Assonance, like alliteration and consonance, occurs in modern verse sporadically, almost accidentally, but with great frequency in all languages. As a regular principle of verse (in place of rime) it is characteristic of Spanish and of Old French; in English its deliberate use is very rare—the best example is perhaps the song "Bright, O bright Fedalma" in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy.

Minute analysis is tedious and unsatisfactory, often indeed misleading, but a single example will perhaps suggest some of the ways in which alliteration, consonance, and assonance are interwoven for harmonic effects that, not being altogether obvious, are felt rather than directly perceived. Similar experiments may be made by the reader with other passages. The opening stanza of Gray's Elegy, quoted on page 55, above, is remarkable for its smooth and quiet flow, symbolic of the atmosphere described by the words. How is this 'atmosphere' produced? or rather, what is there that produces in us this sense of appropriate atmosphere? In the first place, the lines are 5-stress and have the "long iambic roll," and the rimes are simple abab. Furthermore, the coincidence of prose and verse rhythms is noticeable; there are only three variations: wind in the second line, which is too important to occupy the metrically unstressed position, and o'er in the second line and the second and in the fourth, which are not quite strong enough to stand in the stressed position. By a sort of substitution or 'occult balance' the weakness of o'er is compensated by the slight overweight of wind. And the weakness of and is strengthened by the rhetorical pause after darkness. A rough approximation in semi-musical notation would give for the second line

◡—◡———◡◡◡—

There is a syncopation by which — — and ◡ ◡ combine (the natural syllabic length of o'er helping considerably) without destroying the fundamental rhythm. In the fourth line, instead of

◡—◡—◡—

we have

the pause being supported by the meaning as well as by the structure of the verse. Alliteration is appropriately inconspicuous; it is limited to plowman ... plods and the conventional weary way. The consonance is significant. The most frequently repeated consonantal sounds are: l 10, d 9, r[78] 8, th 6, n 6, and w 5; that is, of the seventy consonantal sounds (counting th as one, p and l as two sounds) in the stanza, thirty-five, or one-half, are the comparatively soft sounds l, r, th, n, w. From the point of view of the line, a tabulation shows two or more occurrences in each line of—

That is, there is a kind of RTLD motif throughout the stanza. The assonance is even more striking. The stressed vowel sounds (which are of course the most important[79]) line by line are as follows:[80]

Here the five ō-sounds and four ī-sounds and three ŭ^R-sounds are noticeable.

Now while no one would dream of saying that such a mechanical examination unlocks the mystery of this quatrain's music, it cannot be denied that the predominance of some sounds (especially those that are peculiarly suggestive) over others is significant. And certainly such a tabulation reveals parts of the mystery which are not plain even to the trained eye and ear.

The origin of rime is much disputed, but it occurs, at least sporadically, in the poetry of nearly all peoples, and is likely to have been a spontaneous growth arising from a natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great frequency of similar inflectional endings, and perhaps because it was not entirely consistent with the quantitative principle.[81] In the popular Latin verse, however, which was accentual, rime is found; and when, before the fall of the later Empire, quantity was gradually abandoned, rime returned as a regular feature of Latin verse. From thence it passed into the Romance languages—Provençal, Italian, French—where it was for a time rivalled by assonance; and finally, under French influence after the Conquest, it made its way into England. But it had not been unknown in earliest English verse, though it occurred only here and there, as in Greek and Latin.[82] And from the fact that rimes appear with greater frequency in the later than in the earlier Anglo-Saxon verse, as the native poets became more familiar with the rimed Latin hymns, one may feel sure that it would have developed into a staple of English verse independently of French influence. From the twelfth century until the introduction of blank verse by the Elizabethans, practically all English verse, except that which belongs to the Alliterative Revival (mainly in the north of England) of the second half of the fourteenth century, was rimed.

From the æsthetic point of view rime has been severely attacked and faithfully defended. A lively controversy was waged at the end of the sixteenth century between the Renaissance classicists, who of course condemned it, and the native rimers, but was brought to a peaceful conclusion by Samuel Daniels' A Defence of Rhyme in 1603. In a prefatory note to the second edition of Paradise Lost, Milton delivered an arrogant but ineffectual counterblast. Rime, he said, was "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them."

