— page 4

         Phillips’ wry comments provide a context for examining the current use of assonant end-rhyme among formalist poets. Phillips judges that, in many cases, more zeal than care is being applied to the production of sonnets.  By extension, we may infer the same is likely true with rhyming.  In other instances, avoidance of rhyme’s exactitude comfortably and appropriately fits with the turn of the millennium, when neat rhymes might seem largely out of step with life’s less neat actualities.

         Though the Yeats of Assonance has yet to emerge, assonant end-rhyme is currently attracting many poets’ impulses, to the degree that use of assonant end-rhyme would be more accurately described as commonplace than experimental; the word experimental implies a conscious decision to break with convention, while most of today’s assonant end-rhymes seem simply the products of poets’ natural inclinations.  American formalist poets appear to be using assonant end-rhyme as a tool for achieving a wide range of poetic effects. In other cases, poets simply are feeling increasingly comfortable in substituting an assonant end-rhyme when an attractive exact rhyme seems unavailable, much as earlier became acceptable practice with consonant slant rhyme.

         In presenting the following excerpts, I do not suggest that these poets have a conscious agenda of systematically incorporating assonant end-rhymes into their poetry.  However, the following examples indicate poets’ increasing comfort with employing occasional or, in the cases of some poets, frequent assonant rhyme-endings, certainly more so than would have been the case in earlier phases of American formalist poetry.

         The following lines are excerpted from Alfred Corn’s quasi-villanelle, “Shores” (The Various Light).  The lines’ assonant endings (distant/back, seed/between) contribute to the poem’s inwardly attentive lyric poise:

These seeded grasses, stirred by a distant
Earthquake, nod indicative heads to call back
What I was.  And am I alone here?  Silent...
...A stem flexes between root and seed.
I feel the elation, the torsion between
What I was and am.  I, alone here, silent...

         The following lines are excerpted from Henry Taylor’s sonnet, “One Morning, Shoeing Horses” (The Flying Change).  The assonant hoof/move line-endings soften and relax the homely portrayal of a man coaxing a horse to relax to be shoed.  Here I am reminded of Alfred Corn’s comment in The Poem’s Heartbeat that “a glancing quality, a leaner sound than full rhyme” provides a particular pleasure associated with a “sparer aesthetic”:

...touching his neck, turning his head to coax
a little weight away from the lifted hoof,
the flywhisk light and always on the move,
the soothing whispers tuned to hammer strokes...

         In a recent issue of Sparrow, Jared Carter uses assonant rhyme-ending (path/half) in the opening quatrain of his poem about Emily Dickinson (“Visit”). The word half beautifully does double sonic duty, with 1) its assonant partnering with path and 2) the l in half also echoing falling/calling. This sophisticated sonic interaction evokes a tone of quiet ghostliness:

Whatever day you choose, rain will be falling
out of the granite sky.  Whatever path
you take will make no sound.  A lone bird calling
through the double row of hemlocks seems half
silenced by the gathering mist...