Literary text is a space organized in a special way. His main task is to influence the emotional component of the reader’s personality, affect his spiritual world, and touch the innermost strings. The education of the beautiful, the awakening of love for the world, its beauty, aesthetic impact - these are the guidelines that the masters of the word of art strive for.
Linguistic imagery
One of these organizational “tools” of the literary text is assonance. We can come across examples of its use all the time, without even knowing what it is. Here are the famous lines of Alexander Blok: “Oh, spring without end and without edge / Without end and without edge dream ...” How do they sound? Long, free, chant. Like a breath of sweet, fresh spring air. What creates this amazing effect? Assonance. An example of how the repetition of the same vowel sounds can ennoble speech, makes it clear how effective it is. The emotional-visual images that are born thanks to this poetic device are bright, strong, really tangible. This creates the effect of presence, detail.
Artistic Opportunities
This is a remarkable assonance. Examples of textbook lines from the “Stranger” of the same Block clearly demonstrate the beauty of the language, the harmony of the Russian syllable, the sublime romance of the main character of the poem: “Breathing in spirits and fogs / She sits by the window”. Thus, in the fiction, and especially poetic text, not only the semantic, but also the phonetic side of speech plays an important role. To convey the mood, create an emotional message, expose the “nerve” of the verse, its energetic tension - all this can be an assonance. Examples of its organizing role prove the wide possibilities of this artistic device.
Origin of the phenomenon
As we have seen, the repetition of the same vowel sounds performs certain functions in speech. Masters of the word - who knowingly, who intuitively - often use the technique to give harmony to verses, a more vivid expression of associative-semantic relationships. Assonance in literature originates from Greek rhapsods, storytellers and musicians. The term came to our language from French and is translated as “consonance”. However, in Russian folklore, in folk songs, it has existed since time immemorial, since it was originally peculiar to our phonetic system. The classic assonance is poetry, or rather, Lermontov’s poetic lines from Borodino, reproducing the sound structure of the folk speech: “Our ears are on the top ...”.
To the question of terminology
However, the nature of this phenomenon has a dual character. In literary criticism it is customary to understand not only the use of identical vowels in words standing next to and adjacent lines, i.e., sound recording, but also the consonance of finite syllables, i.e. rhymes. True, it is proposed to take into account exactly the same vowels, while consonants may not coincide. Examples of assonance in verses in this regard are: “rain - wait”, “battle - love”, “give - yes”, etc. These are the so-called assonance or incomplete rhymes. Especially often they can be encountered in Mayakovsky's poetry.
Role of assonance
So, alliteration and assonance are examples of the important role that sound recording plays in prose, and especially in poetic speech. These techniques make it possible to highlight the semantic centers of literary texts, the so-called keywords. Here is the famous Yesenin's: "I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry ... / Withering with gold covered in gold ...". The confluence of vowels "e", "y / y" and the consonants "l", "h", "n" give the lines the famous softness and melody that Yesenin's poetry is famous for. And the incomplete rhyme “cry-engulfed” does not spoil the overall impression, but corresponds to it. Another striking example of the interaction of sound means is Marshak’s children's poems: “Across the blue sky / A roar of thunder rode through ...” The repetition of the sonorous consonants “p” - an echoing, sonorous, combined with the repeating “o”, imitates with great accuracy the sounds of a rampant element. In the context of the whole poem - cheerful, cheerful, cheerful, and these sounds are not perceived anxiously, wary, but life-affirming. And we have a completely different impression when reading the "Factory" of the Block. The very first phrase with the assonance “o” creates some kind of painful tension, unpleasant and ominous: “There are zholty windows in the house ...”. Further, as one plunges into a poetic text, the atmosphere of despondency and hopelessness intensifies. The initially set correct tone helped Blok to reveal the theme and idea of the work not only on a figurative, semantic level, but also through the sound envelope of keywords. What conclusion can be drawn from the above examples? Such that assonance is a powerful means of poetic linguistic expression.
Assonance and rhythm
It is characteristic that assonance is inherent primarily in the syllabic system of versification. Therefore, it also plays an organizational and determining role. After all, a certain number of vowels creates a rhythmic pattern of the lines separately and the verse as a whole. In this regard, the assonance can be compared with percussion instruments in music. In addition, the phenomenon of sound recording is interconnected with the longitude of vowels. Their coloring in certain moods is not constant. The environment of other sounds has an effect on them. Exemplary rhymes, increasingly popular in modern poetry, may not quite correspond to classical harmony, but give the rhythm and movement of the verse a certain dynamic, energy. And at the same time they can help convey, for example, the state of mental discord, dissonance, duality and even despair that overwhelm the author and his lyrical hero. This means that this artistic device, in addition to its main purpose, is almost a universal tool of “poetic cuisine”. It is multifunctional, therefore, from this point of view, the use of assonances was recommended by our poets such as Trediakovsky, Sumarokov, Derzhavin. The development of literary skill improved and hone the ability to use the sound organization of the text not only directly, but also indirectly. If you look into the creative laboratory of any talented writer, study his drafts, you can understand what a titanic work he carries out, choosing exactly those words, their sound shell, which would be optimal for this work.