The chief arguments against rime are those mentioned by Milton, its tendency to conceal "wretched matter and lame metre," and the necessity it often forces upon poets of either twisting unpleasantly what they have to say or of adding irrelevant matter. Besides these there is also what Cowper called "clock-work tintinnabulum"—mere empty jingle. But all the arguments are double-edged. For although many inferior poets have imposed for a while on readers and critics by the superficial melody of rime alone, "wretched matter and lame metre" were never long successfully concealed by it. And although, as Hobbes wrote, rime "forces a man sometimes for the stopping of a chink to say something he did never think," it is a fact nevertheless that the second thought, induced by rime-necessity, "the rack of truest wits,"[83] is sometimes if not better than the first, at least a worthy and handsome brother to it. Whether rime be a hindrance, vexation, and constraint to the poet depends almost wholly on his mastery of the technique of verse. It is not always easier to write in unrimed measures, for, as Milton proudly implied, good blank verse is the most difficult of all metres. And although the jingle of like sounds may become tedious and mechanical if unskilfully handled—"to all judicious ears trivial and of no true musical delight," says Milton again—it has also proved a source of richness and beauty of sound; and it should never be forgotten that in the true æsthetic judgment of poetry sound plays a very important part.[84]

The satisfaction which the ear receives from rime at the end of a verse has been aptly compared to the pleasure we feel when a long arch of melody returns to the dominant and then the tonic. More elaborate is Oscar Wilde's praise of rime—"that exquisite echo which in the music's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of a real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance into the speech of the gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre."

The real problem in the arguments on rime is its fitness or unfitness in particular kinds of poetry. No rules or laws can be formulated; men have judged differently at different times; but it has been generally felt that shorter poems, inasmuch as they are in a way the concentrated essence of poetry, and must make their full impression almost instantaneously, require all the advantages of the poetic art. Tennyson's unrimed lyrics and Collins' Ode to Evening are unusual, though successful, experiments. For long poems, however, there is not this necessity of immediate effect. Here rime is sometimes a vexation, sometimes not. Justification lies in special circumstances. The classical French drama found it indispensable; English poetic drama gave it a trial in the seventeenth century and rejected it. Narrative poems which contain a large lyrical element, like the Faerie Queene and the Eve of St. Agnes, are, all agree, enhanced by the rime. But no one would now wish to have Paradise Lost in rimed verse, though it is clear from the publisher's note in 1668 that many readers at the time were 'stumbled' because it was not. On the other hand, we feel that Chapman's and Pope's Homer and Dryden's Virgil might have been better without rimes. Once more, it lies with the poet—and with the poem—to justify his use of rime or his refusal of it; if he is a good poet and his judgment is not warped by local or temporary conditions there will rarely be any doubt.

Rimes are called masculine when they consist of one syllable, as cries: arise; feminine when they consist of two or more syllables, as heedless: needless, beautiful: dutiful. When both vowel and following consonant agree the rime is called perfect, as might: right, solemn: column. When the preceding consonant as well as the vowel and following consonant agree the rime is called identical or echo rime, as reed: read, perfection: infection, ours: hours. When there is a difference either in the vowel sound or in the following consonantal sound, that is, when assonance or consonance is substituted for rime, the rime is usually said to be approximate or imperfect, as worth: forth, was: pass, gusht: dust (Coleridge). When the rime words look alike but are pronounced differently, they are called eye rimes, as war: car, brow: glow. Sometimes false rimes occur which have no similarity of sound or appearance, but are more or less sanctioned by earlier pronunciation or by custom, as high: humanity. Sometimes also unaccented syllables are rimed with accented syllables, as burning: sing.

Imperfect rimes of all sorts are used for various reasons. Compared with some languages, English is not very rich in rime words; and for many words which poets are prone to use, such as love, God, heaven, etc., few available rimes exist. When good rimes are few, older pronunciations are often resorted to, as the familiar love: move, blood: stood, north: forth. In reading the older poets we find many rimes which are now imperfect but were once entirely correct, as the eighteenth century fault: thought, join: shine, tea: way. On the other hand, the poet's carelessness or indifference is sometimes to blame for approximate rimes, as Gray's beech: stretch in the Elegy, and his relies: requires, Blake's lamb: name and tomb: come, Coleridge's forced: burst, Whittier's notorious pen: been, etc. But to dogmatize on a point like this is obviously very dangerous. Certain poets, especially among the moderns, may be said to choose imperfect rimes deliberately, both as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: blossom. Keats and Rossetti are noted for their free use of approximate rimes. The humorous rimes of Byron and Browning, among others, are of course in a different category.

Feminine rimes have been frequently rejected as undignified. They are, said Coleridge, "a lower species of wit"; and he instanced, not very justly, the couplet of Smart:

But again the right justification is successful use, and no one will deny that Swinburne's double and triple rimes have greatly enriched his verse and revealed to others unused possibilities of metre. Such rimes as grey leaf: bay-leaf were practically a new thing in 1865.[86]

Too evasive for explanatory analysis, almost too delicate and impalpable even for descriptive comment, are many of the best musical effects of fine poetry. The poet's ear and his sixth prosodic sense enable him to make his verse a perfect vehicle of his meaning and emotion. He chooses an appropriate stanza for his poem, discovers an unguessed power in some common measure, makes the words hurry or deliberately holds them back, varying the tempo with the spirit of the words, gives the pattern an unusual twist when the idea is unusual, startles or soothes by the sound as well as by the intellectual content of his lines—and accomplishes all these metrical nuances, not with the whip-snapping of the ring-master, but with the consummate art that conceals art. When his prosodic effects are obvious they lose their power; we can see how the trick is done and we do not marvel. But when we feel vaguely the haunting quality of a melodious line or the perfect metrical rightness of a phrase without knowing why the melody haunts us or the phrase just fits, then we both marvel and applaud; then the poet's gift, his divine authorization, is patent, and we recognize his superiority with awe.

