Literary device
Consonance
Repetition of the same consonant sound in nearby words, anywhere in the word — not only at the start. The consonantal counterpart to assonance and a quieter cousin of alliteration.
Mechanism
Consonance repeats a consonant sound in two or more nearby words, in any position within those words — initial, medial, or final. Alliteration is the strict subset where the repetition lands on the initial consonant; consonance is the broader family that catches the others too: pitter-patter, blank and dark*, the sky-clad mountain*.
The shared sound is what matters, not the shared letter. Cat and kick consonate on /k/; can and city do not (the second is /s/). The repetitions also have to fall close enough that the ear holds them — consonants three lines apart do not consonate in any meaningful sense.
Impact
Consonance binds without announcing itself. Because the repeated consonant can sit anywhere in the word, the device is often heard before it is noticed — the line feels cohesive, weighted, particular to its own sounds, and only on a second reading does the consonant chain become visible. Many poets find that the cleanest consonance is the one the reader notices last.
It also gives a line texture without rhyme. A passage held together by consonance on /t/ or /k/ feels percussive in a way that does not depend on end-rhyme to register; a passage held together by /l/ or /m/ feels liquid in a way that vowel-music alone cannot quite produce. The consonant carries the line's grain.
In real lines
It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Owen's pararhyme — 'escaped' / 'scooped', 'groined' / 'groaned' — is consonance taken to the line-end position. The vowels mismatch deliberately; the consonants /sk-pt/ and /gr-nd/ carry the rhyme. The whole poem reads as if the rhyme is failing to land, which is the point.
Glory be to God for dappled things — For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Hopkins consonates on /l/, /p/, and /s/ across this opening — 'dappled', 'couple-colour', 'rose-moles all in stipple' carry /l/ through every line, while /p/ runs through 'dappled', 'couple', 'stipple'. The consonants bind the catalogue together without taking over the surface.
The classical name for the device is consonant rhyme when it appears at line endings — a vowel-mismatched, consonant-matched closing such as grand / grind or dell / dull. Wilfred Owen made this kind of rhyme — usually called pararhyme — into a structural feature of First-World-War elegy: pararhymes pull the ear toward a rhyme that never quite arrives, and the result is a line that sounds simultaneously musical and broken. Owen's "Strange Meeting" uses pararhyme as its rhyme scheme from end to end.
Where consonance differs from alliteration
Alliteration is consonance's narrower sibling: the same consonant in the initial (and usually stressed) position of nearby words. Consonance covers the same effect when the consonant lands anywhere else — at the end of one word and in the middle of the next, for instance — and the looser definition is often more useful when reading lines that feel sonically bound without the obvious front-of-word repetition that alliteration requires.
The relationship to assonance is the symmetric one: assonance repeats vowels, consonance repeats consonants. A line that does both — the bright kite climbed lightly — runs vowel-music and consonant-binding in parallel.
Across traditions the device travels well. Arabic poetic theory recognises consonance in the broader category of jinās (paronomasia, sound-similarity figures); Sanskrit poetics catalogue it under anuprāsa. In Old English alliterative verse the line was held by initial-consonant repetition, but contemporary English consonance often runs medial or final, particularly in free-verse lyric.
Try this
Write four lines describing a single physical action — closing a door, walking on gravel, lighting a match, breaking a cup — held together by consonance on one consonant. The consonant must appear in at least three of the four lines, and at least once in a non-initial position.
- No two of the four lines may use the consonant in the same word position (initial, medial, final).
- Do not also alliterate the same consonant — the device should be consonance, not its narrower sibling.
- At least one line must place the consonant on a word that carries the line's meaning, not on a function word.
Further reading
- Consonance (opens in a new tab) — Poetry Foundation
Definition with attention to the distinction between alliteration, consonance, and assonance.
- Consonance (opens in a new tab) — Academy of American Poets
Plain-English overview with examples and a note on Owen's pararhyme.