Dear Unknown Friends:

Fifty years ago Eli Siegel wrote two essays on assonance in poetry. Assonance is a matter that is part of literary technique, literary history. But Aesthetic Realism shows that this technical matter is also urgently about everyone’s life.

The essays arose from a request that the poetry magazine New York Quarterly made of Mr. Siegel. Editor William Packard asked him to write about assonance for an upcoming issue. Mr. Siegel did so, and sent the journal “Assonance Is Like This”—which appears in its Spring 1970 number. We are grateful to publish now the other essay he wrote at the time: the magnificent “Assonance Is Considered.”

I have said that Eli Siegel is the greatest of literary critics. It is he who explained what beauty is, and made clear that art—far from being an offset to life—has the answers in outline to the life-questions of every person and nation. “All beauty,” he showed, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In the essay published here, Mr. Siegel shows that assonance is a making one of the tremendous opposites Sameness and Difference.

It has been hard for scholars to get to a satisfactory description of assonance, because assonance seems to have so much variation yet also seems so distinctive. In Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, we have such phrases as: “resemblance of sound in words or syllables” and “used as an alternative to rhyme in verse.” But here is the first sentence of the companion essay to the one we’re now publishing; Eli Siegel gets to the very center of what assonance is as he writes in the Spring 1970 New York Quarterly:

A beginning description of assonance is: the using of the sameness and difference of sound in syllables for poetic music and, therefore, poetic effect.

And he gives, in that companion essay, three specific meanings of assonance as it exists in poetry.

And Why?

As I said, we are with something that can seem very technical, and is. Yet instances of assonance have affected people mightily, and are immortal—and Why? The chief reason is: we need to feel that sameness and difference can be one, can be beautiful. We need this for our happiness—and for people to be decent to each other, and for nations to be sane. That technical thing, assonance, is an answer to the question Can we see our difference from a person, yet feel we are like that person?

All the cruelty in history has come because people have wanted to see others as too different from themselves. Very much, they have attributed spurious difference to persons of another skin tone, background, nation. This making people centrally unlike oneself—not wanting to see that there’s rich likeness too—is part of contempt. And contempt is what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the ugliest thing in the human mind; it is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

Racism, in its hideousness, is about sameness and difference. And for racism really to end, for people to see each other truly, we have to see as art sees: we have to see that those opposites, sameness and difference, can be beautifully one. We have to see that our distinction does not come because we can make persons falsely different from ourselves and feel superior to them. Our importance, our real individuality, will come from the seeing of others and ourselves as simultaneously distinct and grandly related, alike.

Aesthetic Realism makes clear for life itself the message that is in all art and is saliently in assonance. That message is: the difference and sameness of things are in a great, kind drama. In terms of human relations, the message becomes: Yes, every person is different—we are just ourselves; there is no one exactly like us—and yet we are related to everyone in the world, everyone who ever lived.

As I’ve been describing, a false dealing with sameness and difference, which has been so horrible in relation to race and ethnicity, has also been much present in how a person sees all people not oneself, and the world not oneself. A question persons have been asked in Aesthetic Realism consultations is, “Do you feel you are more like other people or more different?” I have never known anyone who answered “More like.”

Because people have made themselves unjustly different from, unrelated to, other people, they feel lonely. Because they’ve lessened other people, they feel ashamed. So a contemptuous dealing with sameness and difference, which is in all brutality, is also the cause of humanity’s pervasive loneliness and self-dislike.

In Economics Too

The economics of the world has been afflicted by a sleazy, dishonest notion of sameness and difference. This notion is at the basis of the profit system—in which a person sees one’s fellow humans not as having a deep likeness to oneself, not as having feelings, and hopes, and rights as real as one’s own, but as existing to aggrandize oneself financially. You cannot exploit a person—you cannot think of a worker in terms of How little can I get away with paying him? or a customer in terms of How much money can I squeeze out of her?—if you see that person as having the same reality and depth that you yourself have. This landmark statement from Eli Siegel’s James and the Children is very much about sameness and difference: “As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.”

A False Likeness

As we make ourselves wrongly different, we can also give ourselves a wrong likeness to certain people. We can want to “fit in” as a means of not having to think deeply and exactly. We can take on the opinions, and even the manner, of those we see as “the right people” in order to make ourselves feel important.

In the field of love, there is a tremendous mistake made every day which involves a false likening. Right now, without being aware of it, a person is, in her mind, turning the “loved one” into an extension of herself. Gillian has conquered James; she has married him; and she sees herself (though she wouldn’t say so) as owning him. She does not see him as a full person having to do with the whole world, but as hers. And if he suddenly shows in some inescapable way that he has an approach to things different from hers, she is angry.

James makes the same mistake with Gillian. They’ve joined together as a team against the big world each sees as displeasingly different from himself or herself. Yet as each has made unreal the fact that the other comes from that big different world and has the world in him or her—they’ve robbed each other of meaning and so they’re bored with each other.

