Assonance

Assonance, in Prosody, is the correspondence of sound pronounced by a reiteration of the same accented vowel with different consonants, as in nice and might, war and fall, mate and shape, feel and need. It is a kind of imperfect rhyme, or rather a substitute for rhyme, and is especially common in Spanish poetry. All the old French poetry also was marked by assonance, not rhyme. 'The rule of assonance,' says Marsh, 'requires the repetition of the same vowels in the assonant words, from the last accented vowel inclusive. Thus man and hat, nation and traitor, penitent and reticence, are assonant couples of words of one, two, and three syllables respectively.' In Spanish verse the assonance is generally introduced only in alternate verses or the second of each couplet. Assonant or vowel rhymes occur frequently in modern English poetry.