"Sound Waves" -- WIX Stock Photo
One of my favorite poetic devices is “assonance.” In case you’re not familiar with this literary term, it’s defined as the repetitious “rhyming” of the same or similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by non-rhyming consonants, usually in stressed and accented syllables of adjacent words and lines. Assonantal rhyme by itself is usually subtly melodic. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy using the device in free verse; it provides artfully loose, sonic composition within an unstructured, and yet lyrical, framework.
It’s more common to rhyme consonants in combination with vowels in formal poetry, called “perfect” or “true” rhyme, but that just makes the less common use of assonance as a device even more appealing to me.
As with “consonance,” or consonantal rhyme (which doesn’t always also make use of rhyming vowels), “repetition,” too, is a common poetic device, and is used to bring familiar melody to poems by repeating ideas, phrases, clauses, words, and sounds. Assonance makes understated and clever use of sonic repetition by virtue of its unexpectedness; most readers of poetry expect perfect and consonantal rhymes in rhyming poetry, and in its absence, readers are typically not altogether conscious of intentional assonance.
Assonantal rhymes are often successfully juxtaposed with consonantal rhymes, although too much noticeable rhyme and unrelenting, sonic cadence can sometimes weigh a poem down with sing-songy effect.
Nearly 20 years ago, I gave an online workshop focusing on assonance and consonance use in poetry. One of the examples I used for illustration was the first stanza from Dylan Thomas’ “Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait”:
The bows glided down, and the coast Blackened with birds took a last look At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye; The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.
Above, I’ve given the same/similar vowel sounds within any matching syllables the same text color, so that you can sound them out for yourselves.
As a bonus example, there is a consonantal rhyme in this stanza that does not share vowel sounds. You probably heard it right away. “Look” with “luck.” And, of course, “took” paired with “look” makes use of both consonantal and assonantal rhyme for “perfect rhyme.” Also, “coast” at the end of the first line sounds good paired with “last” in the 2nd line, due to the repeated, final “st” sound, though it’s not considered a full consonantal rhyme, as the two words don’t share the same hard C or K sound at their beginning.
Dylan Thomas was just one famous poet known to play around with assonance. You might want to explore some of the works of Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A. C. Swinburne, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Mark Twain, to study more examples.
Assonance is also found in prose, from lyric essay to literary novel. James Joyce, Christine Schutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Loren Eiseley come straight to mind.
Some writers seem to naturally inject sonic melody into their writing, be it poetry or prose, but not all of the time, of course, unless it’s an intentional effort. It does take some practice to regularly bring naturally cadent assonance to your poetry, and particularly, your prose.
I find assonance a great device to introduce when you’ve got a poem you’re working on that has promising “conceit” (aka, a logically complex, conceptual metaphor), but is sounding a bit flat. Try elevating one of your next poems or pieces of writing with some intentional assonantal (or consonantal) rhyme. Even a few, sonically elevated lines or sentences can bring additional lyricism to a previously flat piece. I bet many of your readers will appreciate it, even if they don’t consciously know why it grooves with them so.