Rhyme, Alliteration, Assonance
The old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraph, not in lines or stanzas. Rhyme, alliteration assonance and consonance are a way of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in the poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element.
Rhyme consists of identical (hard rhyme) or similar (soft rhyme) sounded placed at the ends of lines or at predictable locations within lines. Language vary in the richness of their rhyming structure; Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming structure permitting the maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem.
The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms in English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme. The degree of richness of language's rhyme structure plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language.
Alliteration and Assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interview meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expect the instant instance of alliteration to occur.
This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European Poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rhyming structures.
Assonance where the use of similar vowel sound within a word rather than similar sound at the beginning or end of a word, widely used in skaldic poetry, but goes back to the Homeric Epic.
Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, Assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese Poetry and so is useful in translating Chinese poetry.
Consonance, where a consonant sound is repeated through, oughta sentence without putting the sound only at the front of a word. Consonance provokes a more subtle effect than alliteration and so is less useful as a structural element
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