What does assonance mean? Assonance: examples in literature

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Artistic text is a space organized in a special way. Its main task is to influence the emotional component of the reader's personality, to touch his spiritual world, to touch the innermost strings. The upbringing of the beautiful, the awakening of love for the world, its beauty, the aesthetic impact - these are the guidelines that the masters of the artistic word strive for.

Linguistic imagery

One of these organizational “tools” of a literary text is assonance. We can meet examples of its use all the time, without even knowing what it is. Here are the famous lines of Alexander Blok: “Oh, spring without end and without edge / Without end and without edge is a dream …” How do they sound? Long, free, melodious. Like a breath of sweet, fresh spring air. What creates this amazing effect? Assonance. An example of how the repetition of the same vowel sounds can ennoble speech makes it clear how effective it is. The emotional-visual images that are born thanks to this poetic device are bright, strong, and really palpable. This creates the effect of presence, detail.

Artistic Possibilities

This is the wonderful thing about assonance. Examples of textbook lines from "The Stranger" by the same Blok clearly demonstrate the beauty of the language, the euphony of the Russian syllable, the sublime romanticism of the image of the main character of the poem: "Breathing in spirits and mists / She sits down by the window." Thus, in an artistic, and especially a poetic text, not only the semantic, but also the phonetic side of speech plays an important role. To convey a mood, to create an emotional message, to expose the “nerve” of a verse, its energy intensity – all this can be assonance. Examples of his organizing role prove the wide possibilities of this artistic technique.

The origin of the phenomenon

As we have seen, the repetition of the same vowels performs certain functions in speech. Masters of the word - some consciously, some intuitively - often use a technique to give euphony to poems, a more vivid expression of associative semantic connections. Assonance in literature originates from Greek rhapsodists, storytellers-musicians. In our language, the term came from French and is translated as "consonance". However, in Russian folklore, in folk songs, it has existed since time immemorial, since it was originally characteristic of our phonetic system. Classical assonance - poems, more precisely, Lermontov's poetic lines from Borodino, reproducing the sound structure of folk speech: "Our ears are on top of our heads …".

To the question of terminology

However, the nature of this phenomenon has a dual character. In literary criticism, it is customary to understand not only the use of identical vowels in adjacent and adjacent lines of words, i.e., sound writing, but also the consonance of final syllables, i.e., rhymes. True, it is proposed to take into account exactly the same vowels, while consonants may not coincide. Examples of assonance in verse in this regard look like this: “rain - you are waiting”, “fight - love”, “give - yes”, etc. These are the so-called assonance, or incomplete, rhymes. Especially often they can be encountered in the poetry of Mayakovsky.

The role of assonance

So, alliteration and assonance are examples of the important role played by sound writing in prose, and especially in poetic speech. These techniques make it possible to highlight the semantic centers of literary texts, the so-called keywords. Here is the famous Yesenin: “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry … / Withering covered in gold …”. The confluence of vowels "e", "u / u" and consonants "l", "ch", "n" give the lines that famous softness and melodiousness that Yesenin's poetry is famous for. And the incomplete rhyme “crying-covered” does not spoil the overall impression, but corresponds to it. Another striking example of the interaction of sound means is Marshak’s children’s poems: “Across the blue sky / A roar of thunder passed …” The repetition of sonorous consonants “r” - rolling, sonorous, in combination with a repeating “o”, imitates with amazing accuracy the sounds of a rampant element. In the context of the entire poem - cheerful, cheerful, cheerful, and these sounds are not perceivedanxious, wary, but life-affirming. And a completely different impression arises when we read Blok's Factory. The very first phrase with the assonance “o” creates some kind of painful tension, unpleasant and ominous: “In … the house of the window is zholta …”. Further, as one immerses oneself in the poetic text, the atmosphere of despondency and hopelessness intensifies. The correct tone set initially helped Blok to reveal the theme and idea of the work not only at the figurative, semantic level, but also through the sound shell of key words. What conclusion can be drawn from the given examples? Such that assonance is the strongest means of poetic language expressiveness.

Assonance and Rhythm

It is characteristic that assonance is inherent primarily in the syllabic system of versification. Therefore, it also plays an organizational-determining role. After all, a certain number of vowels creates a rhythmic pattern of lines separately and a verse as a whole. In this respect, assonance can be compared to percussion instruments in music. In addition, the phenomenon of sound writing is interconnected with the length of vowels. Their coloration in certain moods is not permanent. The surroundings of other sounds have their influence on them. Approximate rhymes, more and more popular in modern poetry, may not quite correspond to classical harmony, but they give the rhythm and movement of the verse a certain dynamics, energy. And at the same time they can help convey, for example, the state of mental discord, dissonance, split and even despair that overwhelm the author and his lyrical hero. Means,this artistic technique, in addition to its main purpose, is almost a universal tool of "poetic cuisine". It is multifunctional, therefore, from this point of view, the use of assonances was recommended by such our poets as Trediakovsky, Sumarokov, Derzhavin. The development of literary mastery improved, honed the ability to use the sound organization of the text not only directly, but also indirectly. If you look into the creative laboratory of any talented writer, study his drafts, you can understand what a titanic work he does, choosing exactly those words, that their sound shell, which would be optimal for this work.