Onomatopoeia may well be, as a student once wrote, "more often found on tests than in poetry." Nevertheless, it occurs frequently enough to be worth the invention of the word, which means the imitation in a poem of actual sounds, using the sound of words to parallel the sounds referred to. Moaning doves, murmuring bees, and various sounds made by the wind are often what is imitated. Indeed, two lines from Tennyson's The Princess include these very sounds: "The moan of doves in
immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees." (John Crowe Ransom made fun of the
effect of the latter, asking if it would have the same effect as, "The murdering of innumerable
beeves.") The last line of this passage from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is a decorous and unobtrusive use of onomatopoeia:

                                    Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
                                           And mid-May's eldest child,
                                 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
                                      The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

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