case of “I Hear America Singing,” Whitman uses parallelism to create order in the poem’s middle lines, where the speaker enumerates the different “songs” they can hear being sung. To see how this works, consider the following sequence of lines (lines 3–6):

   The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
   The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
   The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck
   The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands.

Note how each of these lines begins with a very similar sequence of words. The first two lines in the passage quoted here showcase a perfectly parallel structure, as they each follow precisely the same formula: “The [worker] singing his [own song].” The subsequent two lines deviate very slightly from this formula, but they remain similar enough to constitute an example of parallelism. Whitman’s use of parallelism in these lines functions to establish a sense of unity among these laborers. This use of parallelism also evokes a sense of America as a collective, with each man (and woman) working in concert alongside each other.

Metaphor

As suggested in the poem’s title, “I Hear America Singing” operates through a sustained metaphor that frames the growth of the United States in terms of swelling music. This metaphor plays out through on two distinct yet nested levels. The first level relates to the unique “song” sung by each of the individuals named by the speaker. Each song may be understood as a metaphor that stands for the particular kind of labor that person contributes to the larger community. Just as the carpenter sings a song that’s appropriate to his task of “measur[ing] his plank or beam” (line 3), so too does every man and woman “sing” their own unique personal contribution. As the speaker refers to each new type of person and their characteristic tune, the songs accumulate. This accumulation brings us to the poem’s second, higher-level metaphor, in which the individual songs swell into a figurative chorus of “varied carols” (line 1). It’s worth noting here that the speaker describes all the songs as “strong” and “melodious” (line 11), implying that they work in perfect harmony. The accumulation of songs into such a perfectly harmonious chorus serves as an idealizing metaphor for America at large.