The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Assonance

Assonance: In proximate words, the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllables, followed by different consonant sounds. Assonance is different from perfect rhyme in that rhyming words also repeat the final consonant sounds.

EXAMPLES: Fate and cave show assonance; fate and late show perfect rhyme. In the opening stanza of D. H. Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm” (1928), large, dark, and are; hands, at, and Grasping; those and golden; window, in, its, and wind; weaves and evening; and the ing suffixes are all assonant. Only light and delight rhyme:

What large, dark hands are those at the window

Grasping in the golden light

Which weaves its way through the evening wind

At my heart’s delight?

Assonance is common in hip-hop music, as in Public Enemy’s “Do You Wanna Go Our Way???” (There’s a Poison Goin On, 1999), in which the long o sound is repeated eleven times in four lines — in the words knows, controls, radios, chose, road, hoes, so, rose, woes, negroes, and nose.