What is assonance rhyme
The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (DRAE) defines rhyme as the "identity of vowel and consonant sounds, or only vowels, from the last stressed vowel in two or more verses". Thus, we understand by rhyme the coincidence of several sounds at the end of the last syllable of each of the verses of a poetic composition.
In this lesson from a PROFESSOR we are going to study one of the types of rhyme that exist in Spanish: the assonance rhyme, through a series of examples that clarify the explanation. Keep reading and you will get to know what is assonance rhyme.
We begin to describe what is assonance rhyme. As we said in the introduction to this lesson, the rhyme of a poem is the coincidence of different sounds at the end of a verse. Depending on the verses that rhyme, the rhyme of the text will be of one type or another.
The assonance rhyme is that type of rhyme according to which the matching sounds at the end of the syllable are vowel; that is, the vowels are the same while the consonants can be different from one verse to another.
In this regard, it is important to note that the rhyme is drawn from the stressed voweltherefore, not all the verses rhyme with each other. An example of assonance rhyme is the saying "Better a bird in hand / than a hundred flying", where the vowels "a" and "or" of "hand" and "flying", while consonants are different in a word and in other.
The assonance rhyme, also called imperfect rhyme, is opposed by definition to the consonant rhyme or also called as perfect rhyme, according to which all sounds rhyme, both vowel and consonant.
In relation to this, we must always bear in mind that rhyme is a literary and linguistic phenomenon that affects the acoustic plane; that is, it is perceived through the oral and aloud reading of the poetic composition. For this reason, rhyme is a very recurring element in lyric, but this does not mean that we cannot find different types of rhyme in other compositions such as sayings, set phrases, proverbs or even, tongue twister.
In this other lesson we will discover the types of verses according to their syllables.
Once we have seen the theoretical explanation of what the assonance rhyme is in Spanish, we are going to exemplify it with different fragments of lyrical compositions in which we can observe samples of how the assonance rhyme works within them.
The first of them belongs to one of the most universally known lyrical compositions, the Song of Mio Cid, whose rhyme, in this case, is between the vowels "e" - "a":
And entering Burgos, they saw it sinister, /He rocked mine Cid the shoulders and engrammed the youis /"Albricia, Alvar Fáñez, we are down from the ground, /more to grand ondra, we will return to Castiella.
Other example of assonance rhyme is the following poem by César Vallejo, in which the first two verses rhyme on the one hand ("e" - "a"), and the last two on the other (the vowels "o" - "o"):
I will die in Paris with a downpour, / a day of which I already have the memory. /I will die in Paris -and I do not run-, / maybe on a Thursday, as it is today, in the fall.
And finally, a couple more examples. The first by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: From the trails seek / on the hard rock (the vowels "u" - "a" rhyme) and the second by Jorge Luis Borges: A whiteness / gloom (The vowels "u" - "a" rhyme).
