Assonance

 Assonance is a resemblance in the sounds of words/syllables either between their vowels (e.g., meat, bean) or between their consonants (e.g., keep, cape). However, assonance between consonants is generally called consonance in American usage. The two types are often combined, as between the words six and switch, in which the vowels are identical, and the consonants are similar but not completely identical. If there is repetition of the same vowel or some similar vowels in literary work, especially in stressed syllables, this may be termed "vowel harmony" in poetry (though linguists have a different definition of "vowel harmony").

A special case of assonance is rhyme, in which the endings of words (generally beginning with the vowel sound of the last stressed syllable) are identical—as in fog and dog or history and mystery. Vocalic assonance is an important element in verse.Assonance occurs more often in verse than in prose; it is used in English-language poetry and is particularly important in Old French, Spanish, and the Celtic languages.

Examples

English poetry is rich with examples of assonance:

That solitude which suits abstruser musings

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"

on a proud round cloud in white high night

— E. E. Cummings, if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit

His tender heir might bear his memory

— William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 1"

It also occurs in prose:

Soft language issued from their spitless lips as they swished in low circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds.

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Willow-Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank.

— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Hip hop relies on assonance:

Some vodka that'll jumpstart my heart quicker than a shock when I get shocked at the hospital by the doctor when I'm not cooperating when I'm rocking the table when he's operating...

— Eminem, "Without Me"

Dead in the middle of little Italy little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddly.

— Big Pun, "Twinz"

It is also heard in other forms of popular music:

I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless

— Thin Lizzy, "With Love"

Dot my I's with eyebrow pencils, close my eyelids, hide my eyes. I'll be idle in my ideals. Think of nothing else but I

— Keaton Henson, "Small Hands"

Assonance is common in proverbs:

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

The early bird catches the worm.

Total assonance is found in a number of Pashto proverbs from Afghanistan:

• La zra na bal zra ta laar shta. "From one heart to another there is a way."
• Kha ghar lwar day pa sar laar lary. "Even if a mountain is very high, there is a path to the top." 

This poetic device can be found in the first line of Homer's Iliad: Mênin áeide, theá, Pēlēïádeō Akhilêos (Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος). Another example is Dies irae (probably by Thomas of Celano):

Dies iræ, dies illa

Solvet sæclum in favilla,

Teste David cum Sibylla.

In Dante's Divine Comedy there are some stanzas with such repetition.

così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva,

si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo

che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

In the following strophe from Hart Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge" there is the vowel [i] in many stressed syllables.

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

All rhymes in a strophe can be linked by vowel harmony into one assonance. Such stanzas can be found in Italian or Portuguese poetry, in works by Giambattista Marino and Luís Vaz de Camões:

Giunto a quel passo il giovinetto Alcide,

che fa capo al camin di nostra vita,

trovò dubbio e sospeso infra due guide

una via, che’ due strade era partita.

Facile e piana la sinistra ei vide,

di delizie e piacer tutta fiorita;

l’altra vestìa l’ispide balze alpine

di duri sassi e di pungenti spine.

This is ottava rima (abababcc), a very popular form in Renaissance, used in the first place in long epic poems.

As armas e os barões assinalados,

Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,

Por mares nunca de antes navegados,

Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,

Em perigos e guerras esforçados,

Mais do que prometia a força humana,

E entre gente remota edificaram

Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram;

There are many examples of vowel harmony in French, Czech, and Polish poetry.

Alliteration

 In literature, alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of identical initial consonant sounds in successive or closely associated syllables within a group of words, even those spelled differently. As a method of linking words for effect, alliteration is also called head rhyme or initial rhyme. For example, "humble house," or "potential power play." A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". "Alliteration" is from the Latin word littera, meaning "letter of the alphabet"; it was first coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Alliteration is used poetically in various languages around the world, including Arabic, Irish, German, Mongolian, Hungarian, American Sign Language, Somali, Finnish, Icelandic.

Some literary experts accept as alliteration the repetition of vowel sounds, or repetition at the end of words. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a letter in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid line along".

Consonance is a broader literary device identified by the repetition of consonant sounds at any point in a word (for example, coming home, hot foot). Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is in the stressed syllable. Alliteration may also refer to the use of different but similar consonants, Such as alliterating z with s, as does the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or as Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poets would alliterate hard/fricative g with soft g (the latter exemplified in some courses as the letter yogh – ȝ – pronounced like the y in yarrow or the j in Jotunheim).

There is one specialised form of alliteration called Symmetrical Alliteration. That is, alliteration containing parallelism, or chiasmus. In this case, the phrase must have a pair of outside end words both starting with the same sound, and pairs of outside words also starting with matching sounds as one moves progressively closer to the centre. For example, "rust brown blazers rule" or "fluoro colour co-ordination forever". Symmetrical alliteration is similar to palindromes in its use of symmetry.