"What does assonance mean?" asks Frank Bryant, a professor of literature. "It means getting the rhyme wrong," he declares, before falling drunkenly off the stage, and crashing into his audience.
The professor, played by Sir Michael Caine in the movie Educating Rita, takes a very jaded view of poetry. He's more interested in booze, and escaping from reality. Not unlike several well known, real-life poets...
But in one sense he's correct.
Assonance isn't about end rhymes or 'getting the rhyme right.' It's about powerfully expressing ideas and emotion through the similar sounds made by adjacent words. The resemblance of vowel sounds is where the assonance occurs. If you use assonance effectively, it can change the tempo of your poetry or even intensify the mood you are trying to convey.
Here's a great example of assonance in the poem by Edgar Allen Poe called Bells:
Hear the mellow wedding bellsGolden bells!What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Yes, Poe uses end rhymes too, but it's the assonance of mellow, wedding, bells, foretells that really makes the poem resonate.
Another excellent example of assonance can be found in The Cold Wind Blows by Kerry Roper. This is a rich examples of internal rhymes too.
Who knows why the cold wind blowsOr where it goes or what it knowsIt only flows in passionate throesUntil it finally slows and settles in repose
Want to make your poem memorable? What to step away from predictable rhymes?
Steve Wheeler
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