Some of these effects have already been mentioned in the preceding paragraphs; but besides the 'tone-color' of assonance and consonance and rime proper there are also effects of pitch and of tempo and of repetition, and imitative effects, more or less concrete and explainable. It is true that many trained readers find subtleties of sound and suggestiveness where others find none, and also that many find rich beauties that the poet himself was not aware of and did not intend. This latter case may be accounted for in two ways: sometimes a reader is supersubtle and imagines embellishments that do not exist; and sometimes the poet builds better than he knows. His intuition, or inspiration, or whatever one chooses to call it, endows him with powers of whose complete functioning he is not at the time conscious. As readers must steer carefully between these two dangers, so also the poet has to avoid on the one hand repelling us by the appearance of a metrical device and on the other losing an effect which he intends but which may be too delicate to be seen or felt. No one probably ever missed the simple melody of Poe's

or the imitative effectiveness of Swinburne's

and though these beauties are obvious they are for most tastes not too obtrusive. But Tennyson's

is not so obvious, and there is danger of its escaping notice. One hears the line with increased pleasure after the imitation of sound is pointed out; but only the trained ear catches it at first.

This correspondence of sound and sense is called onomatopoeia. It may appear in a single word, as buzz, whack, crackle, roar, etc.; or a combination of imitative words, as Tennyson's

or a suggestive echo rather than direct imitation, as Shelley's

or a suggestion of motion rather than of sound, as Milton's sea-fish

and the

or an attempt to imitate the motion described, as Tennyson's picture of Excalibur when Sir Bedivere hurls it into the lake—

and Swinburne's more simple

or even the correspondence of a harsh line and a harsh thought, as Browning's famous

Sometimes there is obtained an effect of altered tempo; of which the best illustration, though hackneyed, is still Pope's clever couplets in the Essay on Criticism—

Examples of similar metrical skill may be found everywhere, especially among the more conscious literary artists, such as Shelley, Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Browning, too. A few worth study follow:

Something has already been said above on the nature and effects of pitch in spoken rhythm (pages 35 ff.). It is a constant factor of language, but its usual function is special emphasis or intensification. By itself it rarely dominates or determines the rhythm. And since the regular determinants of spoken rhythm are time and stress, it follows of course that pitch serves usually to reinforce these determinants.[89] But not always; for not only does pitch sometimes clash with rhythmic stress, but also it is sometimes a substitute for it. All three of these functions—strengthening, opposing, and replacing stress—are operative in verse.

In Shelley's line

a great deal of the effect is due to the combination of word accent and emphatic pitch in the syllable-ting-, so that not merely the one word but the one syllable dominates the whole verse. In such frequent conflicts of stress as "on the blue surface," where the prose rhythm is ◡◡ ̷ ̷◡ while the verse pattern has ◡_̷◡_̷◡, the so-called hovering accent (as it is usually described, with the theory that somehow the normal quantity of stress is divided between the and blue) is properly a circumflex accent, which in other words means pitch. Similarly in "If I were a dead leaf," the peculiar rhythm is to be explained as a balance of pitch against stress. And in that metrically notorious line of Tennyson's—

the chief irregularity or dissonance is the clash of pitch against stress in "own time." If the line read—

there would be an unusual arrangement of stresses and unstressed syllables, a peculiar syncopation, but no great difficulty.[90] Much simpler and clearer is the conflict of stress and pitch in such passages as

and Keats's

and Marvel's

The most interesting, and the rarest, effect of pitch in verse is its use as a substitute for stress. In the much-discussed first line of Paradise Lost—

there is a metrical stress on dis-of "disobedience." This is not so much, however, an intensification of an already existent secondary accent, as in, for example, Shelley's

as the substitution of pitch for stress.[93] The adaptability of language to metre appears very clearly in such a line as Paradise Lost, III, 130—

in which the first compound shows a conflict of pitch and stress ('self' having a pitch-accent, but occurring in an unstressed part of the line), while the second shows pitch taking the place of stress. The whole line, and indeed the whole passage, though not of high poetic value, is an admirable illustration of the Miltonic freedom of substitution and syncopation—pitch playing a very important rôle. One should read the lines first as prose, with full emphasis on the expressive contrasts; then merely as verse, beating out the metre regardless of the meaning; finally, with mutual sacrifice and compromise between the two readings, producing that exquisite adjustment which is the characteristic of good verse. There is a similar example of pitch and stress in the familiar

