# Writing Poetry: Assonance



## Ariel (Aug 1, 2016)

Assonance is defined as "the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in non-rhyming, stressed syllables near enough for the echo to be discernible."
(Google Definition)


A diphthong is defined by vocabulary.com as "a sound made by combining two vowels, specifically when it starts as one vowel sound and goes to another."


Assonance adds rhythm and music to poetry by creating an internal rhyme.  It can also create a particular mood that corresponds with the subject matter.


Darkkin has been kind enough to give me some examples of assonance and diphthongs. On diphthongs she says:


"Heartbeat in particular is an excellent example of a dipthong. Two repeating vowels, within one word, yet each with their own sound."


About assonance in general Darkkin says, "e.g. Egrets, ethereal in the eerie light, envoys of the westerly.

The e becomes the heartbeat, dipthongs, the nonrepeating double vowels, are found in ethereal and eerie. Many of the strongest rhymes come from assonance, the power of the word riding on the vowel. The harder the vowel, the clearer the assonance. Egret or iguana, for example. Great ways to establish the pattern, but it is the dipthong that gives the element dimension. Enhances the echo. As illustrated by the words, dimension and motion.


Assonance, because it is subtler on the ear, is an amazing tool when it comes to establishing the tone of a piece. Alliteration makes use of the consonants, and in a marvelous bit of irony the word alliteration is prime assonance, where as assonance is excellent alliteration, especially in conjunction with consonant. Soft edges on the vowels, highlight the consonants."


Reading aloud gives a better ear for diphthongs and assonance in general--allowing the ear to catch the sounds of the vowel.


_An extra special thank you to Darkkin for her time and patience.  I didn't want to mangle your words (or beautiful language)._


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## Terry D (Aug 1, 2016)

Now this is the sort of thread that gets my attention! Thanks for starting it, Ams. Sound-science like this is precisely why I find great value in paying attention to poetry even though I identify myself, primarily, as a fiction writer. We fictioneers often get so wrapped up in story (rightfully so) and plot (no so much) that we fail to understand that some of the most powerful moments we create are powerful because they just _sound_ so damned good. That sound comes from relationships between words that poetry focuses upon so tightly.


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## escorial (Aug 2, 2016)

so like these threads.....


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## Firemajic (Aug 8, 2016)

Hello amsaw, Thank you so much for starting this thread, and thank you DarKKin... as writers, we are all striving to improve our skill, and there are many tools one can use to make their poetry powerful, showcase the rhythm, make the message meaningful...anyway, lets get to work! 
I have a few lines of a poem I have been working on, and I was wondering if I post them, would you show me how to add assonance ...  I can alliterate, but, assonance is just not clicking... I would appreciate the help..


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## Bard_Daniel (Aug 9, 2016)

Great thread. Thanks! : D


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## Ariel (Aug 9, 2016)

I'm not so good at hearing assonance . . . still. I would ask Darkkin. She is so much better at it than I am.


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## Harper J. Cole (Aug 12, 2016)

Is it normal to use the same vowel sound throughout the poem, or to vary from line to line? Also, is it better to have them at the start of words or hidden in the middle, or is it a matter of preference?

HC


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## clark (Aug 12, 2016)

