 As our earlier video lessons on poetic meter, rhyme, euphony, and cacophony make clear, poetry is a genre of sound as much as sense. The repetition of similar sounds at the ends of poetic lines are pleasing to our ears, and that's one of the reasons why we enjoy rhymed poetry. The alternating stressed and unstressed patterns in poetic lines create a rhythm that propels a poem forward, and that's one of the reasons why we enjoy metered poetry. Today I want to discuss two more terms that help to create the soundscape of a poem, assonance and consonance. Both terms are associated with repetition. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, and consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds. But these terms, as they're typically used, differ in three important ways from the patterning of rhyme. First, what sounds are being repeated? Rhyme, as you may know, is the repetition of sounds at the end of a given pair of words, and these sounds usually combine vowels and consonants. For example, door rhymes with floor, not only because of the R at the end, but also the long O, or. When we use the terms assonance and consonance, we're calling attention to only one of these two kinds of sounds, either the consonants or the vowels. So why would we want to do that? Technically, rhyme is a kind of assonance, but in practical terms, when we call something assonance, we often mean that only the vowel sound repeats between words. Along similar lines, when we call something consonance, we mean that only the consonant sounds repeat. Here's a simple, silly example. Euphanous fish. Both words in this phrase contain the repeating F sound, euphanous fish, but the vowel sounds you'll notice aren't the same. As such, we have consonants, but not rhyme. Second up, where within the words are the sounds being repeated? With rhyming pairs, the common sound occurs at the end of each word. In the case of door and floor, the beginning sounds differ, duh and full, but the final sounds match, or creating the rhyme. With assonance and consonants, however, the recurring sound patterns can occur anywhere in the associated words, at the beginning, or the middle, or the end. The phrase euphanous fish is an example of consonants, because the F sound repeats from word to word, even though the sound doesn't necessarily repeat in the same spot in both words. Finally, where does the repetition occur in a poem? In poetry, rhyming words usually occur at the end of poetic lines, creating complex patterns that knit lines and indeed entire poems together. Instead of structuring the entirety of a poem or a stanza, however, assonance and consonants usually show up irregularly in certain moments of the poem. In this way, assonance and consonants create temporary, ephemeral patterns in a given line or phrase that dissipate as quickly as they emerge. What sounds are being repeated? Where in the words are the sounds being repeated? And where in the poetic lines are the sounds being repeated? These three questions are a lot to keep track of, so let's put it together with a simple example. Consider the following lines from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Fish, in which the speaker looks out upon her catch. See if you can spot the consonants and assonants as I read. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper. Shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. As you'll see, there isn't any end rhyme here, but the poem is undoubtedly musical. This is due in part to the consonants in the poem. Consider the opening line, which repeats the NG sound with hung and grunting. Or the fourth line's phrase, brown skin hung, NNN. Or the tenth line's repetition of the hard K sound, speckled with barnacles. These repetitions aren't internal rhymes, the vowel sounds are on the consonants aren't always the same, and this repetition doesn't always occur at the ends of words. But they do operate in a similar way to rhyme. They help Bishop convey the beauty, as well as the strangeness of this encounter with a fish. There's also a bit of assonance in these lines. Consider the thirteenth line, in which Bishop's speaker repeats a series of hard I sounds, though again not in the manner of internal rhyme. Tiny white sea lice. Or the alteration of hard A and hard O sounds in the line's wallpaper, lips like full blown roses stained and lost through age. Again, there isn't a regular pattern here. Instead we're given certain fragments of melodious or euphonious phrases that help us to structure the way that we sound out the poem. Let me leave you with one final, complex example of consonants and assonants that'll help you to distinguish these terms from rhyme. Here are the opening lines to Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem Dover Beach. The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits. On the French coast the light gleams and is gone, the cliffs of England stand glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air, only from the long line of spray where the sea meets the moon-blanched land listen. You hear the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling. At their return of the high strand begin and cease and then again begin with tremulous cadence slow and bring the eternal note of sadness in. In these lines the sound patterns of Arnold's words mimic the waves of the sea as they crash against the beach. They do so because of rhyme, sure. We get rhymes between lines two, six and nine, and we get a separate set of rhymes in lines eight and eleven and lines ten and twelve. We also get a crazy amount of internal rhyme in line ten. Begin and cease and then again begin. But Arnold's use of assonance and consonance also contributes to the noise of the sea. In the second line a little sonic pattern is established in the repetition of f-sounds, the tide is full, the moon lies fair. Or in the fourth line a little pattern emerges in the repetition of gleams and is gone, the pattern emerging and then dissipating in the same way that the light emerges and then disappears. We also get a bit of assonance packed in alongside the consonance. In line six for example we get the repetition of short a and l sounds in moon-blanched land. This assonance again isn't rhyme but performs the same function as rhyme, conveying the effects of the moon casting its light and hear its sound upon the land. As Arnold's and Bishop's sound experiments suggest, repetition in poetry is not always as regular or as simple as rhyme or meter. At certain moments other more subtle repetitions emerge to challenge and delight us as we sound out the poetry we love.