Literary consonance
Consonance is a form of rhyme involving the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds differ (e.g., coming/home, hot/foot, march/lurch).[1] Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance.[2]
In poetry, consonance can be used as an internal sound effect, for example, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day", from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". In rhyming technique, consonance is an element of imperfect rhyme or half rhyme,[3] also called "slant rhyme", "near-rhyme" or "off-rhyme",[4][5] in which "the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that precede them differ, as in 'add-read', 'bill-ball', and 'born-burn'."[6]
Whereas consonance can repeat a consonant sound at any location in two or more stressed syllables,[7] alliteration is a special case where the repeated consonants must occur at the beginning of words,[8] as in "few flocked to the fight" or "around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran".[9] "Consonantal alliteration" is usually distinguished from other types of consonance and has different effects, for instance, it can increase the memorability of a passage and is often employed in slogans.[10]
Another specialized type of consonance is sibilance, the repetition of hissing sibilant sounds such as /s/ and /ʃ/,[11] as shown in the following line from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven": "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." (This example also contains assonance around the "ur" sound.) The word "sibilance" itself illustrates consonance.
Examples
[edit]In this stanza from Emily Dickinson's poem "As Imperceptibly As Grief",
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon,
the linking of "begun" and "afternoon" utilizes consonance to create a slant rhyme or half rhyme.[12] In its verb form, it is said that the words "begun" and "afternoon" consonate.[13] Consonance rhyming, in a strict sense, pairs words where all consonants match, and only the vowel sound varies (e.g., fit/fat). Slant rhyming, by contrast, pairs words whose consonant sounds closely approximate one another (domestic/plastic, flex/fix, summer/somewhere, ruin/strewn), but still allow some differences.[14]
Consonance appears frequently in hip-hop lyrics, for example, in the song Zealots by the Fugees: "Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile/Whether Jew or gentile I rank top percentile." (This is also an example of internal rhyme.)
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Baldick, Chris (2008). The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-0-19-920827-2. Retrieved 25 September 2013.
- ^ Baldick, Chris (2015). "Consonance". The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. doi:10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-871544-3. Retrieved 30 October 2025.
- ^ Baldick, Chris (2015). "Half-Rhyme". The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. doi:10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-871544-3. Retrieved 30 October 2025.
- ^ Turco, Lewis (1968). The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. New York: E. P. Dutton. p. 25.
- ^ "Rhyme". Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation.
- ^ Holman, C. Hugh (1972). "Consonance". A Handbook to Literature (Third ed.). Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press. p. 119. ISBN 0672630486. LCCN 73175226.
- ^ "consonance". The Free Dictionary.
- ^ "alliteration". The Free Dictionary.
- ^ "consonantal alliteration". Collins Dictionary.
- ^ Grün-Oesterreich, Andrea (2006). "Alliteration". Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195125955.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-512595-5. Retrieved 30 October 2025.
- ^ Baldick, Chris (2015). "Sibilance". The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. doi:10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-871544-3. Retrieved 30 October 2025.
- ^ Holman 1972, p. 119.
- ^ "consonate, v. meanings, etymology and more". Oxford English Dictionary.
- ^ Ciardi, John; Williams, Mitch (1975). How Does a Poem Mean? (Second ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 137–38. ISBN 0395204402.