consonance

Definition:

Broadly, the repetition of consonant sounds; more specifically, the repetition of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.

See also:

• Ten Titillating Types of Sound Effects in Language
• Alliteration
• Assonance
• Homoioteleuton
• Onomatopoeia
• Rhyme
• Tautophony

Etymology:

From the Latin, "agree" + "sounds"

Examples and Observations:

• "The repetition of final consonant sounds, as in 'First and last,' 'odds and ends,' 'short and sweet,' 'a stroke of luck,' or Shakespeare's 'struts and frets' is CONSONANCE."
  (Laurence Perrine, Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Harcourt, 1978)



• ’T was later when the summer went
  Than when the cricket came,
  And yet we knew that gentle clock
  Meant nought but going home.
  
  ’T was sooner when the cricket went
  Than when the winter came,
  Yet that pathetic pendulum
  Keeps esoteric time.
  (Emily Dickinson, "’T was later when the summer went")



• Consonance . . . is quite often employed in rap, whether to underscore rhyme or to offer a kind of rhyme substitute. Lauryn Hill's lines from the Fugees 'Zealots' show consonance at work alongside rhyme:

  Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
  Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
  Many styles, More powerful than gamma rays
  My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays

  Consonance with one sound ('eck') shifts to multisyllable rhymes with another sound ('projectile,' 'Gentile,' 'percentile') and then another ('gamma rays,' 'grammar pays,' 'Santana plays'). The result is as intricate as it is effortless."
  (Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. BasicCivitas, 2009)



• "[In Seamus Heaney's poem "Ocean's Love to Ireland"] the plosives i and k also serve to slow our reading, as do the alliteration and consonance of the b's and d's that begin here and continue in the second through fifth lines:

  Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
  As Ireland is backed to England
  
  And drives inland
  Till all her strands are breathless.

  We picture a deliberate, proud, unfrenzied man using language and physical strength to overpower the maid."
  (Karen Marguerite Moloney, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope, University of Missouri Press, 2007)



• Great, or good, or kind, or fair,
  I will ne'er the more despair;
  If she love me, this believe,
  I will die ere she shall grieve;
  If she slight me when I woo,
  I can scorn and let her go;
  For if she be not for me,
  What care I for whom she be?
  (George Wither, "Shall I Wasting in Despair)



• A Quietness distilled
  As Twilight long begun,
  Or Nature spending with herself
  Sequestered Afternoon--
  (Emily Dickinson, "As imperceptibly as Grief")

Pronunciation: KON-se-nens

Also Known As: half rhyme, slant rhyme