What are examples of onomatopoeia in poetry?

Onomatopoeia is the figure in which a word's sound imitates the thing it names, so a line is heard and not just read: buzz, hiss, clang. Poets reach for it to put a sound directly into the reader's ear. But the strongest examples in poetry are often not the obvious dictionary sound-words at all. Tennyson writes a couplet about murmuring bees in which no single word is onomatopoeic, yet the whole line hums, and that built kind of sound is a different and harder thing from the named noise of Poe's "clang." The examples below are all sourced, and most of them turn on that split between a sound-word a poet drops in and a sound a poet's line produces on its own.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells" (1849)

This is the example nearly every reader meets first, and it earns the spot. Across the poem's four movements, Poe runs an escalating set of sound-words that track the bells from delight to terror. The silver sleigh-bells of the first section "tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, / In the icy air of night," and the golden wedding bells that follow are all "jingling and the tinkling." By the last section the iron bells are "clang, and clash, and roar," with the "twanging," "clanging," and "jangling" piling up as the alarm spreads.

The onomatopoeia here is structure, not decoration. The sounds darken as the bells do. You can hear the poem move from a child's sleigh ride to a city on fire without reading a single line of plot, because the imitative words carry the change by themselves. That is the high end of what the figure can do: a poem that does not describe a sound so much as sound it.

Did you know? Poe repeats the word "bells" itself more than sixty times across the poem. The page rings with the bare noun long before any imitative verb arrives, so the repetition does sound-work of its own, drumming the reader's ear flat before the "clang" and "clash" land on it.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Come Down, O Maid" (1847)

The strongest case for the figure is also the one that changes what you think onomatopoeia is. The lines are:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Not one word here is onomatopoeic in the dictionary sense. "Murmuring" comes close, but "immemorial," "innumerable," and "elms" are ordinary words doing ordinary jobs. And yet the couplet hums. The clustered m, n, and r consonants force the mouth into a low continuous drone, so the line itself murmurs while it names murmuring.

This is sound the line builds, rather than a sound-word dropped into it. It is worth holding onto, because it is the technique that lets a poem be heard rather than just describe what hearing would be like. Tennyson does not write the word hum. He makes the line hum.

Robert Browning, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1842)

Browning turns onomatopoeia into a wall of sound. Describing the rats overrunning the town, he writes that they:

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats.

When the piper's music finally draws the rats out, the verse becomes the swarm. "And out of the houses the rats came tumbling," Browning writes, then runs a hammering catalog: "Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, / Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats." No single word here is a perfect imitation of a rat. The effect is in the relentless beat of the list, the short stressed syllables stacking up faster than the eye can sort them, so the rhythm itself produces the sense of a flood of vermin pouring into the street. The reader hears a swarm because the lines move like one.

Emily Dickinson, "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –" (1862)

Dickinson is the lesson in restraint. The whole poem turns on one sound-word, set in the title line and held there:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –

That single "buzz" is doing almost everything. A fly is the most mundane noise imaginable, and Dickinson drops it into the most final moment a poem can describe, the instant of dying. The smallness of the sound is the point. The grand departure the speaker expected does not come; what comes instead is an insect. One ordinary, half-irritating noise carries the whole weight of the poem.

The takeaway for a writer is the inverse of "The Bells." Where Poe stacks sound-word on sound-word to build a structure, Dickinson plants exactly one in a quiet poem and lets it ring. Both work. A single well-placed sound can do more than a page of them.

Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" (1871)

Here is a category that rarely makes a list of examples: invented onomatopoeia. Carroll's nonsense words have no dictionary meaning, yet their sound tells you exactly what happened.

One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

You know "snicker-snack" is the sound of a blade going in and out fast and clean, even though the word has never named anything before this poem. The same trick runs through "burbled," "galumphing," and "whiffling": made-up words whose sound carries sense with no real-world referent at all. It is proof that onomatopoeia is not really about matching a dictionary entry to a noise in the world. It is about a word's sound doing the naming. Carroll just removed the dictionary and showed the figure still works.

Carl Sandburg, "Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio" (1920)

Sandburg proves the figure is not a museum piece. This is free verse, twentieth-century American, with no rhyme scheme propping the sound up:

It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes. The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts. The banjo tickles and titters too awful.

The plain modern diction does the imitative work without any of the formal scaffolding the older examples lean on. "Crashes," "razzes," "neighs," "snorts," "tickles," and "titters" pack the lines with noise, and Sandburg lets the rough consonants do the playing: the zz of "razzes" buzzing like a muted cornet, the snort of the tuba landing on a hard "snorts." There is no meter forcing the rhythm and no rhyme pairing the sounds. This is what onomatopoeia looks like when a working poet reaches for it in ordinary language, the kind of language a contemporary writer actually uses. The figure did not stay in the nineteenth century.

When sound-words weaken a poem instead of sharpening it

The failure mode is the most useful thing here for a writer. The obvious dictionary sound-words, buzz, splash, boom, crash, do not improve a line just by being present. Piled on, they tip a poem into the cartoonish or the nursery-rhyme register, where the sound effects start to read like a sticker book of noises. Onomatopoeia works best when it is sparing and when the sound is earned by the line around it, the way Dickinson's single "buzz" is earned by the silence of the deathbed it lands in. The same word in a poem already crowded with bangs and crashes would do nothing.

It is also worth drawing the line that sends readers to this page, because three figures of sound run together and get confused. Onomatopoeia is a word whose sound imitates a sound. Alliteration is the repetition of the same opening consonant across nearby words ("clang, and clash"). Assonance is the repetition of the same vowel sound. They are not rivals, and they often share a line: Poe's "clang, and clash" is onomatopoeia and alliteration at the same time, the imitative words happening to start with the same hard c. Telling onomatopoeia and alliteration apart comes down to a single test in practice: ask whether the word sounds like its meaning (onomatopoeia) or merely shares a first letter with its neighbor (alliteration).

How to read and use onomatopoeia in a poem

Pull the examples together and two kinds of poetic onomatopoeia come into focus. The first is the literal sound-word: a word that already imitates a noise, dropped into the line. Poe's "clang," Dickinson's "buzz," and Carroll's invented "snicker-snack" all work this way; you can point at the word and say, that is the sound. The second kind is sound the line builds from its own consonants and rhythm, where no single word is the noise. Tennyson's murmuring bees and Browning's tumbling rats work this way; remove any one word and the effect survives, because it lives in the cluster and the cadence, not in a single term.

Poem	Technique	What carries the sound
Poe, "The Bells"	Literal sound-word	"tinkle," "clang," "clash," "twanging"
Dickinson, "I heard a Fly buzz"	Literal sound-word	a single "buzz"
Carroll, "Jabberwocky"	Literal sound-word (invented)	"snicker-snack," "galumphing," "whiffling"
Tennyson, "Come Down, O Maid"	Built sound	clustered m, n, r consonants in "murmuring of innumerable bees"
Browning, "Pied Piper"	Built sound	the hammering rhythm of "Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats"
Sandburg, "Honky Tonk"	Both	plain sound-words ("crashes," "razzes," "snorts," "titters") carried by free-verse rhythm

What separates the strong examples from the weak is the same across both kinds: restraint, a sound that the context earns, and onomatopoeia working with the poem's rhythm instead of sitting on top of it. When you reach for the figure in your own draft, the real decision is not which sound-effect word to pick off a list. It is whether the sound should be a single named noise or something the line's consonants and rhythm produce on their own. The second kind is harder, and it is what separates a poem that uses onomatopoeia from one that merely contains it.