Repetition is a rhetorical not a metrical device, though it is employed with great effectiveness in verse as well as in prose:

But a frequent kind of repetition which is truly a prosodic phenomenon and which, though primarily an element of stanzaic form, has often an effect analogous to those just described, is the refrain. This may vary from the simple "My Mary" of Cowper's poem (see page 103, above) to the elaboration of such a stanza as Rossetti's Sister Helen:

in which the second, fifth, and sixth lines remain the same throughout the forty-two stanzas, and the second half of the last line as well.

Besides the prosodic variations and subtleties so far discussed, there are a great many peculiar rhythms, that is, unusual but harmonious changes from the set metrical pattern, modulations, adjustments and combinations of different melodies, which enormously en-rich the verse of a poem. As in music the ear at length tires of the familiar harmonies too often repeated, so the precise regularity of the metrical pattern too closely followed becomes tedious and almost demands variety. To be sure, a certain amount of variety results of necessity from the continual adaptation of ordinary language to the requirements of verse; but many of the examples of early heroic couplets and early blank verse are enough to show that this natural variety is too slight to satisfy the ear. The poet must exert a perpetual vigilance to prevent monotony. But on the other hand, only the highly cultivated ear appreciates the very unusual subtleties of rhythm, and the poet must therefore, unless he is willing to deprive himself of ordinary human comprehension and write esoterically for the "fit audience though few" (in Milton's proud phrase), limit himself to reasonably intelligible modulations. "It is very easy to see," says Mr. Robert Bridges, "how the far-sought effects of the greatest master in any art may lie beyond the general taste. In rhythm this is specially the case; while almost everybody has a natural liking for the common fundamental rhythms, it is only after long familiarity with them that the ear grows dissatisfied, and wishes them to be broken; and there are very few persons indeed who take such a natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction."[94] Some examples of these finer rhythms, in addition to the particular forms already given—rhythms not altogether 'learned,' but occasionally far-sought and peculiarly delicate—may be profitably examined. One should keep the metrical pattern constantly in mind as a test or touchstone of the variations. To classify or arrange these illustrations in special groups is difficult because so often the same line exemplifies more than one sort of variation, but the following more or less vague classes of modulation (substitution and syncopation) may be differentiated, and other peculiarities mentioned in passing.

The normal blank verse line calls for five stressed syllables and five unstressed syllables; but when two light syllables are naturally and easily uttered in the time of one, trisyllabic feet occur, sometimes with and sometimes without special effect—

When this extra syllable comes at the end of the line it is more noticeable; for if it is a weak syllable, it tends to give the line a falling rhythm, and if it is a heavy syllable, it distinctly lengthens the line, with a semi-alexandrine effect—

Sometimes there are two consecutive lines having such hypermetrical syllables—

Much more frequent, however, is the trisyllabic effect in which the number of syllables of a line remains constant, that is, in the heroic or 5-stress line does not exceed ten—

And the following line (Comus, 8) contains an extra syllable at the end, one in the middle, and also a trisyllabic effect at the beginning—

This last phenomenon, the trisyllabic (or dactylic, or anapestic) effect, is commonly described as an inversion—the 'rule' being given that in certain parts of the line the iamb is inverted and becomes a trochee. This explanation is convenient, but it is open to the objection of inaccuracy. It almost stands to reason that when a rising rhythm is established the sudden reversal of it would produce a harsh discordant effect, would practically destroy the rhythmic movement for the time being. So it is in music, at any rate,[95] whereas it is not so with these 'inverted feet' of verse. Therefore it seems more reasonable to scan such a line as that of Tennyson thus:

and the substitution is simply that of a triple rising (anapestic) for a duple rising (iambic) rhythm in the same time. Sud-is a monosyllabic foot, and the preceding rest is easily accounted for by the pause at the end of the previous line. In fact, this phenomenon is nearly always in immediate proximity to a pause either at the beginning of a line or in the middle. Very common is the movement—

Less simple are the following lines from Samson Agonistes—

Still more unusual are—

But in the last example Milton's pronunciation would give the second syllable of 'prostrate' a weak accent to support the metrical stress. That he was willing to take the extreme risk, however, and actually invert the rhythm of the last foot, appears from unequivocal instances in Paradise Lost:

In a short poem such lines as these last would presumably be unthinkable; probably Milton counted on the length of Paradise Lost to fix the rhythm so securely in the reader's ear that even this bold departure from the normal would seem a welcome relief. But it is both notable and certain that in a lyric measure the very same inversion does not seem unpleasantly dissonant—