Assonance

Assonance is the repetition 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. Assonance does not have to be a rhyme; the identity of which depends merely on sequence of both vowel and consonant sounds. Thus, assonance is a resemblance of units that are generally less than a syllable.

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.
• Examples and definition of assonance.