Assonance

Assonance is the refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the ("o"/"ou"/"ue" sound) is repeated within the sentence and is assonant.

Assonance is found 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 Celtic languages.

The eponymous student of Willy Russell's Educating Rita described it as "getting the rhyme wrong".

Examples

{| |valign=top|

 

|Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. |valign=bottom rowspan=2|— William Wordsworth, "The world is too much with us" |- | |Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. |- |valign=top|

 

|Hear the mellow wedding bells |valign=bottom|— Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells" |- |valign=top|

 

|And murmuring of innumerable bees |valign=bottom|— Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Princess VII.203 |- |valign=top|

 

|The crumbling thunder of seas |valign=bottom|— Robert Louis Stevenson |- |valign=top|

 

|That solitude which suits abstruser musings |valign=bottom|— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight" |- |valign=top|

 

|The scurrying furred small friars squeal in the dowse |valign=bottom|— Dylan Thomas |- |- |valign=top|

 

|Dead in the middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled two middle men who didn't do diddily." |valign=bottom|— Big Pun |- |valign=top|

 

|It's hot and it's monotonous. |valign=bottom| |- |valign=top|

 

|tundi tur unda |valign=bottom|— Catullus 11 |- |valign=top|

 

|on a proud round cloud in white high night |valign=bottom|— E.E. Cummings, if a Cheer Rules Elephant Angel Child Should Sit |- |valign=top|

 

|I never seen so many Dominican women with cinnamon tans |valign=bottom|— Will Smith, Miami |- |valign=top|

 

|I bomb atomically—Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses can't define how I be droppin' these mockeries. |valign=bottom|— Inspectah Deck, from the Wu-Tang Clan's "Triumph." |- |valign=top|

 

|Up in the arroyo a rare owl’s nest I did spy, so I loaded up my shotgun and watched owl feathers fly |valign=bottom rowspan=2|— Jon Wayne, Texas Assonance |}

Assonance can also be used in forming proverbs, often a form of short poetry. In the Oromo language of Ethiopia, note the use of a single vowel throughout the following proverb, an extreme form of assonance:

kan mana baala, aʔlaa gaala (“A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere"; somebody who has a big reputation among those who do not know him well.)

In more modern verse, stressed assonance is frequently used as a rhythmic device in modern rap. An example is Public Enemy's 'Don't Believe The Hype': ''"Their pens and pads I snatch 'cause I've had it / I'm not an addict, fiending for static / I see their tape recorder and I grab it / No, you can't have it back, silly rabbit".

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

Category:Poetic devices