An excellent thread on a complex subject that is, in its _inception _by poets, remarkably  (and deceptively) simple.  And if the foregoing sounds like the most evasive piece of shit you've read in some time, that's because it is.  Few poets that I know (including myself) deliberately set out to "use" the codified sound elements of poetry to achieve particular effects.  Fiction writers, as TerryD (post #2) points out, are concerned that the elements of their work serve the efficacy of _STORY _, properly their primary concern.  They can and do plan and pattern and consciously manage details to serve that primary end.  They can go back and work on ;language, rhythm (perhaps), and other stylistic issues later.  Poets, on the other hand, write from emotion, gut instinct, and a sense of rhythm and _music _that arises as much as is consciously 'employed' when they start a poem.  Shakespeare, I am 100% positive, never said to himself, "OK Will, now we're going to write a piece about how your lover is even hotter than a great sunny day in sodden England, so let's select the iamb--closest beat to natural speech--and a five-beat pentameter line for a gentle cadence--let me just jot all these notes down and get this project happening--all right then! lemme see if this will fit all these elements:  "_Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. . ."  _I'm being a little silly to make my point.  Everything Darrken says thru Amsawtell is absolutely correct. . .but poets don't write that way, is my main point.  When Samuel Johnson published the first Dictionary in English (1755) he cautioned elsewhere that _definitions_ simply show the limits or parameters or limits of words, they do NOT help us with usage.  Only the people and how they decide a word will be used, can do that.  So with poets:  the rhythm, cadence, music--da beat--of a poem comes from the poet's guts as the poem comes to life.  Very difficult to talk about these issues 'objectively' (whatever to hell that means).  It may appear that a poet has consciously manipulated sound, vowel length, plosives, sibilants, assonance, consonance, etc. because all of these elements come together so seamlessly when the end result is analyzed.  S/he is rarely aware of their congruence when writing, whereas a fiction writer is very aware of the elements os Story at all times.  The two forms of creativity exert different imperatives.  This is certainly not to say that fiction is 'not' poetic.  If you're unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy's novels, have a look at the first ten pages of _All The Pretty Horses_.  His description of the Plains Indians' migration routines will absolutely blow your socks off with the intensity of its poetry.


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## clark (Aug 12, 2016)

Just a little footnote:  all consonant sound elements involve--no, even stronger--_require_ vowels for their existence.  You cannot 'say' a consonant without a vowel preceding or trailing.  This simple reality of sound formation can have a profound effect on the impact of a consonant in use, esp. if the vowel is short or long and depending always, of course, on context.


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## midnightpoet (Aug 12, 2016)

clark said:


> An excellent thread on a complex subject that is, in its _inception _by poets, remarkably  (and deceptively) simple.  And if the foregoing sounds like the most evasive piece of shit you've read in some time, that's because it is.  Few poets that I know (including myself) deliberately set out to "use" the codified sound elements of poetry to achieve particular effects.  Fiction writers, as TerryD (post #2) points out, are concerned that the elements of their work serve the efficacy of _STORY _, properly their primary concern.  They can and do plan and pattern and consciously manage details to serve that primary end.  They can go back and work on ;language, rhythm (perhaps), and other stylistic issues later.  Poets, on the other hand, write from emotion, gut instinct, and a sense of rhythm and _music _that arises as much as is consciously 'employed' when they start a poem.  Shakespeare, I am 100% positive, never said to himself, "OK Will, now we're going to write a piece about how your lover is even hotter than a great sunny day in sodden England, so let's select the iamb--closest beat to natural speech--and a five-beat pentameter line for a gentle cadence--let me just jot all these notes down and get this project happening--all right then! lemme see if this will fit all these elements:  "_Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. . ."  _I'm being a little silly to make my point.  Everything Darrken says thru Amsawtell is absolutely correct. . .but poets don't write that way, is my main point.  When Samuel Johnson published the first Dictionary in English (1755) he cautioned elsewhere that _definitions_ simply show the limits or parameters or limits of words, they do NOT help us with usage.  Only the people and how they decide a word will be used, can do that.  So with poets:  the rhythm, cadence, music--da beat--of a poem comes from the poet's guts as the poem comes to life.  Very difficult to talk about these issues 'objectively' (whatever to hell that means).  It may appear that a poet has consciously manipulated sound, vowel length, plosives, sibilants, assonance, consonance, etc. because all of these elements come together so seamlessly when the end result is analyzed.  S/he is rarely aware of their congruence when writing, whereas a fiction writer is very aware of the elements os Story at all times.  The two forms of creativity exert different imperatives.  This is certainly not to say that fiction is 'not' poetic.  If you're unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy's novels, have a look at the first ten pages of _All The Pretty Horses_.  His description of the Plains Indians' migration routines will absolutely blow your socks off with the intensity of its poetry.



