assonance

the use of the same vowel sound with different consonants or the same consonant with different vowels in successive words or stressed syllables, as in a line of verse. Examples are time and light or mystery and mastery

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Assonance

(1) Repetition of similar vowel sounds in a line, strophe, or sentence.

(2) Imperfect rhyme; the accord between the endings of two or more verse lines in which the vowels coincide but there is greater freedom of the consonants—for example, krasivaia—neugasimaia; kliauze—mauzer. Assonance is one of the most important elements of medieval poetry, especially in the Romance languages. Nineteenth-century Russian poets rarely used assonance. It was revived by the symbolists and is widely used in contemporary Soviet poetry.

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References in periodicals archive

25 Following Cai Zhonglang ji, waiji (Sbby), 3.3a, and Chuxue ji, 19.465: [Chinese Text Omitted] (with the alliterative - both having the initial [Chinese Text Omitted] - and assonant binome binfen [Chinese Text Omitted]), "flying about, moving chaotically").

The Lu-school reading of "Guanju" as preserved in an eastern Han fu

When, for example, he admires Aubert's wonderfully assonant French rendering of the famously alliterative last sentence of "The Dead," reading Polyglot Joyce becomes entirely enchanting.

Patrick O'Neill. Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation

The intimate connections are assonant ("whispered a song along ..."), the muggy sun motif is released in his sweating (but the sweating is also associated with his feelings of panic).

Frank O'Hara's intimate fictions

Building on folkloric devices such as alliteration, repetition, masterful use of diminutives, assonant rhyme, he often introduces an original twist - inversion, ingenious paronomasia (which makes his poems almost untranslatable), rhymes that do not adhere to a fixed pattern and are not identical, frequent internal assonance to change the flow of the line - and achieves unexpected results.

Meditacijos

The exact figure cannot be established for two reasons: not all of the Ebla tablets have been, so far, published or excerpted; and it is not always possible to be certain whether some assonant names are mere variants or represent different entities.

I Nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla (ARET I-IV, VII-X e' altri documenti editi e inediti)

Stone's pure and simple sound effects, her assonant lines and drummer's beats, are among the hardest to achieve, and the sort of radical innocence they embody and extend to us reveals the rare gift of a perfect poetic ear.

Ruth Stone: a gift from the universe

The sense of inescapable movement is heightened by the repetition of sounds: the alliterative "wi's" in "wild winds," the assonant long "o's" in "coldly blows." (The alliterations are picked up in the second line of the second stanza in those "bare boughs weighed with snow.") The emphatic consonance binds the line, the psyche, and brings us in range of the oldest Celtic poetries, the archaic powers of language.

Three initiations

In Stevens, a line such as "Inanimate in an inert savoir" is one that, whilst indicating a sort of semantic entropy, is acoustically creative, energized by an audible dance of consonants and assonants as well as its playful reaching toward French.

Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism