What is an Alliteration?
Alliteration can be defined as the repetition of a similar initial consonant sound in closely connected syllables within a group of words. The word ‘alliteration’ can trace its origin to the Latin word ‘littera’, which means ‘letter of the alphabet. Alliteration is a poetic device used in a lot of prose and poetry all around the world, in multiple languages.
The sounds need not be written the same way for it to be an alliteration. The sounds ‘z’ and ‘s’ sound very similar in speech, but are written as different letters. They can be used in the same alliteration. There is a subset of alliteration, called symmetrical alliteration. This requires the words at the end, then at the second end, to have the same or matching sounds.
Some popular forms of poetry that use alliteration are ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Alliteration is used for rhetoric, to make the audience feel some urgency or some other emotion. As sounds are stressed repeatedly, the audience feels the emotion even deeper.
What is a Consonance?
Consonance is a literary device that repeats consonant sounds at any part of closely connected words with different vowel sounds. A vowel sound counterpart to consonance is assonance. Words like ‘coming home’ and ‘Cosmo Kramer’ can be called consonance. A consonance has two special cases; alliteration and sibilance.
The origin of the word ‘consonance’ can be traced to Latin. The word ‘consonare’ changed to ‘consonant’, which translates to ‘sounding together’. This was adopted by the English language and evolved into the word ‘consonance’, which came to hold the meaning it does today.
A consonance can occur in the beginning, middle, or the end of a word, and it occurs in repetition. The main part of consonance is the sounds made by the consonants, not the letters. This is used as a poetic device as it makes the poem better. The poems ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S.Eliot and ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Stevie Smith make use of this. Some common examples of consonance are ‘tea and toast’ and ‘better late than never’.
Difference Between Alliteration and Consonance
- A consonance uses the repetition of consonants at any part of closely connected words to create a literary device. An alliteration, however, stresses repeated parts of words that are in the starting of words.
- For an alliteration, the repeated sound must be at the beginning of a word, or a stressed part. For a consonance, the consonant sound could be at any part of the word.
- An alliteration is a part of the broader literary device category that is a consonance.
- The sound in alliteration could be a vowel or a consonant sound, whereas the sound in consonance needs to be a consonant sound.
- Consonance is more distinguishable when the repeated sounds occur at the end of words, whereas alliteration is noticed better when it is at the beginning of words.
Comparison Between Alliteration and Consonance
| Parameters of Comparison | Alliteration | Consonance |
| Whole/Part | Alliteration is a special case of consonance. | Consonance is the bigger category of which alliteration is a part. |
| Meaning | When a stressed sound is repeated at the start of the word, it is alliteration. | Consonance is the repetition of consonant words that are closely connected. |
| Stressed part | The sound is stressed at the beginning of a word. | The consonant sound is stressed at any part of the word. |
| Vowel/Consonant sound | The sound that is stressed could be a vowel or a consonant sound. | The stressed sound can only be a consonant sound. |
| Example | The wicked witch of the west. Betty bought a bit of butter. | I thought I sent a silent tweet. Mike likes his new bike. |