This is interesting, and brings up a question I've been wondering about lately - I'm good at rhymes but have trouble at times with rhythm, and I've been wondering if that is because of a lack of a musical background.  Never tried an instrument or studied music - how important is that, really, in writing poetry?  Am I over-thinking this?  Of course, as I'm a really old fart, it's probably too late anyway.:grin:


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## clark (Aug 12, 2016)

@ HarperCole
An interesting question Harper (never thought about it before this!).  I would suggest there is no 'normal' practice, for sure.  The famous onomatopoeic line (so famous I can't remember the poet--Keats maybe), "The melodious murmuring of innumerable bees" depends for its 'buzzing' effect on internal assonance throughout.  I think, without study, that assonance is usually internal in individual words and in full lines.  There is certainly no 'rule' here.  In his long poem, "Don Juan", for example, Byron deliberately mispronounces single-syllable Spanish  'Juan' throughout as a trochee--(JOO-uhn) to achieve an anti-climactic, trailing line-end.  Sometimes the short concluding vowel is signalled as a long vowel by the accompanying line to which it is married.  Using assonance in this way in the concluding half-foot would, I think, be relatively unusual.  I hope others will book on with opinions here.


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## clark (Aug 12, 2016)

@midnightpoet (implies you're a nightowl like me. . .).  Free verse has been around for a lonnnnng time, but it has become THE most popular poetic form for. . .what. . .50 years?  It freed poets from the oft-times rhythmic rigidity of established forms like the sonnet.  But it carries the heavy price of 'discovering' rhythm with every single poem you write.  The poet literally re-invents rhythm with every poem.  So we need to _internalize _rhythm as language unfolds in the poem as it's written.  To tune into internalization, I have a weird suggestion--read rhyming poets who are MASTERS of traditional rhythm.  Read them ALOUD, in front of a mirror, with as much exaggerated drama as you can muster.  Read to the dog (always an appreciative audience).  Read Service, Frost, (shudder) Longfellow, Alexander Pope, Shakespeare's /Sonnets. . . . then, when you're hopping and grooving and feel rhythm in your bones, read Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" and feel the rhythm in that non-rhyming poem.  Read Tennyson's "The Lotus Eaters", then kick the family off to a movie, lock the dog in the garage, pour youself a liberal glass of your favourite libation, turn the lights low, and listen to Keith Jarrett's KOLN CONCERT (longest piano solo in the history of jazz).  If you don't have rhythm twitching in your toes at the end of this exercise, I'll wash your car for a year.


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## midnightpoet (Aug 13, 2016)

It's been years since I've thought in terms of consonants and predicates; grammar rules were drilled into me some 60-odd years ago in school and I just write.  I'd have to look up the definition of consonants.  I'm usually okay, I just have forgotten the rules.  Where to put a comma? Forgotten the rule - but it usually "sounds" right.  The same with rhythm, it just "sounds" right to my "tin" ear.  I love music, I like the ballad form - probably because I like telling stories.  Hence my prose. 

I've read many of those you've suggested many years ago, I think re-visiting them will be a good idea.

Have a great day (morning?)

Tony


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## Ariel (Aug 13, 2016)

I have been asking about rhythm myself. I enjoy form poetry (I like the classics and if I have to read Prufrock once more I am digging up Eliot to bean him over the head).  I went to poetic soul sister and asked her about rhythm. She compared it to beats in music as she has a musical background.  I think she was right to do so.  Poetry and music is inextricably bound together.  The first poems were sung.

She suggested I read Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  I tend to read it aloud but the rhythm is strong and easy to fall into.  I would also suggest Poe for rhythm that is not iambic pentameter.

Clark, thank you.  Your knowledge is invaluable.

Harper, I think Clark is correct--there is no preferred way to write assonance.  I think you'll have an easier time of it if you choose more than one sound in more than one place.


