by Mel Mcintyre

Created on: March 21, 2009

Dissonance is a literary device used in poetry and prose to counteract any assonance and give the text variety. It is, in fact, a deliberate attempt to avoid assonance, which is the repetition of vowel sounds.

Assonance occurs when vowels are repeated from word to word, such as in the phrase "John took a look at the book". In this example, the "oo" sound is the same. In order to add dissonance, the author might write "John took a peek at the text", which removes the assonance and gives the phrase a harsher, edgier feel.

Examples of assonance and dissonance can be found in well-known poetry and literature, such as in this excerpt from Shakespeare's Sonnet 144:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still

You'll notice how the author uses assonance in the words loves, of and comfort (the "o's") and dissonance (the "a's") in the words have, and, and despair. Here's how Wallace Stevens applied dissonance in his poem The Emperor of Ice-Cream:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

You'll notice on the third line that each of the "u's" creates a different vowel sound, which is effective following a lot of assonance in the words big, cigars, bid, whip, and in. It's important to remember that dissonance and assonance go hand in hand, and one complements the other. Walt Whitman's poem To a Locomotive in Winter shows us just how potent the combination can be:

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,

At first glance the stanza's opening line would appear to be completely dissonant, until you spot the relationship between the "i" in fierce and the "y" in beauty. It's a short line but a powerful one, cramming as many dissonances as possible between two assonant points. The second line is equally as forceful, making use of no less than six different vowel sounds.

William Blake makes use of dissonance in The Tyger, one of the Songs of Experience and his most often quoted poem:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Note the last two lines of the stanza in particular, where the assonance of the "o" sounds in immortal and or, and of the "i" sounds in eye and thy, are embedded in a forest of dissonance.

Dissonance can be used to interrupt the flow of rhythm, to jar the reader and make him or her pay closer attention, and to add variety to the internal structure of the words themselves. It's just one of the many devices good writers make use of to create well-crafted and highly polished works of art.

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