Poetry: Beyond Rhyme

We've already discussed rhyme when we talked about rhyme scheme, but there are other ways to make poetry sound lyrical and "pretty," other than rhyming.

Alliteration refers to several words in quick succession starting with the same sound. Hey, look; I just did it: "starting with the same sound" is an example of alliteration. The words don't have to start with the same letters, since we sometimes spell things differently but pronounce them similarly. (Did you catch the alliteration in that sentence? Beautiful.)

While rhyme usually refers to the ending sound of a line of poetry, assonance appears throughout the line, specifically looking at vowel sounds. An example might be if we see the... ha, there it is. "be if we see the": all of those words contain the same long "e" sound, and therefore give us assonance.

Consonance is similar to assonance in that it appears in the middle of lines of poetry (or prose) but it refers to the ending consonant sounds of words, like, "tip, tap, top." (I don't know why those three words would appear together in a line of poetry; poets and poems can be a bit odd.) These three words all end with the same "p" sound, and combined, are an example of consonance.

There is also something called slant rhyme that basically means you're cheating when trying to rhyme something. Sometimes slant rhyme comes about from translating or updating the language of a poem, or regional differences. For example, if we have a poem with these lines:

We wanted some privacy,
So we went by the sea.

Weird poem. Anyway, an American would pronounce the last word of the first line "PRY-vuh-see." An English person would pronounce it "PRIH-vuh-see," and it wouldn't rhyme as closely with the second line's phrase "by the sea." It would still rhyme, but not as thoroughly.

An American might rhyme "mobile" (like a cell phone... if we were stuck in the 1990s) with "global," whereas an English person would rhyme it with "while" or "tile." So regional differences can causes slant rhyme.

Or, sometimes, it is done on purpose: perhaps because the poet wants to draw attention to a certain pair of lines, or perhaps because s/he cannot come up with a closer rhyme, or rhyme just isn't that important to this poet or poem.