Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

16.2 Types of sound pattern: types of rhyme and types of alliteration
Unit 16 Rhyme and sound patterning
Section 4 Poetic form

We can group the various kinds of sound patterning into larger groups, which we can call types of rhyme and types of alliteration. Types of rhyme involve the end of the syllable, while types of alliteration involve the beginning of the syllable.

Strict rhyme involves the [nucleus+coda]. Thus ’bite’, ’plight’ and ’fight’ (from Table 16.1) could all rhyme, because they have the same nucleus and coda. Where just the [nucleus] is repeated, and the coda varies, this is ’assonance’. While ’I’ does not rhyme with ’bite’ because the coda is different, the identity of nucleus makes this an example of assonance. Where just the [coda] is repeated, and the nucleus varies, this is ’consonance’. Though ’at’ does not rhyme with ’bite’ because the nucleus is different, the similarity of coda makes this an example of ’consonance’. Various issues relating to rhyme can be examined by using the following stanzas.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher,

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

the blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

        (Percy Bysshe Shelley, ’To a Skylark’, 1820)

In the first stanza there is an exact repetition in ’heart’ and ’art’, which is a rhyme (because nucleus+coda are the same in both words). Is ’wert’ part of the same rhyme? One question we might ask is whether Shelley pronounced this word as he pronounced ’heart’: vowels have changed in the course of the history of English, and a pair of words might once have rhymed even if they do not rhyme now. (However, a check of a contemporary edition of Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary shows that ’wert’ and ’heart’ are listed at that time as having different pronunications, at least in one standard accent of English.) If he did not pronounce these words alike, then we could describe this as an example of consonance with ’heart’: consonance is the repetition of just [coda], here the final consonant [t] (or [rt] if the r is pronounced as it is in some accents). It is often the case that a consonance is ’upgraded’ to count as a rhyme, if there is supportive evidence. If we look at the rest of the poem - including the second stanza quoted here - we find that the second, fourth and fifth lines characteristically rhyme with each other, and this gives us some reason to think of the ’wert’/’heart’ match as a slightly defective rhyme rather than as a true consonance. In this way we see that - just as in metre - the abstract description of the form as ’rhyme’ conceals some variation in actual pronunciation. We might similarly allow ’spirit’ and ’near it’ to count as rhyme; here we have a shared sequence of nucleus-onset-nucleus-coda, thus involving two syllables. This kind of rhyme, where two syllables are involved and where the first syllable is stressed and the second is unstressed is called a feminine rhyme. Rhymes involving just a final stressed syllable are called masculine rhymes. Rhyme is often used systematically in English verse, and we say that a poem can have a ’rhyme scheme’, which for this poem would be written down as ABABB for each stanza, showing which lines rhyme in each five-line stanza. Some types of rhyme scheme have their own names: AABBCC, etc. patterns are called ’couplets’ and AAABBB, etc., ’triplets’. Combinations of specific metres with specific rhymes also have specific names: the combination of iambic pentameter with (rhyme) couplets is called ’heroic verse’, while the use of iambic pentameter without rhyme is called ’blank verse’. Special types of stanza also have specific rhyme schemes, and poetic genres such as the sonnet have specific rhyme schemes. Finally, remember that sounds (not spellings) produce rhyme, so ’cough’ rhymes with ’off’, not with ’plough’. Words like ’cough’ and ’plough’, whose spelling suggests they ought to rhyme, are called ’eye-rhymes’.

The second major class of sound patterning is alliteration, which in its prototypical form involves repetition of the onset, as in ’paste’ and ’pay’, or ’plaster’ and ’plight’. For the most part in English, we can say that there is alliteration if just the first consonant in the onset is repeated. This is the kind of alliteration we see in Shelley’s poem: ’pourest’ and ’profuse’ and ’blithe’ and ’bird’. In a stricter variant the whole onset must be repeated, so that ’blithe’ and ’bird’ would not alliterate with each other, but ’blithe’ and ’blood’ or ’bide’ and ’bird’ would alliterate. In a third variant, the onset must be in the first stressed syllable of the word, which can be seen in the notion of the ’three Rs’: ’reading, writing and arithmetic’. Here the ’r’ in each word is the complete onset of the first stressed syllable in the word (in ’arithmetic’ this syllable is the second actual syllable in the word). A fourth variant of alliteration involves not only the onset but also the nucleus, as in ’cash’ and ’carry’. Leech (1969) calls this ’reverse rhyme’; it is the standard type of alliteration (or reverse rhyme) in, for example, Finnish and Mongolian poetry (but is not common in English poetry). If we look at the alliteration in Shelley’s poem we see that, although it is quite widespread, it is not systematic: we could not talk about an ’alliteration scheme’ to parallel the rhyme scheme in the poem. In fact, English poetry has not had systematic alliteration since the medieval period (it is the rule in Old English poetry, was revived in the Middle Ages, and is occasionally imitated in later poetry). In analysing alliteration it is particularly important to remember that you are analysing sounds and not letters: ’seek’ and ’shape’ do not alliterate with each other because they begin with different sounds (even though their spelling makes them look similar). There is, however, a tradition of using line-initial (or stanza-initial) letters as an organizatory device; while this is not a kind of alliteration, because it uses letters and not sounds, it is worth noting. The Latin poem Altus Prosatur (written in Iona in the sixth century) has each stanza beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, and is called an ’abecedarian’ poem.

Thus we can broadly distinguish between rhyme as the repetition of the end of the syllable (and usually the end of the word) as opposed to alliteration as the repetition of the beginning of the syllable (and usually the beginning of the word). It is technically possible to have both the beginning and the end of the syllable repeated; this is called ’pararhyme’ (and sometimes also called ’consonance’) and is seen in ’send’ and ’sound’, or ’beat’ and ’bite’.