Rhyme

11 Key excerpts on "Rhyme"

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  Listening to Poetry

  An Introduction for Readers and Writers

  • Jeremy Trabue(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Chemeketa Press

    (Publisher)

  At the other extreme, there are also many people who think of nonrhyming poetry as “modern” and rhyming poetry as “traditional.” This is also inaccurate. Old English poetry did not Rhyme at all, nor did much poetry in Middle English. UnRhymed verse has been part of modern English right from the beginning. Seventeenth-century poet John Milton wrote a blistering attack on Rhyme in his introduction to Paradise Lost (which does not Rhyme). And most early English dramatic verse is mostly written without any Rhyme (though some short rhyming passages do appear in Shakespeare and other renaissance drama).

  The role and importance of Rhyme in poetry was much debated and contested in Milton’s time, and it still is today. UnRhymed poetry is more common, but rhyming poetry is alive and well. Rhyme is not omnipotent or omnipresent. Rhyme does not define “poem.” However, it is a part of poetry, and it’s here to stay.

  Rhyme is one of those subjects for which the phrase “deceptively simple” was created. Most preschoolers recognize and can give examples of rhyming words. Most could easily recognize the Rhymes in this list:

  bed / embed / said / read bay / weigh / astray / they wing / asking / unifying / testifying lady / bee / abbey / tabby

  But what exactly makes these words “rhyming”? The entire ending syllable is not exactly the same in each one because the ending syllables may start with different consonant sounds. The spelling is certainly not the same in each one. However, the ending syllable after its initial con sonant sound is the same. Notice that they don’t have to have the same number of syllables, either, as long as that final syllable sound after its initial consonant is identical.

  Rhyme is the repetition of the same vowel sound followed by the same consonant sound—if there is one—in the final syllable of two or more words and in close enough proximity that it creates an obvious pattern. That’s the basic definition, but there is a lot of variation just under the surface of that definition that you should be aware of.

  Varieties of Rhyme

  Rhyme is such a rich subject that there are different varieties of Rhyme.

  First, Rhymes can be either internal or end. End Rhyme occurs at the ends of lines, and is the most common.

  When people talk about Rhyme, they usually mean end Rhyme. Internal Rhyme,

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  Oral Interpretation

  • Timothy Gura, Benjamin Powell(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As is true of what you learn from scansion, what you discover from studying cadence has a direct input into your rehearsal. If, say, you choose to perform “Open the Gates” (by now, you know a great deal about how that poem works), you can embody and evoke this knowledge. Specifically, what rate will you select for the first stanza? Of course, your decisions about where to pause will be guided by what you discover in secondary cadences. Will you simply repeat the same choices in stanza 2? Why not? And, as you approach line 8, how will you negotiate the dangerous phrases in “I brandish the great bone of my death” so that you prepare listeners for “Beat once therewith, and beat no more”? The last two lines are the longest in the poem. Are they rushed to finish the poem off, or paced more deliberately to show the final, appalling sight that confronts the speaker? If you hadn’t discovered this in analysis, would you have intuitively made all the appropriate decisions in performing this poem? Analysis provides you with certain wisdom. In the tumult of anxieties that attends any performance, such certainty is a rock on which interpreters gladly rest.

  Clearly, no audience will ever grasp fully the subtlety of this rhythmic pattern when the poem is read aloud. Indeed, it would be most unfortunate if you called attention to the pattern. Nevertheless, unless you understand what the poet has done to communicate the total effect, your audience loses.

  Rhyme

  Rhyme most commonly occurs at the line ends. Lines may contain internal Rhymes as well. Unlike rhythm and cadence, Rhyme is not an essential element of poetry—some fine poems have very little Rhyme. But when it occurs it can reinforce rhythm, cadence, pattern, and tone color.

  Although corresponding sounds strike the mind’s ear in a silent reading, they emerge for complete appreciation only when a poem is read aloud. Like a chime of music, Rhyme is satisfying and pleasing to hear; it gives intellectual pleasure through the delights of repetition and anticipation. The reason for Rhyme, however, is not to decorate a poem but rather to bind it more closely together. For one thing, Rhyme unifies the pattern of sound. Its power doubtless contributes to the explosive popularity of rap music and hip hop. Can you imagine either without Rhyme? Just as in more traditional poetry, Rhyme emphasizes the line lengths by creating an expectation of repeated sounds at regular intervals. Experienced poets and rap artists know that Rhyme, if used unwisely, can shatter rather than intensify the unity of a poem. Therefore, when they use Rhyme, they exhibit great care and ingenuity in handling it. It’s a powerful tool so you need to use it carefully. If you stress every Rhyme, the aural shape of the poem blocks out all of its other qualities. Now for some more terms.

  Rhyme is the exact correspondence of both final vowel and consonant sounds (love—dove). There are several kinds of Rhyme. Assonance is the correspondence of vowel sounds only, regardless of the final consonant sounds (place—brave). In half Rhymes (pavement—gravely, river—weather

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  How to Write About Poetry

  A Pocket Guide

  • Brendan Cooper(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  There are various dimensions to this notion of the shaping or arranging of words, and the first one I wish to explore is especially well known – familiar to pretty much everyone, in fact, right from their very earliest experiments with language and sound patterns as young children. This is the phenomenon of Rhyme. 36 Chapter 3 The Reasons for Rhyme Not all poems Rhyme. No one says that they must. Back in the seventeenth century, John Milton was already rebel- ling against the presence of Rhyme in English poetry; he rather dismissively described it as “the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory”. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular, many poets have tried to avoid a reliance on Rhyme in favour of more innovative and original methods. Nevertheless, Rhyme remains one of the most conspicuous features of poetry, one of the easiest, clearest ways that a poem becomes identifiable as a poem. However, the question of why poets use Rhyme – of its purpose, its effect – is not so commonly considered, and not so straightforward. Simply pointing out that a poem either Rhymes or does not Rhyme does not get us very far. We need to consider carefully the reasons why Rhyme might be used, the effect it creates when it appears, and the best possible ways to approach the analysis of Rhyme in poetry. So, why Rhyme at all? The use of Rhyme is related to long-held connections between poetry and song. Rhyme is, effectively, a form of music. It is the chiming of word- sounds together, and as such, it might be fair to say that moments of Rhyme are where language is at its most musi- cal. The potential effects of Rhyme, though, are somewhat complicated and unpredictable. These can vary greatly, often depending on the overall tone or subject matter The Challenge of Poetic Form 37 of the particular poem. Rhyme often seems to reflect or reinforce elements of a poem’s overall message.

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  Surprised by Sound

  Rhyme's Inner Workings

  • Roi Tartakovsky(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • LSU Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Hearing and Listening to Rhyme If negotiating with linguistic constraints and literary conventions comes with the territory of writing poetry, Rhyme occupies a great part of that territory. Certainly, in the case of English, it is difficult to overstate the association between Rhyme and poetry, or the significance of Rhyme to poetry. This association is attested to in rhetoric by Rhyme’s synecdochic or metonymic substitution for poetry itself. Rhyme-as-poem is a prevalent trope throughout much English-language poetry and is nowhere more evident than in William Shakespeare’s ending of Sonnet 17: “You should live twice, in it and in my Rhyme.” In practice, Rhyme’s prevalence is attested to by the overwhelming number of Rhymed poems written by generations of poets. Of course, Rhyme is not the only sound device, nor the earliest in the history of English poetry. A perfect or full Rhyme is, in fact, one of numerous poetic sound devices, including assonance, alliteration, consonance, and many forms of partial Rhymes. But it is the more encompassing member among most of these weaker or partial sound relations because full Rhyme typically requires a correspondence of both the vowel and the following consonant sounds of the last stressed syllable of each word. 1 Assonance was never used systematically in English verse, partial Rhyme is best appreciated as a subset of full Rhyme, and alliteration, while carrying its own historical connotations of Anglo-Saxon prosody, seems, at least in poetic consciousness, more distant and dimmed today than Rhyme. 2 Rhyme, both historically and phonetically, is set up to stand out in the soundscape of the poem or of poetry. As prevalent as Rhyme is (or was —a question I will get to momentarily), it is easy to forget that Rhyme’s entry into English poetry was a gradual process and one that—in spite of scholarly interest—remains somewhat murky. Murkier yet is the larger question of the historical origin of Rhyme itself

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  The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry

  2nd Edition

  • Rhian Williams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In such a view, to abandon or even just to loosen Rhyme is to be revolutionary – as seen in many post-1918 poetic innovations, or Romantic experiments with ‘everyday speech’ in poetry. A poet may feel that there is no place for Rhyme in a world that has lost all sense of harmonious relationship. On the other hand, excessive Rhyme can also be revolutionary. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for example, used complex patterns of four, five, six, seven, eight or ten lines of interlocking Rhymes in a spirit of experimentation and daring: technical brilliance and sophisticated rhyming patterns denoted scandal and subversion as he allied this rhyming excess with sexual, moral and religious excesses. The principle behind Rhyme is repetition and near-collision: Rhymes are the repetition (or the almost-repetition) of a sound that you have just heard. This principle of return or meeting can be used as a healing, soothing or celebratory gesture, as when Elizabeth Jennings Rhymes ‘caress’ with ‘gentleness’ when she tries to characterize the emotion she feels for a friend. Despite the sense content, the matching sounds suggest a relation between the two words – both tactile and reserved – that is comforting, as though that pairing was somehow meant to be: Such love I cannot analyse; It does not rest in lips or eyes, Neither in kisses nor caress. Partly, I know, it’s gentleness Elizabeth Jennings, ‘Friendship’ (1972), ll. 1–4. However, the same principle can produce unsettling and disturbing effects. For example, in Thomas Hardy’s often-uncomfortable elegies ( Poems of 1912–13 ) for his wife, the repeated sound of rhyming creates a sense of entrapment (see the enclosing gestures at the end of each stanza in ‘Lament’, for example).

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  Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama

  • Anne-Sophie Bories, Petr Plecháč, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Anne-Sophie Bories, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Petr Plecháč(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Although poetry is made up of words arranged in sentences, the conventions of meter, line length, and Rhyme sometimes require the alteration of natural syntax. Conventions of poetic discourse or register also constrain which words or kinds of expression are considered acceptable in poetry at a given historical moment. Individual poets necessarily write within and against such conventions, following or modifying them to suit their expressive needs. These conventions also contribute to the “horizon of expectations” that readers bring to their evaluation of poetic texts (Jauss, 1982 : 19). Before the twentieth century, most lyric verse in English was written using line-end Rhyme (McDonald, 2012). (Dramatic and narrative verse, in contrast, was frequently written in unRhymed iambic pentameter lines.) Because English is less inflected than many European languages and because of the long-standing preference for one-syllable Rhymes in English, the number of possible Rhyme pairs is fairly limited. In order to account for the effects of Rhyme, analysis of word frequencies in poetry should include analysis of the frequency and distribution of line-end words as distinguished from words found elsewhere in the text. 1.2 Rhyme In English poetry, Rhyme is predominantly used in the final word of the poetic line. Two syllables that Rhyme “have identical stressed vowels and subsequent phonemes but differ in initial consonant(s) if any are present” (Brogan, Cushman, 2012 : 1184). Although the majority of Rhymes commonly used in English poetry are masculine Rhymes of only one syllable, feminine two-syllable Rhymes may also be used occasionally. In the nineteenth century, many critics preferred exact Rhymes (hat/cat) over near Rhymes (hat/fact) or eye Rhymes (love/prove), which are visible on the page but not heard in pronunciation. Rhyme creates relationships of similarity and difference among the line-end words in a poem

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  The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

  Fourth Edition

  • Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  enterprise . This is Rhyme yet more interwoven and complete.

  (8) By participation of the Rhymes in sound patterning nearby . Part of the perceived effect of the Rhyme also depends on the density of sound patterning in the lines surrounding the Rhyme words. Here we enter the realm of those larger constellations of sound that schematize the entire poem, over and above, though not apart from, the Rhyme scheme. Like Rhyme, these too impose a surplus of design on the verbal material, binding words together, promoting salient words, underlining significant semantic parallels between otherwise disparate words, punctuating the seriatim flow of text processing by repetition of significant sounds recently heard and remembered, and marking the text as aesthetic through the increase of attention required—and rewarded—in reading.

  (9) By the position in the line of the Rhymes. Normally Rhyme is presumed to be end Rhyme, i.e., sound linkage of lines by marking their ends (it is known that ends of members in series have special cognitive “visibility”), but more complex forms Rhyme the word at line end with other words line-internally or Rhyme two line-internal words in the same or successive lines, or both, thus opening up a spectrum of new possibilities for more complex sound figuration. Further, even the end-Rhyme word itself may be hyphenated or broken over the line end to effect the Rhyme (see BROKEN Rhyme ).

  (10) By the interval between the Rhymes. Without the space or gap between the Rhyme words, no Rhyme is possible: hence, the distance is no less significant than the repetition. In fact, repetition requires distance, the absence enabling the presence. The variance of distancing and of repetitions, of course, yields the patterning of Rhyme in the stanza, i.e., the Rhyme scheme; more interestingly, it also enables the distinction between “nonRhymes” and “antiRhymes.” Abernathy points out that it is not sufficient to characterize some types of verse as “unRhymed,” for this fails to distinguish between “Rhymeless” verse, wherein Rhyme is neither required nor prohibited but merely unspecified, and “antiRhymed” verse, such as blank verse, where Rhyme is specifically proscribed. Rhyme schemes reveal intervals not only between Rhymes but between unRhymed lines; and in some unRhymed verse, passages of deliberate Rhyme may even appear (T. S. Eliot). It is also worth noting that Rhymes that are very widely separated are not Rhymes because they are not perceived so. There are, in fact, some hundred-odd Rhymes in Paradise Lost

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  What is Poetry?

  Language and Memory in the Poems of the World

  • Nigel Fabb(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  I have not found research that shows whether the sections ending in Rhymes are sufficiently short that they can each be held as a whole unit in working memory. Similarity and near similarity in Rhyme and alliteration A Rhyme or alliteration involves a set of words that are alike in their sound structure. This is sometimes unproblematic: for example, when the shared sounds are the phonetic forms of the words, as is true for most Rhyme and alliteration in English poetry. However, in particular poetic traditions or for particular poets or poems, words can Rhyme or alliterate if they share sounds that are alike but not identical. This has been extensively studied by linguists (summarised in Worth 1977; Miller 1977; Fabb 1997; Kawahara 2007). We saw examples of this above, in Irish poetry. Some have argued that the similarity depends on psycho-acoustic factors. Steriade (2003) argues this for Romanian poets and judgements of the acceptability of half-Rhymes. Kern (2012) argues that in Irish, Rhymes between unlike segmental structures involve changes in sonority contours. Kawahara (2007) suggests that in a Japanese rap song, the formation of rhyming sets is not categorial but gradient, based on general principles of acoustic similarity not underlying form. These are ways in which poetic form appears to be sensitive to microvariation in language. A further possibility is that two words Rhyme or alliterate not because they share whole sounds at any level of phonological structure, but because they share parts of sounds. Thus, Lorimer (1954: 551) notes that in Bakhtiari verse, back vowels Rhyme with back vowels, and front with front; the two liquids [r] and [l] are treated as identical, and so on. Worth (1977) notes that in Slavic, consonants will Rhyme with others with the same voicing feature. Zwicky (1976) showed that in English language pop songs, two consonants that differ in one phonetic feature can Rhyme.

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  The Sound Sense of Poetry

  • Peter Robinson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

   The rhythm of a poem is an experience of the patterned sound it makes when read aloud; any identifiable pattern, regularised in hinted at binary alternations of stress, is its meter.  As already noted, the meter is an abstract template that can, with varying degrees of plausibility, depending on the complexity of the cases, be identified by analyzing a poem’s lines and phrases. In all but the simplest of jingles, the meter and rhythm, template and performance, are by no means the same. This is because there are more  Richard Wollheim draws a distinction between knowing a language and having an artistic style in Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . His distinction, if applied to poetry, is complicated by language speakers having prosodic style in their usage informed by knowledge of lullabies, chants and other folk poetry with what he calls ‘psycho-motor reality’.  Seymour Chatman takes it as axiomatic ‘that meter is a species of rhythm’ in A Theory of Meter (The Hague: Mouton, ), . Though he does not confuse the terms, I prefer them separated for clarity of exposition. For an account of why the terms meter and rhythm can be contrasted and where the contrast is inherited from, see John Hollander’s account of the Greek metrikoi and rhythmikoi in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.  The Sound Sense of Poetry than two levels of stress in naturally pronounced English. Even in jingles the distinct characters of the individual syllables will give variety to the simplification of such sounds into the abstractly alternating ‘ti tum ’ of, in this instance, iambic metrical feet. These feet are similarly abstract inter- pretations attributed to formed phrasings. Intuiting a meter may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient to hearing the poem.

