Symbol Analysis
Alliteration is all over "Sonnet 75." Since the speaker is bragging about his poetry skills, we think that he decides to show them off via alliteration (which is a super-obvious and easily identifiable hallmark of poetry). The speaker wants us to notice the poem-y-ness of his poem, and alliteration becomes a really quick way for him to do just exactly that.
- Line 2: "Waves" and "washed" alliterate early on in the poem; the softness of all those W sounds is just washing over us.
- Line 4: "Pain" and "prey" alliterate, and those P's sound pretty harsh. The sound echoes the rough content of the line, in which the ocean metaphorically eats up the beloved's name as if it is prey.
- Lines 9-10: The harsh D of "devise," "die," and "dust" is smacking us in the face. We don't want to die in dust. Duh, dudes.
- Line 11: Ah, the soft V of "verse" and "vertues" is now mellowing us out. We'll take this mellow sound over the D's and P's any day.
- Lines 13-14: Ditto on the melodious W's and L's in the final lines of the poem, in the words "where," "Whenas," and "love," "live," and "later life." This kind of alliteration lulls us into happyland.