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The Historical Importance of Assonance to Poets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Percy G. Adams
Percy G. Adams*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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Abstract

Assonance—the repetition of a vowel sound in stressed syllables near enough to affect the ear—has been as important as alliteration. Such vowel echoes have been employed in three chief ways. They have been simply harmonious, as in Swift's “So rotting Celia stroles the street / When sober folks are all in bed,” where the echo of [i] and [o] may be more pleasing to the ear than the two alliterations. Assonance has been used for structural effects and for emphasis: it has bound adjective to noun, from Beowulf's “ēōwralēōde”—a popular formula—to Thomas' title “The White Giant's Thigh”; it has bound the lines of a couplet, as in Spenser's “All in a vele of silke and silver thin / That hid no whit her alablaster skin”; it can emphasize rhythmical stresses, as in Shakespeare's “Do I delight to die, or life desire”; it can emphasize rhetorically balancing words, the names in Butler's “Didst inspire Witers, Prin, and Vickears,” or the verbs in Dr. Johnson's zeugma “No dangers fright him and no labors tire.” Assonance can also be onomatopoeic when it repeats the vowel of a key word, as in Pope's “Now pleasing sleep had seal'deach mortal eye; / Stretch'din their tents the Grecian leaders lie.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 8 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Among the many are these three: August Brink, Stab und Wort im Gawain (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1920); J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1930; 1968); Virginia E. Spencer, Alliteration in Spenser's Poetry (Zurich: [No pub.], 1900).

2 The author is Ulrich K. Goldsmith, Chairman of Germanic Langs, and Lits, at the Univ. of Colorado.

3 See NED, s.v. “Alliteration” ; and Churchill, The Prophecy of Famine, 1. 86.

4 See, e.g., Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense (New York: Harcourt, 1963), p. 149. Perrine does not here insist that alliteration be restricted to accented syllables, but he adds that restriction on p. 152. See also Edgar V. Roberts, Writing Themes about Literature (Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 112, and Lawrence J. Zillman, The Art and Craft of Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 58, who prefers this definition but illustrates alliteration with “Lost Lenore,” the second / of which is unstressed.

5 See NED, s.v. “Assonance.”

6 The Dictionary has almost the same words for “Consonance” : “Accord of sound.”

7 See the handbooks cited in n. 4, as well as C. F. Main and Peter J. Seng, Poems: Wadsworth Handbook and Anthology (San Francisco: Wadsworth, 1961), and Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), s.v. “Assonance.”

8 Quoted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1964), s.v. “Assonance.” The Americana (1963) uses almost the same words. In neither case is the statement to be defended because it refers only to end assonance as a replacement for rhyme since nowhere in either article are we told how assonance is widely employed within the line. The same approach is to be found in books on prosody, e.g., Paull F. Baum, The Principles of English Versification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1922), p. 167; and Max Kaluza, A Short History of English Versification from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 174–75.

9 Patmore, English Metric Critics (1857). Quoted in W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1949), ii, 101.

10 Russell Astley, “Stations of the Breath : End Rhyme in the Verse of Dylan Thomas,” PMLA, 84 (Oct. 1969), 1,602.

11 Lowell, My Study Windows (Cambridge, Mass. : Osgood, 1871), p. 327; for Gardner's study of Greek vowel repetitions, see pp. 125–31.

12 See “Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern,” in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1962), ii, 276.

13 As by E. E. Sikes, Roman Poetry (London: Methuen, 1923), pp. 260–61 ; for a full discussion of Lucretius' alliteration, and a brief one of his vowel echoes, see Rosamond E. Deutsch, “The Pattern of Sound in Lucretius,” Diss. Bryn Mawr 1939.

14 Maurice Grammont, Le Vers français (Paris: Delagrave, 1947), p. 349. See, however, for a different opinion W. Theodor Elwert, Französische Metrik (München: M. Hueber, 1961), pp. 88–89, who argues that in French poetry such final vowel echoes are so common that they have been accepted as genuine rhymes (“als ein echter Reim gegolten”); he suggests that they be called “rimes faibles.”

15 See also ll. 452, 597, and 773.

16 Baum, Chaucer's Verse (Durham, N. C. : Duke Univ. Press, 1961). See also Dorothy Everett, “Chaucer's ‘Good Ear,‘ ” RES, 23 (1947), 201–08. Since writing the present essay I have done the one on “Chaucer's Assonance” which, as this paragraph suggests, has been needed; that essay is to appear in JEGA in 1973.

17 From Spencer (see n. 1) to a provocative treatment by Ants Oras, “Spenser and Milton: Some Parallels and Contrasts in the Handling of Sound,” in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton, 1967), pp. 19–33. Oras' article appeared first in Sound and Poetry, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 109–33.

18 For some treatment of Spenser's vowel echoes in comparison with those of Milton, see Oras, esp. pp. 21–26.

19 Sonnets 15, 18, 30, 55, 60, 64, 73, 97, 116.

20 With Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries, east and feast had the vowel in modern best.

21 See my two articles: “‘Harmony of Numbers’: Dryden's Alliteration, Consonance, Assonance,” TSLL, 9 (Autumn 1967), 333–43; and “Pope's Concern with Assonance,” TSLL, 9 (Winter 1968), 493–502.

22 Alliteration can, of course, be used for structure and emphasis also. See the article on Dryden (n. 21).

23 See, for one discussion, with statistics, Oakden, i, 154–56.

24 See Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., with George Milne, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), vi, 103n.

25 The manuscript version can be found in Robert M. Schmitz, Pope's Essay on Criticism, 1709: A Study of the Bodleian Manuscript Text with Facsimilies, Transcripts, and Variants (St. Louis: Washington Univ. Press, 1962).

26 David Masson, “Sound in Poetry,” Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 785.

27 See Hymes, “Phonological Aspects of Style: Some English Sonnets,” in Essays, ed. Chatman and Levin, pp. 33–54, rpt. from Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of M. I. T., 1960); and J. J. Lynch, “The Tonality of Lyric Poetry: An Experiment in Method,” Word, 9 (1953), 211–24.

28 See his Traité de phonétique, which went through many eds. after 1908, the year of the first ed. See also his Le Vers français.

29 “Pope,” Lices of the English Poets (London: Oxford Univ. Press 1912), pp. 329–30.

30 See Jacob Adler, The Reach of Art: A Study of the Prosody of Pope, Univ. of Florida Monographs, Humanities, No. 16 (Spring 1964), p. 102, and my own article on Pope (see n. 21), p. 499. This vowel would have been pronounced as in Standard American full, not as in cut.

31 “Meditation 29. 1 Pet. 3:20,” 1. 16. As with Dryden and Pope gone had the vowel of run: [u].

32 Dedication to the Aeneis, in The Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed. G. R. Noyes (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1909), p. 511.