Consonance

Consonance is "a form of rhyme involving the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds differ," with stock pairs like coming and home or march and lurch. Placement separates the family: consonance "can repeat a consonant sound at any location in two or more stressed syllables," while "alliteration is a special case where the repeated consonants must occur at the beginning of words," and consonance is "the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance." Sibilance, the hissing run in Poe's "silken sad uncertain rustling," is one named subspecies.

For the prose writer consonance is the quietest of the sound figures: it works at the ends and middles of words, where alliteration announces at the front, and it is "an element of imperfect rhyme or half rhyme," binding line endings without the full chime. It shares with assonance the risk of prose in love with its own sound.