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Assonance is a literary device that repeats vowel sounds within words or syllables to add meaning and musicality to poetry and prose. It differs from rhyme and is often used in combination with other devices like consonance and alliteration. Assonance is popular in children’s literature and contributes to the entertainment value of nursery rhymes.
Assonance is a rhetorical device often used in poetry and prose to add a deeper sense of meaning to the images it contains. It is usually defined as the repetition of vowel sounds within words or syllables. For example, the words “wait” and “stay” demonstrate assonance with each other because they both contain the same internal vowel sound.
This literary device differs from rhyme in that rhyme typically involves the use of similar consonant sounds at the end of words. Writers generally use assonance to make their images more vivid, to help draw readers into the story, or to add a sense of musicality to a piece of poetry or prose. Readers are believed to find the repetition of similar vowel sounds within words and syllables both comforting and engaging.
The use of repeated vowels within words and syllables is said to attract the reader’s ear and establish the writer’s artistic authority. Assonance is often found in poetry, where it generally helps the line flow more smoothly. It is not generally considered an element of poetic form or structure. Instead, it is more often thought of as a further poetic flourish. The use of assonance in poetry is generally thought to give the poet more creative leeway and may allow the poet to create an illusion of structure in free verse poetry, which does not typically follow poetic conventions such as form or structure.
Writers typically employ assonance in combination with a variety of other literary and rhetorical devices, such as consonance, or the repetition of consonant sounds within a word or syllable, and alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds in initial syllables of words. Prose writers often use rhetorical devices like these to make their prose more poetic. Assonance can help prose writers convey the implied meanings of their words, to express moods and emotions that may not be immediately obvious from dictionary definitions of the words themselves.
Literary devices that manipulate the sounds of words are often especially popular in children’s literature and poetry. Nursery rhymes for children can also contain assonances, such as the classic “She sells shells by the sea”. Rhymes like these also generally employ elements of alliteration and consonance. The repetition of consonant and vowel sounds through the use of these literary devices is thought to contribute to the entertainment value of children’s literature, poetry, and nursery rhymes.
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