Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
Rhyme time
Poetry country
So far, except for the Yeats stanza in chapter 32 and one of the poems from The Wish, the examples I’ve given haven’t rhymed. Whether or not to rhyme is another decision the poet gets to make, and there is no right or wrong way to go. A poem is bona fide poetry whether or not it rhymes.
When I do see rhyme or hear it, a pleasurable buzz runs through me, a little zzzt! Almost any kind of rhyme does it, sometimes with the added fillip of thinking, Aren’t I clever? for noticing.
I say almost any kind of rhyme because there are quite a few. There’s the kind we all know, called end rhyme, obviously because it comes at the end of the line.
Excuse me, but this little narrative poem from my childhood pops up in my mind. Maybe you know it too:
OOEY GOOEY
Ooey Gooey was a worm,
a mighty worm was he,
standing on the railroad tracks,
the train he failed to see . . .
. . . Ooooeey! Goooeey!
He and see are end rhymes. But there’s another kind of rhyme in the first and last line of this charming jingle. Ooey Gooey is an example of internal rhyme, because it happens inside the lines, not at the ends.
Here are two more examples of internal rhyme, these from the Yeats stanza. I’ve underlined the words I want you to look at:
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand.
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Than and can are separated by the word you, but that’s okay. The rhyme still counts. Above them, and and hand are in different lines, but it’s still internal rhyme. A few lines could divide them, and the rhyme would still be legit. Understand and hand are end rhymes, but they also rhyme internally with and and with hand inside the line.
Aside from being internal, these rhymes—than with can, and with hand, and Ooey with Gooey—are just like the end rhyme example, he with see, in that they rhyme exactly. In sound they’re the same except for the beginning of the word. Such exact rhymes are called perfect.
If you’re stuck for a rhyme, a rhyming dictionary is the place to go. I find mine online, and sometimes I consult more than one. But don’t depend entirely on dictionaries. Often your brain will send you more creative rhymes than the dictionaries offer.
Here’s a bit of a ditty that excited and horrified me when I was little, which also features worms. The versions I found online are different, but this is what I used to sing in a quivering voice:
The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
They chew your guts
and they spit them out.
Poor starving worms, never swallowing! The rhyme comes from the repetition of the word out. When a word rhymes with itself, it’s called identical rhyme. There are a lot of technical terms in poetry!
Another kind of rhyme is called slant rhyme, and it may be my favorite. It’s almost rhyme, like stink with skunk. I underlined two slant-rhyming words in this poem by nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—
I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
Soul and all both end in an l although the vowels are different. That’s the kind of rhyme that makes me feel clever when I notice it. (Storm and warm also have different vowels, but the sound is the same, at least in my New York accent, so I’d count this rhyme as perfect.) If you’re writing a rhyming poem and you can’t come up with an exact rhyme that fits your poem, you can broaden your thinking to include slant rhymes. To help you out, most online rhyming dictionaries offer a slant- or near-rhyme option.
The only sort of rhyme I’m not fond of is forced rhyme. I’ll show you what I mean by example:
Jill did frown
when Jack fell down.
In ordinary speech we’d never say, “My best friend Jill did frown when I yelled at her.” The word did is present only to force a rhyme.
Here’s another example:
She gave him the globe full of snow
just out of friendship, not for show.
A snow globe isn’t even filled with real snow; I just put it that way so it would rhyme with show, because it’s much harder to find a perfect rhyme for globe—I might have to pull in an earlobe!
Poets of long ago often forced the rhyme. That was okay back then and not a flaw, but today’s poets prefer more natural phrasing.
Forced rhyme can be great in a funny poem, however. Here’s one by twentieth-century poet Ogden Nash, known for his light verse, which means humorous poetry:
THE DOG
The truth I do not stretch or shove
When I state that the dog is full of love.
I’ve also found, by actual test,
A wet dog is the lovingest.
Most of us, if we’ve spent time with a dog, have experienced being used as its towel!
The first line in Nash’s poem is twisted around so that it ends with shove. In ordinary speech we’d say, I do not stretch the truth, but Nash wanted to end with shove, an unnecessary, forced word, to get to the rhyme. And lovingest isn’t a word we usually come across. But what fun it is! And how satisfying those silly rhymes are.
Still, aside from light verse, poets of today usually go for more conversational wording. Let’s try the Jack and Jill example like this:
Jill frowned
when Jack fell down.
Frowned is an absolutely completely acceptable rhyme for down. The ear barely registers the ed.
Let’s take another example:
Sorceress Annie did break
the bad news to Wizard Jake.
Replace did break with broke and we get a fine slant rhyme with Jake. If the rhythm seems wrong, we can add a word or two like this:
Sorceress Annie sighed and broke
the bad news to Wizard Jake.
Perfectly natural, right?
Slant rhyme examples like soul and all are also called consonant rhyme, because the final consonants are the same, but not the vowels. (Broke and Jake above are also consonant rhymes, since the final e is silent.)
If there’s consonant rhyme, naturally there must be vowel rhyme, also known as assonance. An example would be elf and pen because of the short e.
There are more kinds of rhyme, a surprising abundance. I won’t name them all, just a few more: apocopated (I love the sound of this word, pronounced uh-POCK-uh-payted, which sounds to me like popcorn popping), in which a syllable is missing, as in stinker with clink; mosaic rhyme, where a single word is rhymed with more than one, like assail with a snail; and eye rhyme, when the sounds aren’t the same, but the letters are, as in bone and gone or dough and cough.
In my favorite kind of rhymed poem, the rhyming is so subtle and natural that I don’t even see it at first. A contemporary poet who’s great at rhyme is Molly Peacock. Here’s a beautiful poem by her:
THE THRONE
When I was afraid, fear took me in,
and gave me a cold seat in her kingdom
from which I looked for all my kin
and found no mother, no father. Dumb
I was, and deaf then. Touch only I had,
only the cold claws of the chair arms did
I feel, and hollowness in my head.
My mother was dead. My father was dead.
I gripped the throne of fear with my right hand,
and the seat of the chair held me upright
or I would have fallen. I couldn’t stand.
But the throne’s left arm was warm with human might.
It took my hand and held me in its own,
that the kingdom of fear might be overthrown.
Look at these end rhymes: kingdom with dumb, had with did, and in its own with overthrown. And notice the internal rhyme in the twelfth line: arm with warm. The whole poem is thrilling, and the rhyme adds to the excitement.
And here, for pure delight, is a rhyming poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Edward Lear. When you come to it, don’t let runcible stop you. It’s a nonsense word Lear invented.
HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR. LEAR
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few find him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);
He used to be one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Writing time!
• Pick a poem you’ve written and look through it for rhymes you didn’t know were there. Underline them. Look for synonyms you can switch in to add more internal rhyme. If you find any forced rhyming, reword with any of the kinds of rhymes we’ve discussed (consonant, vowel, mosaic, apocopated, identical, and eye).
• Try a bouts-rimés (from French, pronounced BOO ree MAY), which requires at least two people. Each person writes a list of rhymed words, like joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. The participants exchange lists and each has to write a poem using those end rhymes. When you get your list, be wild. Poetry doesn’t have to be logical.
• Use my words for a rhymed poem: joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great (or grate). Don’t worry about meaning. If you’re able to cobble together something that makes sense, fine, but go for the pleasure of the sounds.
• Write a rhymed poem about yourself or about someone you know. If your creation turns out to be light verse (as Edward Lear’s is), you can force the rhyme to make it funnier.
Have fun, and save what you write!