Page 9 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes

Assonance is found more often in verse than in prose. It is used in (mainly modern)
English-language poetry, and is particularly important in Old French, Spanish
and Celtic languages.

The eponymous student of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita described it as “getting the rhyme wrong”.
Examples

1. The silken sad uncertain rustling of — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
each purple curtain

2. And murmuring of innumerable bees — Alfred Lord Tennyson, The
Princess VII.203

3. The crumbling thunder of seas — Robert Louis Stevenson

4. That solitude which suits abstruser — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost
musings at Midnight”

5. The scurrying furred small friars squeal — Dylan Thomas
in the dowse

6. Dead in the middle of little Italy, little — Big Pun, “Twinz”
did we know that we riddled two middle
men who didn’t do diddily.
7. It’s hot and it’s monotonous — Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in
the Park with George, It’s Hot
Up Here

8. Tundi tur unda — Catullus 11
9. On a proud round cloud in white high — E.E.Cummings, if a Cheer Rules
night Elephant Angel Child Should Sit
10. I’ve never seen so many Dominician — Will Smith, “Miami”
women with cinnamon tans
11. I bomb atomically-Socrates’ philosophies — Inspectah Deck, from the
and hypotheses can’t define how I be Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph”
droppin’ these mockeries

12. Up in the arroyo a rare owl’s nest I did — Jon Wayne, Texas Assonance
spy, so I loaded up my shotgun and
watched owl feathers fly
13. Some kids who played games about — C.S. Lewis, “The Voysge of the
Narnia got gradually balmier and balmier Dawn Treader
14. And the moon rose over an open field — Paul Simon, America

15. Yo, I’m a hot and bothered astronaut — Earl Sweatshirt of OFWGKTA
crashing while Jacking off to buffering –“Earl”
vids of Asher Roth eating apple sauce

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