Assonance
Assonance is a literary device that involves the repetition of vowel sounds within words in close proximity. It is used to create a musical or rhythmic effect in poetry and prose. By repeating similar vowel sounds, assonance can enhance the mood, tone, and overall musicality of a literary work.
5 Key excerpts on "Assonance"
eBook - ePubWriting with Clarity and Style
A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers
- Robert A. Harris(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the following example, note how the repetition of the short i in city, hill, and hid contributes to the rhythm and music of the sentence. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.—Matthew 5:14b (KJV) In formal prose, while rhyming would be inappropriate, Assonance allows the writer to include a feeling of rhythm and sound that is perfectly acceptable. In the example below, the repeated long o sounds in the underlined words create a drawn-out sonorousness, suggesting both flow and inevitability of movement. So flows the river, going past the town, its whole load of toxins, fish, and sediment pouring evermore into the sea. In many cases, Assonance is used for a pair of words next to each other. The aim of the portrait photographer is to freeze a gleam in the eye. Despite its lengthy and impressive provenance, the supposedly faded print was merely a pale fake. As long as the Assonance is effective, several words can be used, and they can be placed anywhere. The Assonance must occur in stressed syllables, however. To get within sight of the lava, the geologists took a high -temperature hike. The hoot of the owl in the cool of the moonlight warned them to head home soon. Remember—and the third reminder should be enough—many readers subvocalize as they read, so these sounds are not lost on them. The music—or noise—of your prose will be heard, at least at some level. The subtlety of effect of Assonance means that your readers will probably not remark on its presence (the same is true for the use of many of the devices in this book). Rather, instead of thinking, “My, that’s Assonance,” or “My, that’s musical,” they will think, “My, that’s well written.” Nevertheless, the sounds are there in an affecting way. Pay attention, then, to the sound of your writing. Read it aloud to get the feel of it and to test its aural qualities...
eBook - ePubThe Prosody Handbook
A Guide to Poetic Form
- Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Alliteration can also help a poet get on with his work in another way: an alliterative pattern, like any other, provides the poet with a guideline—and knowing precisely what is expected of one is a good preparation for performing it. Alliteration is not without its disadvantages. Like ordinary rhyme, it is easy to make and is therefore dangerous. Its conspicuousness is its potential weakness as well as its strength. Of the language of a great many poems, it may be said that conspicuousness is its only virtue. The making of showy, jingling, trivial verse has no end. In the twentieth century, most English poetry has shied well away from alliteration, even when it has held onto rhyme. This exorcising is partly a reaction against the alliterating nineteenth century, and partly a more positive desire to head poetry in the direction of prose and of informality. IV. Assonance Assonance is to vowels what alliteration is to consonants: agreement or near agreement of nearby vowel sounds, especially at the beginnings of words or at stressed syllables within words. We have already seen Assonance in the long as of Hopkins’ gale and cage. Here are some additional examples: (i) I nd i st i nct in h i s i mperfect sight. (ii) The blue Mediterr a nean, where he l a y, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Bes i de a pumice i sle in B ai ae’s b a y. Assonance can create beautiful melodic effects, as in (ii) above. Notice there, also, the alliteration and the liquidity and sibilance—a number of patterns going together to create an extraordinary but not cloying euphony. When Assonance is used as the basis of end rhyme, it is usually Called TERMINAL Assonance: Over blue st o ne Blue water fl o ws, And clouds in the bl ue Silence of the deep t u ne. The lines of Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” quoted in part in Chapter 6, mate in an extremely intricate pattern of terminal Assonance; the effect is richly lyrical and not at all strained....
