Rhyme
Kinds of rhyme
| Kind | What matches | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Perfect | The stressed vowel and everything after it | rock / clock, keeper / deeper |
| Slant (near) | Only the vowel, or only the final consonants | rock / talk, light / late |
| Eye | Spelling only, not sound | love / move, though / through |
| Feminine | Two or more syllables, stress on the first | tiding / hiding |
| Identical | The same sound and word (or homophone) | light / light, sea / see |
| Internal | A rhyme inside the line, not at the end | "the night was bright" |
Perfect rhyme is the default for fixed forms and comic verse. Slant rhyme is normal in song lyrics and much modern verse. Identical rhyme usually reads as a failure, except in a refrain. Eye rhyme works only in poems older than the pronunciation change, or as a deliberate joke.
Rhyme depends on accent. Rock / clock holds everywhere; path / bath / laugh do not rhyme with math in most British accents, and dawn / don rhyme in much of North America but not in Britain. Check rhymes in the dialect the verse is for.
Scheme notation
Give each new end sound the next letter; repeat the letter when a sound returns. Mark refrains with a number (A1, A2) and slant rhymes with an apostrophe (B').
A keeper who lived on a rock A
Whose lamp was as true as a clock. A
When his clock lost a hand B
He relied on the sand, B
And he keeps his accounts in a sock. ALabel the scheme under the scansion table and compare it with the form's
rules in forms.md.
Forced-rhyme tells
A rhyme is forced when the line exists for the rhyme word, not the other way round. Check each rhyme pair for:
- Inversion: word order bent to put the rhyme last ("the storm did rage, the waves were high; / to shore the boat could not come nigh").
- Filler verb: did + verb to fit a beat or reach a rhyme.
- Dead word: a rhyme word that adds nothing, or a word the poem would never use elsewhere (nigh, yore, anon in modern verse).
- Meaning drift: the line changes subject to reach the rhyme.
- Predictable pair: the reader knows the rhyme before it arrives. The pairs below have been used so often that they read as defaults: heart / apart, love / above, fire / desire, pain / again, sky / high / fly, night / light / bright, day / way / away, soul / whole, tears / years, sea / free.
Fix a forced rhyme by changing the rhyme word in the other line of the pair, or by rebuilding the sentence so the rhyme falls naturally. A strong fresh rhyme usually comes from a concrete noun or verb.
Checking a scheme
- Write the last stressed vowel and following sounds of each line, not the spelling.
- Assign letters.
- Compare with the form. Note every slant or eye rhyme and ask whether the author meant it.
- Check that no rhyme word repeats within a stanza unless it is a refrain.