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         Thus, at the twentieth century’s beginning, rhymed poetry had two stepchildren: consonance and assonance.  The two were identical twins insofar as the low opinion afforded them as instruments of end-rhyme. Both were relegated to the status of “translator’s rhymes.”  During the Modernist period, one of these twins was adopted into legitimacy, while assonance continued to languish in disrepute.  However, even Clement Wood, from his 1930s perspective of prosodic purity noted, “Unpopular so far, at any time assonance may achieve a popularity in English versification.”

         Indeed, just as Vaughan and others had laid the preliminary groundwork for greater acceptance of consonant end-rhyme, some degree of groundwork had been laid for the emergence of assonant end-rhyme. For example, George Eliot made early attempts in this direction, as in the following excerpt with its assonant end-rhymes of blackness/dances and roaming/floating:

Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness,
Lithe as panther forest-roaming,
Long-armed naead, when she dances,
On the stream of ether floating...

(The Spanish Gypsy)

         While Emily Dickinson is recognized as one of the pioneers in legitimizing consonant slant-rhyme line-endings, it should also be noted that she often relied upon assonant end-rhymes as a means of infusing her poetry with further variety, liveliness and unpredictability.  Assonant line-endings were tools for many of her most haunting prosodic effects.  Assonant end-rhyme is present in one version of her portrayal of  Death as a gentleman caller.  When we recall the degree to which readers of her day were unaccustomed to assonant end-rhymes, those readers would have heard her long a-sounds (played/grain) as intoning a dream-like, almost senile imbalance:

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done —
We passed the fields of gazing grain —
We passed the setting sun —

         A consonant sound tends to be stronger and more assertive than vowel sounds; hence, the weaker assonant end-rhyme in the above excerpt sounds the note of human fragility and evanescence, within Dickinson’s often-visited context of eternity.  In The Poem’s Heartbeat, Alfred Corn describes Dickinson’s use of assonant line-endings as providing some of her poems with a dissonant quality: “The incomplete, assonantal rhymes might be read as reinforcing a sense of mismatch, of separation from divine assurances...the assonantal rhymes appeal to the ear as part of the poem’s dissonant texture.”

         Dickinson also employed distant assonance (awe/fair, bed/break) to instill a sense of breathy sacredness and reverential hush in the following well-known passage:

Ample make this bed —
Make this bed with awe —
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and fair....

         Consonance and alliteration often bounce the reader to a surface, rather than the reader sinking into the poem’s sound, e.g., Vachel  Lindsay’s, “Booth led boldly with his big, bass drum.”  By contrast, Dickinson’s stanza lacks the neat consonant click of closure.  She uses vowel sounds quietly to infuse vocalic recessiveness, their inexactness harkening back to the preverbal and to the moan that emerges from dream-sleep.