Literary consonance

Consonance is a form of rhyme involving the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds differ (e.g., coming/home, hot/foot, march/lurch). Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance.

In poetry, consonance can be used as an internal sound effect, for example, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day", from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". In rhyming technique, consonance is an element of imperfect rhyme or half rhyme, also called "slant rhyme", "near-rhyme" or "off-rhyme", in which "the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that precede them differ, as in 'add-read', 'bill-ball', and 'born-burn'."

Whereas consonance can repeat a consonant sound at any location in two or more stressed syllables, alliteration is a special case where the repeated consonants must occur at the beginning of words, as in "few flocked to the fight" or "around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran". "Consonantal alliteration" is usually distinguished from other types of consonance and has different effects, for instance, it can increase the memorability of a passage and is often employed in slogans.

Another specialized type of consonance is sibilance, the repetition of hissing sibilant sounds such as and , as shown in the following line from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven": "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." (This example also contains assonance around the "ur" sound.) The word "sibilance" itself illustrates consonance.