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         Charles Martin amusingly ventures into the vocalic in “Leaving Buffalo” (Room for Error).  In this poem of Italian quatrains in tight, traditional rhymes, Martin suddenly veers into a sonically complicated partnering of manners/savannas, the two words blending both assonant and consonant echoes of one another. Thus, the stanza ends with a heavy, longing vowel-sigh of savanna’s a-sound (a sigh for the “apple-breasted women”?), a softer note as compared to the poem’s otherwise metronomic regularity of perfect rhymes:

“...When what will last of us are our manners?”
They called abhorrent what was merely lewd,
But dreamt of apple-breasted women: nude,
Bronze-skinned lovelies of the far savannas....

         In the following excerpt from “The End of the Season” (Daily Horoscope), Dana Gioia uses assonant line-endings (lake/away, clear/streets) to create a softening, quieting effect.  The stanza’s only perfect rhyme-pairing is tonight/starlight, which frames the stanza, the rhyme of this pair being greatly muted and softened by being separated by four intervening lines, this separation producing a delicate lyric echo.  Internal rhymes and assonance enhance quiet musicality. The reader might notice resemblances between the use of this excerpt’s assonance and general style and the earlier-discussed passage from Weldon Kees, indicating Kees’ influence on Gioia:

I wanted to tell you how I walked tonight
down the hillside to the lake
after the storm had blown away
and say how everything suddenly seemed so clear
against the sparkling, rain-soaked streets
cold and bright as starlight.

         Molly Peacock often is free in positioning rhymes in varying stanzaic positions within single poems, combining assonant end-rhymes with slant consonant end-rhymes and perfect rhymes.  In fact, Peacock goes further than relying on assonant rhymes, often choosing imperfect assonance, as the following excerpts demonstrate. This fluidity of types and positions of rhymes combines with chattiness of tone, resulting in a texture which might be described as verse longing to be prose.  Her poem “Painted Desert” (Take Heart) is for the most part traditionally rhymed throughout, though the opening quatrain uses the imperfect assonant pairing of most/wolf, which sets a normative rhyme for the poem that is less literary than might have been the case if all four lines were tightly rhymed:

Connivers are the victims I hate most,
feeling close to them in mindset.  Take this
Navaho below this sign, “See Live Pet Wolf.”
Oh, the wolf is there all right, chained, while his...

         In “Say You Love Me” (Take Heart), Peacock writes tercets in which perfect rhymes, consonant slant rhymes and assonant end-rhymes all swirl, mirroring the confusion of the poem’s tempestuous situation in which the poet as a girl is portrayed being emotionally abused by her father.  Assonant end-rhyme abounds, playing off of perfect rhymes: of/was/above, because/jaws/love, me/fifteen/she, been/mean/knee, age/gazed. Peacock attempts to strike a tonal balance between realistic description which is almost journalistic and a sound distantly reminiscent of the balladic. The imperfect assonant end-rhymes help the poem remain closer to earthy realism than might be the case if the narrative were accented more consistently with perfect rhymes:

...by defeat into a cardboard image, untrue,
unbending.  I was surprised I could move
as I did to get up, but he stayed, burled...