eBook - ePub- Mick Short(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If you want to take this kind of examination a step further, see Knowles (1987: Chs 2—3). 4.2.2 Assonance Assonance is the term traditionally reserved for patterns of repetition between vowel sounds. In example 5 the words withered, nipped and shivering are connected by Assonance: Example 5 I, like yon w i ther a leaf, remain behind, Nipped by the frost, and sh i vering in the wind; (George Crabbe, 'The Village', I, 210-11) Both the speaker and the withered leaf have been affected by the frost (withered, nipped) and as a result both appear to be shivering. Assonance, like alliteration, connects important words together and helps the reader notice meaning-connections between them. Although there are only five vowel letters in the English spelling system, there are twelve pure vowel sounds in 'BBC' English, and even more vowel sounds if we include the diphthongs (e.g. the vowel sounds in 'play' and 'boy'), sounds which consist of a glide from one pure vowel sound to another. Vowels are distinguished from one another according to whether they are long or short and where the highest point of the tongue in the mouth is along the coordinates low—mid—high and front— mid—hack. Thus the /i/ of 'bit' and the of 'beet' will be felt to be similar because they are both high front vowels, differing from one another mainly through the feature of length (the symbol after a vowel indicates that it is long). Vowel length is something which is not difficult to perceive. Vowel positioning is a bit harder. One way of feeling the differences is to hold all of the features constant except one, say vowel height, and then to produce the relevant sounds, making yourself aware of what happens to your tongue as you do so. It is mainly the tongue which is used to alter the shape of your mouth cavity and so change the position in the mouth where vowels are pronounced...
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In so far as the spelling system is phonemic, the phonological correspondences are indeed reflected in writing; but where spelling and pronunciation diverge, alliteration and rhyme follow the latter: great rhymes with mate, not with meat; city alliterates with sat, not with cat. If great is put in correspondence with meat in a poem, this counts only as an EYE-RHYME, a category of near-rhyme sometimes tolerated as a licence, but not to be confused with a ‘true rhyme’. However, it must be continually borne in mind, when reading poetry of past centuries, that what is only an eye-rhyme to us may have been a ‘true rhyme’ to the poet. When Pope, for example, rhymes line and join, this is because they were commonly pronounced alike in his day. 6.3 ‘MUSIC’ IN POETRY It was suggested earlier that parallelism is the aspect of poetic language which most obviously relates it to music. If this is so, then surely the comparison with music is especially applicable to the various parallelisms of sound we have dealt with in the past two sections. Exactly what a person means when he says that a piece of poetry is ‘musical’ eludes analysis. But it is very likely that alliteration, Assonance, consonance, and other sound echoes play an important part in it. These effects need not be in the forefront of attention to be successful: indeed, they are often most successful when least obtrusive. We see this if we examine a piece of poetry with good musical qualities, such as the opening part of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan : In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. Various observations can be made about the patterning of sound in these lines, apart from that of its verse structure, which we will take for granted...
eBook - ePub- Jonathan Culler(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...On the other hand, experiments on the associations of sounds convincingly show agreement, even across languages, about the contrastive values of sounds: asked to pair the two vowels i and u in pit and put with pairs of qualities such as bright/dark, high/low, light/heavy, big/small, thick/thin, subjects largely agree. 63 Some relate these effects to the fact that speakers of all languages use the same vocal apparatus to produce sound, so that the place and manner of articulation should be the key to sound symbolism, but the literature on this subject does not lead to reliable conclusions, and such connections would in any event doubtless be relative rather than absolute. How far such relative perceptions are relevant to the experience of reading verse is difficult to determine. It seems likely that the sounds have an effect not individually, for any particular value, but, like rhythm, through patterning which foregrounds them and either calls attention to particular words or phrases, creating the associational rhythm of which Frye speaks, or creates a memorable musical surface. In a shrewd discussion of the music of poetry, Robert von Hallberg notes that “The separable syntactic and prosodic structures of a poem vie with one another for the focused attention of readers. Critics reassuringly show how sound echoes sense, but it does so only occasionally; sonics are often bewildering, even in poems as shapely as Shakespeare’s sonnets.” In the end, “the sound effects that matter most are not merely local to one statement” but those that contribute to the seductive, charm-like autonomy of the larger poetic sequence. 64 I return to this dimension of lyric below when discussing rhyme, but first there is the question of the relation of sound to voicing, the idea of “voice,” and the lyric subject. Blasing stresses that poetic rhythm evokes the historical subject of the language, a general rather than individual subject...
