Literary Device Week Day Four: Assonance and Dissonance

If you’ve watched Romeo and Juliet, one passage probably plays out loudly in your head:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy

It’s a melodic passage with an easy rhythm, but how does it create the tune?

Shakespeare wrote the melody with assonance. He presented words with similar sounds together. We have the “O” sound in the first line through “Romeo” and “thou”. We have the “I” sounds in the second line in “deny” and “thy,” and then we have further “o” sounds in “sworn” and “love.” The writer achieves his rhythm through metre, too, but today, we’re learning about assonance and dissonance.

Assonance repeats similar vowel sounds to make your writing feel easy and pleasant to the reader. Assonance is a breezy summer day. Assonance is love. Assonance is Edgar Allen Poe’s “mellow wedding bells.” If you want your readers to feel serene, assonance will achieve it. If you want them to recall a particular sentence in your paragraph, assonance is a good tool for it. If you want your readers to be so immersed in your work they forget they’re even reading, assonance might do it for you.

Unlike rhyme, which repeats consonants and vowels, assonance only repeats syllables. That makes it far subtler, so it can happily exist in prose. You might not even notice it in this Cormac McCarthy passage:

"And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage."

Just because you don’t always notice it, doesn’t mean it lacks power.

Dissonance is the opposite of assonance, and Shakespeare used it in Macbeth when he wanted to make his readers uncomfortable:

“Of all men else I have avoided thee. With blood of thine already.”

The consonants and vowels clash with one another, forcing the reader to struggle over them uncomfortably. Ted Hughes was brutal with dissonance:

Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet.

The language is no easier than a tongue twister, and that’s the point—to create a cacophony of sounds. Writers are like music conductors. They must create the musical pulse of their writing and shape its sound.

Today, I’d like you to use assonance, dissonance, or both in a piece of prose writing. You can choose a short story or piece of flash fiction.