"Where I Come From" uses alliteration at a few choice moments, highlighting key images and linking words and concepts together.
The poem starts by clearly stating—and alliterating!—its main idea. The /p/ sounds in "People are made of places" create a bond between the two nouns, reinforcing the claim that place and personality are linked.
The rest of the stanza then paints an evocative picture of city life, focusing especially on smell: "smell of smog [...] smell of subways." Repeated /s/ sounds intensify these phrases, perhaps reflecting the intensity of the odors themselves.
In the second stanza, which focuses on rural life, the speaker describes "blueberry patches in the burned-out bush" (line 14). Those plosive /b/ sounds pop out of the lines, mimicking the vivid growth of blueberries against the grayish backdrop of fire-scarred shrubbery. That same sound reappears in lines 17-18, in the phrase "battered schoolhouses / behind which violets grow." Here, the forceful /b/ sounds suggest the way weather has beaten and scarred the building, while again highlighting an image of growth amid destruction.
In the final lines, alliteration helps the speaker describe a memory (or vision) of winter wind:
A door in the mind blows open, and there blows
a frosty wind from fields of snow.
This is a fricative sound, meaning the mouth has to expel air to make it. This effect subtly evokes the rush of "frosty" air and makes the imagined scene all the more visceral.
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