Alliteration and repetition

Two things about how 'Try Again' sounds, and both help carry its meaning.

First, alliteration: the same consonant sound repeated at the start of words close together. It isn't rhyme (which comes at the ends of lines); alliteration happens inside a line, at the beginnings of words.

Listen for it:

• "down it came with a slippery sprawl"
• "will strive no more"
• "silken, filmy clue"

Once you listen for the first sounds of neighbouring words, they jump out!

Second, repetition: the poet repeats words and phrases. Your book asks why: "tried and tried", "steadily, steadily", "up, up".

Repetition makes you feel what's happening. "He had tried and tried" takes longer to say than "he had tried", and that extra time is the effort: one try after another.

"Steadily, steadily, inch by inch" does the same for the last climb. The words move slowly, so the climb feels slow. If the poet had written "quickly it climbed", the line would be over before the spider was!

And "up, up it ran" gives you two movements where one word would give one: just what the spider is doing.

The trick to remember: in a poem, the sound of a line can do the same job as its meaning. When you write, read your lines aloud: do they sound like what they say?