Question

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells the tale of a sailor on a long, sea voyage. In the stanza below, the sailor describes being stranded in a sea of undrinkable salt water with nothing to quench his thirst.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Which choice best explains the poet's use of poetic devices?

The poet uses assonance to unify the sound of the lines within the verse.
The poet uses internal rhyme to create a pleasing sound to the reader's ear.
The poet uses repetition to highlight how much water surrounds the sailors.
The poet uses no clear poetic devices within these four lines of the poem.

Answer 1

The answer is:

The poet uses repetition to highlight how much water surrounds the sailors.

Repetition is a literary and rhetorical device which involves the recurrence of a word or phrase for emphasis, to add intensity and to make the speaker's ideas and thoughts more straightforward.

In the passage from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the author Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes use of repetition to make more forceful the fact that the sailor is thirsty in a motionless ship, in the middle of water but unable to consume it.