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## clark (Aug 13, 2016)

Amsawtell -- excellent reminder!  We can only speculate (which is all we really ever do anyway.  Experts are just much better at it than amateurs, because they KNOW when they're bullshitting_),_ can only speculate that at pre-writing stages in the development of languages, STORY became the primary depository for tribal knowledge.  The story-tellers would have been critical to the continuity of the tribe.  Linguists have been able to determine that tribes went for HUNDREDS of years, perhaps thousands, using oral language only.  Rhyme must have developed during this period, as a story-telling tool, a memory aid.  With the development of writing, rhyme was no longer a necessity, but it now evolved in its own right as a part of written art.


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## Darkkin (Aug 13, 2016)

Deleted.


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## Ariel (Aug 13, 2016)

clark said:


> Amsawtell -- excellent reminder!  We can only speculate (which is all we really ever do anyway.  Experts are just much better at it than amateurs, because they KNOW when they're bullshitting_),_ can only speculate that at pre-writing stages in the development of languages, STORY became the primary depository for tribal knowledge.  The story-tellers would have been critical to the continuity of the tribe.  Linguists have been able to determine that tribes went for HUNDREDS of years, perhaps thousands, using oral language only.  Rhyme must have developed during this period, as a story-telling tool, a memory aid.  With the development of writing, rhyme was no longer a necessity, but it now evolved in its own right as a part of written art.


There is evidence from pre-writing cultures still around today that the different techniques we currently use for written poetry were used as memory devices for a story.  It's easier to remember a tongue twister full of alliteration, for example, than a joke that doesn't use any alliteration.  We even see that pattern with the Torah in that it is sung as part of worship and (I believe) that part of it must be memorized for the bar/bat mitzvah celebrations.


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## RHPeat (Aug 13, 2016)

*The sounds of poetry: *

It is important to realize that the art form of poetry is aural more than oral. That it is to be heard as a reaching out. So it is very song like in that way. Good songs have excellent poetic structures as well. 

"All forms of art are intentional composing. It's the direct and deliberate arrangement and organization of form by man through his sensuous qualities" by sir Herbert Reed. (something like that)

Even in poetry the detail involved in breaking a line becomes critical, but most of the time we are responding to that need emotionally. The rewrite might be far more analytical in nature while the initial draft tends to be more emotional. I think both are needed in the craft of any art, for the real art comes in shaping something. Anyone can have emotional feelings, but that true craftsman is skilled enough to actually place us there to have the experience. So within the viewer, listener, reader, etc. in any art form even though touch and taste at times — we become a part of the art as an extension of the presentation of the art.  

Like Clark says, we feel it more than we think about it. We exude it or evoke it as an experience. We might ever provoke it at times in a political sense. A good poem always puts us at the edge of our feelings. It's more about cognitive thoughts as feelings than the logic of understanding. For sure we can understand through our feeling. I'm sure that's part of where language begins in us even as a child. And the rhymes in children's verses do stick with us. "Like Jack Sprat could eat no fat." or "High diddle diddle the cow jumped over the moon" The rhythms and the rhymes stick to our gut even as children. So the sounds of the poem become vital to the presentation of the art form. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## clark (Aug 13, 2016)

My brief colleague and mentor, the late Robin Blaser, was passionate n advocating that "every poem is a political act".  Part of that awareness is the potentially subversive nature of a poem, its insidious ability ti get under the skin of a hearer/reader, open new ways of Seeing, and thus alter thinking, emotions, and--horrors!--socio/political attitudes and expectations.  Poets and poetry made Plato nervous, supposedly because of layers of 'meaning' and attendant ambiguities which did not sit well at all with the shaping of a Philosopher-King.  Isn't it interesting, though, having made his position clear _intellectually _that he argued one of his major points by image and analogy ("The Allegory of the Cave"), rather than by rational argument.  And I am a broken record in reminding anyone who'll listen that the Jesus of the Gospels never (that I know of) answers a straight abstract question from the disciples with a straight, abstract, rational answer.  ALWAYS he gives them a parable, a story, a metaphor, an image and essentially says, "If I give you the answer, you have my words.  But , you get inside that image I just gave you, and you'll find your  answer. Truth lies there."  Very, very dangerous, this discovery of Truth within the self thru art.  Philosopher Kings......and modern politicians beware.


