Distillations: Assonance

This month we continue our exploration of poetry techniques with assonance, defined as the repetition of vowel sounds. Last month, I referred to assonance as “alliteration’s crafty cousin.” The reason for this is that assonance is much less visually obvious. Although the English language is quite free with the correspondence of spelling to sound, this effect is much stronger with vowels than with consonants. As a result, it is only when the poem is read that the repetitions are discovered. Oftentimes, the reader is captivated by the effect, without realizing that it even exists.

There are some good examples of this technique in Marly Youmans’s “Why People Disliked Art, Circa 2005” from Electric Velocipede #13. The third stanza contains the same short “i” sound in “crinkle,” “wings,” “this” (twice), and “is” (also twice). The long “I” is also represented with “tightening,” “thighs,” and “sighs.” Here it is all together:

Or hear a crinkle of the wings
Or tightening of thighs—
This is a spot of mystery,
This is the Vale of Sighs

Note that this stanza also contains repetition of words as well as sounds and imagery. It is rare that any technique occurs in isolation.

In “The Money Splicer’s Tale” from Electric Velocipede #12, Bruce Boston’s counterfeiter sneaks in the “e” of “greenbacks / gene-spliced” which ties the two lines neatly together. This technique is especially effective at the end of a poem, as with the last two lines “At my villa in the Swiss Alps, / I’m cloning gold instead.” The matchups are the “I” in “villa,” “in,” “Swiss,” and “instead;” the “a” in “At” and “Alps;” the long “I” in “my” and “I’m,” and finally the “o” in “cloning” and “gold.” The only word that remains unpaired is “the.” Interestingly enough, its vowel sound is represented by the “schwa” (phonetically represented as “ə”) which is the most commonly used vowel sound in the English language. These uncommon coincidences resonate with the reader to create a stronger effect than the meter alone.

Just for fun, here is a counterexample from “Narrowing Silhouettes” by Nanette Rayman Rivera, which appears in Farrago’s Wainscot Vol 2, Issue 5. Look at all of the O’s in the initial line, “Maybe the cowbird was omen and mourning.” Each one represents a different sound. However, these unlike sounds are actually setting up a pattern of assonance that runs throughout the poem. In the third line, the “ow” in “cowbird” is echoed with the “ou” in “outside.” In the fourth stanza, the “o” in “omen” is matched with the “o” in “uncombed.” And in the fifth line, the “our” in “mourning” is matched with “more.” These unities of sound hold the poem together in a subtle manner until the last word of the final line, “down,” which echoes “cowbird” again. While the bling of rhyme and meter are exciting, sometimes what a poem needs is the soft power of assonance.

Poetry can be hard to define. It is an art with constantly changing rules and boundaries, not unlike the field of science fiction itself. Still, there are some fixed stars by which we can learn our way.