Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance^[1] serves as one of the building blocks of verse. Assonance is not a rhyme, because the identity of which depends merely on the vowel sounds. Thus, an assonance is merely a syllabic resemblance.

Assonance occurs more often in verse than in prose. It is used in (mainly modern) English-language poetry, and is particularly important in Old French, Spanish and the Celtic languages.

Examples

English poetry is rich with examples of assonance:

That solitude which suits abstruser musings

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"

on a proud round cloud in white high night

— E. E. Cummings, if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit

It also occurs in prose:

Soft language issued from their spitless lips as they swished in low circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds.

— James Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

English-language hip hop relies on assonance, which is sometimes hard to distinguish from slant rhyme:

Fire at the private eye hired to pry in my business.

— Eminem, 'Criminal'

Dead in the middle of little Italy little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddly.

— Big Pun, 'Twinz'

It is also heard in other forms of popular music:

I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless

— Thin Lizzy, "With Love"

Assonance is common in proverbs, such as:

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

The early bird catches the worm.

These proverbs can be a form of short poetry, as in the following Oromo proverb, which describes someone with a big reputation among those who do not know them well:

kan mana baala, aʔlaa gaala (A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere)

Note the complete assonance in this Amharic proverb:

yälämmänä mänämmänä (The one who begs fades away)

See also

• Alliteration
• Literary consonance

Sources

• Assonance, American Rhetoric: Rhetorical Figures in Sound
• Assonance, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, University of Pennsylvania
• Definition of Assonance, Elements of Poetry, VirtuaLit

External links

• Examples of assonance in poetry.

References