ASSONANCE

Welcome to this lecture headed “VERBS”. We will be discussing all about verbs. Enjoy your lecture.

Assonance means the repetition of vowel sounds in a sentence or phrase. In this regard assonance can be understood to be a kind of alliteration.

What sets it apart from alliterations is that it is the repetition of only vowel sounds.

Assonance is the opposite of consonance, which implies repetitive usage of consonant sounds.

Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound or diphthong in non-rhyming words.

To be considered as assonance, the words ought to be close enough for the repetition of the sound to be conspicuous.

Assonance is a widespread literary practice used in poetry and prose, and is broadly found in English verse.

Uses of Assonance

Much like every other literary device, assonance as well has a very significant role to play in both poetry and prose.

Writers make use of it as a tool to improve a musical effect in the text by using it to create internal rhyme, which as a result enhances the pleasure of reading a literary piece.

In addition, it assists writers to develop a specific mood in the text that corresponds with its subject matter.

The same vowel sound of the short vowel ‘-e-‘ repeats itself in almost all the words apart from the definite article.

The words do share the same vowel sounds but begin with different consonant sounds unlike alliteration that involves repetition of the same consonant sounds.

For instance:

“A long song”. (Where the ‘o’ sound is repeated in the last two words of the sentence)

Cute – Fuse New – Few Law –

Cute – Fuse

New – Few

Law – Raw

Cool – Fool

Good – Food

“Men sell the wedding bells.”

See a few common Assonance Examples below:

We light fire on the mountain.

I feel depressed and restless.

Go and mow the lawn.

Jessy went here and there and everywhere.

The engineer held the steering to steer the car.

Examples of Assonance in Literature

Assonance is mainly used in poetry to add rhythm and music, by adding an internal rhyme to a poem. Let us look at a few examples of assonance from literature.

Try to observe the use of assonance in Robert Frosts poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” given below:

“He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

The underlined bold letters in the above extract are vowels that are repeated to produce assonance.

Assonance can as well sets the mood of a course as in Carl Sandburg’s Early Moon:

“Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is among the oldest of living things. So old it is that no man knows how and why the first poems came.”

Observe how the long vowel “o” in the above extract assists to stress the idea of something being old and mysterious.

The sound of long vowels slows down the pace of a passage and sets an atmosphere that is weighty and solemn. This is illustrated in the following example extracted from Cormac McCarthy’s “Outer Dark”:

“And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage.”

The repetition of the long vowel in the above passage stresses on the frightening atmosphere that the writer wants to portray.

In the same way, you would observe the use of long vowels in a passage from Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle into the Good Night”:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight,

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The poet intentionally make use of assonance in the above lines to slow down the pace of the lines and produce a somber mood, as the subject of the poem is death.

Again, William Wordsworth uses assonance to produce an internal rhyme in his poem “Daffodils”:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host, of golden daffodils

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze….

I never heard before of a ship so well furbished

with battle tackle…

…no wise man in hall or weathered veteran…

…asleep from their feasting…

…they wept to heaven… (Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney)

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents…by Shakespeare)

This excerpt from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 is made up of two distinct assonance examples; the first is the short ‘i’ sound in ‘princes’ and ‘outlive’ and the second is the long ‘i’ sound in ‘shine’ and ‘bright.’

These things are with us every day

even on beachheads and biers. They

do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.

(“Today” by Frank O’Hara)

Frank O’Hara’s poem “Today” has many examples of assonance and consonance. In this excerpt, the assonance between the words “strong” and “rocks” assists to make a connection between the two concepts.

Below are a few short examples of assonance from various writers:

“If I bleat when I speak it’s because I just got . . . fleeced.” – Deadwood by Al Swearengen

“Those images that yet,

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” – Byzantium by W.B. Yeats

“Strips of tinfoil winking like people” – The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath

“I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless.” – With Love by Thin Lizzy

Common Examples of Assonance

A lot of English proverbs are made up of examples of assonance. The assonance in these phrases assists to make them more unforgettable in a subtler way than through rhyming words. Some of these proverbs are provided below:

The early bird catches the worm.

Honesty is the best policy.

Let the cat out of the bag.

A stitch in time saves nine.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Significance of Assonance in English

Although a lot of people may think that rhyme is one of the basic aspects of poetry, it was not at all common in Old English verse.

The glossary of Old English did not include a lot of rhyming words. Rather, the chief poetic techniques of Old English storytellers were rhythm and meter, and consonance and assonance.

Rhyme merely became popular in English poetry afterward, when Germanic language took on a lot of new words from Romance languages.

This is due to the fact that Romance languages like French, Italian, and Spanish have a lot more words with similar endings.

In fact, rhyme was quite trendy in the troubadour traditions, which started in France in the late 11th century and broaden to Spain and Italy.

Rhyme remained common in English verse for many hundred years, but has once again fallen out of favor.

For the meantime, modern poets still make use of assonance, consonance, and alliteration to make available more subtle phonemic unity.

Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.

Your Lecture Master:

Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua