resemblance of sound between syllables of nearby words, arising particularly from the rhyming of two or more stressed vowels, but not consonants (e.g. sonnet, porridge), but also from the use of identical consonants with different vowels (e.g. killed, cold, culled)

the use of assonance throughout the poem creates the sound of despair

alliterative assonances such as ‘fail’ and ‘fall’ are very common in Old English poetry