Assonance Information
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance[1] serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the /uː/ ("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 the Celtic languages.
The eponymous student of Willy Russell's Educating Rita described it as "getting the rhyme wrong".
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Examples
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the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain | — Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" |
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And murmuring of innumerable bees | — Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Princess VII.203 |
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The crumbling thunder of seas | — Robert Louis Stevenson |
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That solitude which suits abstruser musings | — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight" |
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The scurrying furred small friars squeal in the dowse | — Dylan Thomas |
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Dead in the middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily." | — Big Pun, "Twinz" |
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It's hot and it's monotonous. | — Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, It's Hot Up Here |
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tundi tur unda | — Catullus 11 |
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on a proud round cloud in white high night | — E.E. Cummings, if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit |
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I've never seen so many Dominican women with cinnamon tans | — Will Smith, "Miami" |
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I bomb atomically—Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses can't define how I be droppin' these mockeries. | — Inspectah Deck, from the Wu-Tang Clan's "Triumph." |
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Up in the arroyo a rare owl's nest I did spy, so I loaded up my shotgun and watched owl feathers fly | — Jon Wayne, Texas Assonance |
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Some kids who played games about Narnia got gradually balmier and balmier | — C.S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader |
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And the moon rose over an open field | — Paul Simon, America |
J. R. R. Tolkien's Errantry is a poem whose meter contains three sets of trisyllabic assonances in every set of four lines.
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
Sources
- Assonance, American Rhetoric: Rhetorical Figures in Sound
- Assonance, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, University of Pennsylvania
- Definition of Assonance, Elements of Poetry, VirtuaLit
References
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