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## Darkkin (Aug 14, 2016)

.


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## Firemajic (Aug 14, 2016)

Hahaa, I am freeeeakin out.... but it does not take much to confuse and overwhelm me... I need simple, and less is more for me... I HOPE I did ok.. but now I have the urge to delete my efforts for the Pip challenge... [ dives to the bottom of DarKKin's pond ]......


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## Firemajic (Aug 14, 2016)

Assonance: The repetition of identical or similar VOWEL sounds in neighboring words, like:
 fish and chips
bad man
If I bleat when I speak it's because I just got fleeced [ Al Swearengen in Deadwood]
He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance. [Mary Shelley, Frankenstein ]
I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless.. [ Thin Lizzy, With Love ]


The moon, like a flower
in heaven's high bower,
with silent delight,
sits and smiles on the night [William Blake "Night" songs of innocence]

Assonance [or medial rhyme] is the agreement in the vowel sounds of two or more words, when the consonant sounds preceding and following these vowels do not agree. So, "strike, grind, hat and man" rhyme with each other, according to the rules of assonance....

Less is more, be subtle... Any assonance that draws attention to it's self is excessive... in other words, poets... try not to show your ASSonance too much..


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## Darkkin (Aug 14, 2016)

Precisely.


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## clark (Aug 14, 2016)

Darkken -- My posts have obviously rubbed you the wrong way. You say I'm taking the neophytes into dense and (for them) uncharted territory that they need not explore to put certain principles into practice.  Giving lectures on the development of axe manufacturing to a boy who is supposed to chop some firewood?  That kind of thing?  I don't think my posts do that at all.  I think further that having some clear ideas about how ideas have developed. how they have evolved into their present form, is both inherently valuable and pedagogically sound.  And in that last phrase lies what would appear to be a fundamental difference in the way we perceive our roles here in WF.  I reject the role of "teacher" here.  Did that for a lonnnng time.  Here I write poetry and blather on about it 'cause I love it. I'm a poet and fiction writer-- I know a bit about ths and that_--EVERY OTHER WRITER_ on these boards, as far as I'm concerned, is a poet or fiction writer who knows a bit about this and that.  It's the same road.  Just different spots and everybody gains when we talk about what we see in our section of it.

I won't be changing my style, Darkken.  And I hope you won't be changing yours.  And I would encourage everyone on these boards, regardless of background, to speak out boldly about whatever concerns them.  I have enjoyed your posts, Darkken, in the past, and will continue to do so.  And when we disagree, we will disagree with intelligence and wit, and everyone will have a good time


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## RHPeat (Aug 14, 2016)

Clark

That's a good thought. Dare to be fearless about learning, expanding & assimilating; let it all hang out. Even the smallest roads lead to great highways. 

At The Precipice 

by all means stand firm,
fear not;
 put us at the cliff's edge
where steepness rises
above the common land; 
the land we already know
beside that unknown territory
yet to be discovered
on the other side. 

We will expand to meet you 
there in the darkness, 
revel in the moonlight, 
dance around the campfire
were plenty becomes
unbounded 
within loosened sounds. 

Let the fires burn bright
where wonder lurks in darkness; 
let it
peer out into the night
with bight eyes. 

Let us feel the bite
from unknown beasts
as wildness 
leaps into knowing
inside our visions.

a poet friend
RH Peat © 8/14/2016


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## Firemajic (Aug 14, 2016)

Well, hopefully this thread covers all skill levels, for the novice like me, to the extreme poet Gods...


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## Ariel (Aug 20, 2016)

From "Patterns of Poetry" b Miller Williams: "Assonance is the relationship between words with different consonants immediately preceding and following the last _accented_ vowels, which vowels have identical sounds (hit/will, disturb/bird, absolute/unglued)."  (13)

Emphasis is my own.

Williams goes on to suggest Emily Dickenson's poetry for more examples of assonance.


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