The craft
Rhyme
Rhyme is a promise that sound will come back. Kept too neatly, it turns a poem into a jingle. Broken too soon, it sounds like a failure of nerve. The skill is to make the chime feel like a discovery rather than a tax.
What rhyme is doing
Rhyme binds two moments in time. When “night” finds “light,” the mind sets them in a relation that grammar did not require: opposition, completion, joke. That is why the last word of a rhyming line is so expensive. Do not spend it on “the” and a desperate noun. Spend it on the word the poem was always heading towards.
Rhyme also aids memory — which is why ballads, hymns and advertising use it. If you are writing to be heard once in a room, rhyme is a courtesy. If you are writing to be reread, it is a structure of thought.
Kinds of rhyme
- Perfect (full) rhyme: identical vowel and closing consonant, different onset — light / night, claim / flame. The expected pleasure.
- Slant (half, near) rhyme: related but not identical — room / storm, prove / love. Dickinson’s native tongue. It keeps the ghost of pattern without the nursery chime.
- Assonant rhyme: shared vowel only — lake / fate.
- Consonant rhyme: shared closing consonants — leaf / life.
- Eye rhyme: looks like a rhyme in spelling, is not one in modern speech — love / move, wind / find. Once these were full rhymes; language moved. You may still use them as a historical flavour or a wry almost.
- Identical rhyme: the same word twice. Usually a fault; occasionally a hammer.
- Feminine (double) rhyme: two syllables, unstressed at the end — dying / flying. Comic in English unless you are careful; Byron made a career of not being careful.
- Internal rhyme: chime inside the line, not only at the end. A secret metre of sound.
Schemes you can hear
We label end-rhymes with letters: first sound is A, next new sound B, and so on. Explore a few rooms:
The kettle ticks against the painted tile,a moth keeps writing circles on the lamp.I mean to work, and sit like this a while,and let the evening settle, cool and damp.
Rhyme that drives, rhyme that serves
The beginner’s disaster is letting the rhyme dictionary choose the meaning. If you need a rhyme for “love” you will be offered above, dove, glove, of (if you cheat). None of these is automatically false; all of them are automatically suspected. Write the sense first in unrhymed lines, then see which end-words already lean towards each other. Swap a synonym until a true chime appears. If none does, use slant rhyme or change the scheme. Never invert a sentence into eighteenth-century porridge to rescue a couplet.
When not to rhyme
Do not rhyme because you think that is what makes it a poem. Plenty of the last century’s best poems do not rhyme at all. Rhyme is a poor substitute for image, and a worse substitute for a turn. If your subject is awkward, unfinished, or bureaucratic, unrhymed verse (or jagged slant rhyme) may tell the truth that a neat couplet would varnish.
Conversely, do not refuse rhyme because it is unfashionable. Fashion is not a craft. A villanelle, a ballad, a children’s curse, a toast at a wedding — some poems want to be remembered after one hearing. Give them the technology that was invented for that.
If you want the whole scaffolding, go to Traditional forms. If you want the art of refusing it, go to Free verse.