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  Theory of the Lyric

  • Jonathan Culler(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  [Trans. John Felstiner] The poem alludes both to the repetition of musical fugues and to German drinking songs but the repetition of words and phrases, continued in sub-sequent stanzas, with all the verbs in the present tense, takes on a numbing quality, beating us into submission: this is what happens, over and over. The combination of hyperbolic repetition with the variable line length is one striking possibility in lyric (Whitman offers a very different example, as does Hopkins, in a superb poem I consider in the next section). But Celan and Williams illustrate the extraordinary range of rhythmical pos-sibilities of free verse, for which we still lack a plausible set of organizing categories that would capture its rhythmical resources—so important to lyric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The boldest account of rhythm that I have encountered, but which does not really take on free verse, is Amittai Aviram’s Telling Rhythms. There are three possible relations between rhythm and meaning, he claims: (1) rhythm is a rhetorical device subordinated to meaning, to which it can contribute (the most common view); (2) there is no significant relation between rhythm and meaning; and (3) meaning is subordinate to and refers to rhythm. Intrepidly opting for the last, he maintains that seeing meaning or content as a representation of the form is the only way of re- Rhythm and Repetition 165 lating the two without reducing form to content. The meaning of a poem, he claims, allegorically represents “aspects of the power of the poem’s own rhythm to bring about a physical response, to engage the readers or listener’s body and thus to disrupt the orderly process of meaning.” Thus, for example, in Blake’s “Tyger,” “Much of the power and thrill of the poem comes from the insistent repetitiveness and parallelism that gives the poem a strong, relentless beat.

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  Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats

  • Marjorie Perloff(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  20 THE PHONETIC FUNCTION OF Rhyme IN YEATS'S POETRY and (2) to establish a classification of Yeats's approximate Rhymes, deter-mining chronologically the distribution of each subclass. 1. THE DISTRIBUTION OF Rhyme AND EPIPHORA H o w widespread is the use of Rhyme in Yeats's poetry? Table A, Appendix, provides the following information about each poem in the Variorum text: (1) the number of lines, (2) the number of lines ending with a RHYMING UNIT, 2 (3) the number of lines containing EPIPHORA, 3 (4) the total number of Rhymes, 4 whether exact or approximate, and (5) the number of approximate Rhymes. 5 To illustrate the method I have 2 Although I generally refer to the two rhyming partners in any one Rhyme as Rhyme WORDS, the term Rhyme WORD is misleading when one wishes to describe the precise phonetic character of a Rhyme, because the rhyming entity may consist of one syllable of a disyllabic or a trisyllabic word (punish merit/sent), of a whole word {tent¡sent), or of more than one word (take it¡naked). I therefore adopt Roman Jakobson's term RHYMING UNITS (see Linguistics and Poetics, in Style and Language, ed. Thomas A Sebeok [New York, 1960], pp. 367-68) to refer to the two entities that are involved in any one Rhyme. 3 LINES CONTAINING EPIPHORA are defined throughout this book as lines that contain word repetition in final position IN PLACE OF a rhyming unit. For example, in Stanza 1 of The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes: 'What do you make so fair and bright?' a 'I make the cloak of Sorrow: (b) O lovely to see in all men's sight [a] Shall be the cloak of Sorrow (b) In all men's sight.' [a] only lines 2 and 4 are, strictly speaking, lines containing epiphora for although sight occurs twice (lines 3 and 5), it Rhymes with bright in line 1; lines 1, 3, and 5 are therefore counted as RhymeD LINES. The stanza thus has three Rhymed lines and two lines containing epiphora. The notation (b) means that lines 2 and 4 have epiphora rather than Rhyme.

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