While sameness and difference are opposites—great, eternal, aesthetic opposites—they have to do with all the other opposites. And one way is this: everything, everyone, is related to us, like us, because it or she or he has the same opposites we do. Mr. Siegel explains, for example:

Does not a sheet of paper in its wideness and narrowness bring some essential likeness to us, to ourselves? Is not a twig, on or off a branch, in its simplicity and complexity, continuity and discontinuity, an abstract and tangible presentation of what we are?…A card is flexible and firm. We are flexible and firm, and we mean to do a better job as to the relation of these two adjectives.

Now we come to Eli Siegel’s essay, great in literary criticism, “Assonance Is Considered.” I have commented a little, a very little, on why it matters so much.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Assonance Is Considered

By Eli Siegel

1. The Recent Change

The highpoint of assonance for English readers was in 1921 when, with the publication of Poems by Wilfred Owen, readers had a chance to see the power, grace, and everlastingness of Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” When they came to the lines

—it seemed that frowned and friend, as the last words of lines, were better than some other words; and killed and cold, as seeming rhymes, looked right too.

Rhyme is the complete thing in sound, while assonance hovers about completeness with varying degrees of hovering. There certainly is a difference between Task/Frisk, Task/Wound, and Task/Bask.

Task and frisk are in assonance, accenting a change of vowel. Task and bask, however different the meanings, are rhymes. And task and wound have some relation which can be used musically, but this relation is hardly that of rhyme or assonance.

And then there are other relations task has which can be found and can be used. Task and taps seem rather close but, differently from task and frisk, accent consonantal differences. And if we have the couplet

—these lines are hardly elegant. The lines are not elegant, and the thought can be seen as not elegant, and the “rhyme” of task and relapse would have made an editor of the 1850s put aside with hostile feverishness the manuscript containing it.

Whatever can be said of this editor, assonance is at its high time these days. Rhymes are looked on as if they were of another, more placid period. To rhyme is to conform. To use assonance is to gambol individually in the fields of sound, metaphor, the Muses, poetry, metre, or anything else you see as appropriate—which has fields.

Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” with its great beginning—

—has been seen almost in itself as a justification for the power and need of assonance. Owen used assonance elsewhere, but it does not have the momentous and perdurable power in these other poems that it has in “Strange Meeting.”

And I have just used another way of getting sameness and difference into verse, though prose is what is going on at the present moment. “Perdurable power” in the sentence above is alliteration. Piers Plowman, the title of the most noted poem in alliteration, illustrates a mode of sound that dear Anglo-Saxons and Middle English people were so fond of.

But, just as some rhyme is better than other rhyme and some alliteration is better than other alliteration (certain instances of Swinburnean alliteration are unendurable in their compulsive excess), so assonance, akin both to rhyme and alliteration, has its ups and downs, as everything else has that exists or lives at all.

For example, in his autobiography, on an early page, Mark Van Doren has the assonance of whispered and prospered. As assonance, this is perfectly permissible, but there isn’t a poem that goes with it.

Elsewhere Van Doren has other examples of assonance which the present writer can look upon with neither fervor nor favor. (These last two nouns are in assonance.)

Perhaps the most noted contemporary employer of assonance is John Crowe Ransom. His work certainly has got esteem, but I think that the grimness and technical accomplishment of Mr. Ransom is ahead of his earth-given relation to poetry. If Mr. Ransom were more of a thrush, had more self-impelling and world-impelling naïveté, his assonance would be better accompanied. Something supreme in a poem is the feeling that goes with it and which it comes from; and the poem, the Muses have said, is the boss of assonance. Sometimes, it seems, with Mr. Ransom and with others, it is the assonance that is running the poem.

I do not wish to demur everlastingly, but I think that the preponderance of assonance over the main force in a poem is present delicately in the work of W.S. Merwin.

If I say that Emily Dickinson uses assonance so that the profound slanting way she saw the world was kept to truly, then I am saying what I think I have seen.

The purpose of assonance is to present the world as sound accurately and wryly, on a slant, with some astringent twist. The world heard and seen centrally, but with an elbow-movement of the soul, is to be seen in many lines of Emily Dickinson.

Here is a stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “I Dreaded That First Robin So.” Such an uncontemporary title! But then, as you look at it, you feel it is contemporary too. Here is the stanza:

Lord, an editor of long ago might have said, what relation has daffodils to fashion and gown to own? And the answer could have been: Sir, it is assonance which this lady in Amherst finds herself impelled to use.

And in a poem called “The Tint I Cannot Take Is Best,” we have this stanza, which has pleased ever so many persons in recent years:

Dominion and discontent are really like each other somehow—isn’t there the on sound in both? And Soul and tell, both strong, assertive monosyllables, have the l sound noteworthily, while the vowel sound, different, is distinctive to both, central in both.

And here we may come to the two kinds of assonance in the western world. The vowel sounds in Soul and tell are clearly different, but in that poem of the late eleventh century (likely) which has remained—the Chanson de Roland—the assonance comes through the repetition of a vowel.

2. Illustration of the Past

The English can be this*:

3. Appraisal

The change from the vowel assonance of the Chanson de Roland to the assonance of Dickinson and Owen is an important thing in civilization. It would be well to show why.

The chief reason is that the assonance of pine and eyes—like rhyme—shows the world stable; with a center, felt. The assonance of Dickinson and Owen—rich, mesh—has the world leaning, askew, askance, awry, irregular, tippy, and so on.