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Assonance is the matching of vowel sounds in poetry to create specific sound combinations that trigger literary or auditory associations. It helps the text flow and can be used to create tonal lines or to link ideas. Assonance is effective in performance poetry and is primarily used for visually expressed meter.
Assonance, or the art of matching vowel sounds in lines of text, is used in poetry primarily to produce specific sound combinations that trigger literary or auditory associations in listeners and readers. Assonance can be used to make a poem sound different and also to provide “hints” for literary symbolism. Along with assonance, writers also use different types of consonant patterns in poetry, including alliteration or concordant consonants at the beginning of words.
A primary use of assonance in poetry is to help the text ‘flow’, mainly from an auditory perspective. Choosing vowel chord sounds gives a line of poetry a sort of simplified sound that may be more accessible to readers with a “musical ear” or to others who appreciate phonetic tone in poetry. Flow is an element of modern types of poetry, for example, in stream-of-consciousness or “beat” poetry, styles influenced by a more modern way of thinking about verse.
Another way to use assonance in poetry is to use vowel chord sounds in important words, usually in nouns, to trigger an association between two ideas. For example, if a writer combines two assonant words like “corn” and “morning,” he can help create some sort of subtle link between the two. This idea also works with proper nouns.
Some writers may also use assonance in poems to create “bright” sounding lines or other distinctly tonal lines. A line like “apple blossoms wrapped in satin” has a kind of bright tone when spoken aloud, based on the short “a” sound. This is another way this literary convention can come in handy in building a poem that sounds as good as it looks on the page.
Assonance is particularly effective for poems written for “reading” or to be performed. In contrast to traditional forms of poetry which are primarily read, performance poetry must be written with an ear for its verbal form. Where consonantal methods such as alliteration tend to have more diverse sets of uses in poetry, assonance in poems primarily refers to the idea of “visually expressed” meter.
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