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 is a rhyme, the identity of which depends merely on the vowel sounds. Thus, an assonance is merely a syllabic resemblance.

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.

Examples

	the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain	— Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven"
	And murmuring of innumerable bees	— Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Princess VII.203
	Windows tinted on my ride when I drive in it, so when I rob a bank run out and just dive in it, so I'll be disguised in it. And if anybody identifies the guy in it, I hide for five minutes. Come back, shoot the eye witness. Fire at the private eye hired to pry in my business.	— Eminem, Criminal
	Rolls-Royce keep my movements smooth while manuevering, through all the manure in the sewer that I grew up in	— Jay Z, No Hook
	That solitude which suits abstruser musings	— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"
	I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless	— Thin Lizzy, "With Love"
	Close your eyes for what you can’t imagine; we are the xany gnashing, caddy smashin', bratty ass, he mad, he snatched his daddy's jag and used the shit for batting practice, Adament and he thrashin', Purchasin' crappy grams with half the hand of cash you handed	— Earl Sweatshirt, from Frank Ocean's "Super Rich Kids"
	The crumbling thunder of seas	— Robert Louis Stevenson
	Dead in the middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily.	— Big Pun, "Twinz"
	tunditur unda	— Catullus 11
	on a proud round cloud in white high night	— E.E. Cummings, if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit
	I've never seen so many Dominican women with cinnamon tans	— Will Smith, "Miami"
	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."
	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
	Some kids who played games about Narnia got gradually balmier and balmier	— C.S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
	And the moon rose over an open field	— Paul Simon, America
	Gonna get a set of better clubs, gonna find the kind with tiny nubs, just so my irons aren't always flying off the backswing	— Barenaked Ladies, One Week
	Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation	— Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication

J. R. R. Tolkien's Errantry is a poem whose meter contains three sets of trisyllabic assonances in every set of four lines.

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".

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.)

Also from Ethiopia, note the complete assonance in this Amharic proverb:

• yälämmänä mänämmänä ("The one who begs fades away.)

See also

• Alliteration
• Literary consonance
• Rhyme Genie - dynamic rhyming dictionary with 30 different rhyme types

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.