Assonance is a way of rhyming within the words, as opposed to rhyming the word endings. It’s done by repeating vowel sounds to create an internal rhyming scheme, as in the phrase “the good wood stood” where the “oo” sound is repeated.

As a literary device, assonance is the opposite of dissonance, which is a deliberate attempt to avoid similar vowel sounds. Dissonance is used to give text variety and add a harsher, edgier feel.

It’s often easier to spot assonance in poetry than in prose, although there’s plenty of it there, too. Here are some examples you’ll find in well-known poems, starting with “The Bells” by Edgar Allen Poe:

Hear the mellow wedding bells,

and

From the molten golden-notes

In the first line above the “e” sound in mellow, wedding and bells makes use of assonance, while the second line plays with the long “o” sound. This is a fairly straight-forward and simplistic use of assonance, but it’s not always as obvious as that. Here’s an excerpt from William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” for example:

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;

Notice how the “ea” combination is used throughout the two lines to help hold them together. It’s quite subtle but effective. Assonance can be applied to a longer piece of verse equally as well, as in this extract from “Onion Days” by Carl Sandburg:

She takes a street car at half-past five in the morning,
Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti does,
And gets back from Jasper’s with cash for her day’s
work, between nine and ten o’clock at night.

You can clearly identify the internal rhyme using the letter “a” in the words half and past, back, Jasper’s, cash and at. It’s likewise easy to pick out in Robert Frost’s oft-quoted “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;

Cover of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

On the second line, Frost is using the soft “i” sound in the words his, is, in and village to create an assonant rhyme. You’ll find the same kind of thing in advertisements and slogans, where you’re told that “this meal is the real deal” or something similar.

Assonance provides a subtle technique of creating cohesion between words that don’t rhyme in the obvious sense. It’s a device you’ll often find in the lyrics of well-known songwriters. See if you can spot instances in this example from “Alexandra Leaving” by Leonard Cohen:

As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again.

The “i’s” have it. And did you notice assonance in the last line of the paragraph above this verse? It’s there in the words if, instances, in, and this. Look out for it in everything you read and see how many examples you can find.