Poetry Definitions

by Willard R. Espy from Words To Rhyme With

2.  Rhyme

The beat of sound in poetry is always accounted as meter, but balance between sounds is not always accounted as rhyme.  Rhyme as I is presently defined was unknown to the ancient Greeks, nor is there evidence of it in classic Latin poetry.  It appeared in church Latin around 200 A.D., and took a thousand years to seep through Europe.  Our Anglo-Saxon forebears preferred alliteration-the repetition of the opening sounds of accented syllables, as in Shakespeare's "Full fathoms five thy father lies."  My home encyclopedia describes alliteration, as the "jingle of like beginnings:" rhyme, in Milton's phrase, is "the jingling sound of like endings."  His definition has a patronizing echo; though immortal poetry has been written in rhyme, there have been and continue to be poets who consider it beneath their dignity to employ it for serious business.  If there must be any association at all between the sound of one word or another, they prefer that it be more oblique, as in assonance and consonance (see below). *  Blank verse-generally iambic pentameter-discards rhyme but not meter.  Free verse the favorite of many modern poets drops them both.  But neither is a threatened species.  Writers will continue to produce some of our finest poetry in rhyme; and in the field of light verse it stands alone.

A.  Types of Rhyme

Rhyme, says the dictionary, is

   The correspondence, in tow or more words or verses, of terminal sounds beginning with a accented vowel, which in modern English usage, must be preceded by different consonantal sounds, or by a consonant in one case and none in the other.

    In traditional rhymed verse, the rhyme is carried by the last foot of the line.  The briefest possible rhyming foot is a semi-iamb, a single stressed syllable as in:

Fly'
High'!

    But the usual iambic (or single, or masculine) rhyming foot is made of two syllables, with the accent of the second:

Don't fly'
Too high'!

 A two-syllable rhyming foot with the accent on the first syllable is a trochaic
 (or double or feminine) rhyme:

Pret'ty
Kit'ty!

 A triple (or dactylic) rhyming foot has three syllables, with the accent on the first: 

Crick'e.ty, lick'e.ty,
Ma's are per.snick'e.ty.

 The list of rhyming words listed here is divided into the foregoing three categories-single, double, and triple.  The rhymes are traditional; that is, the accented vowels match exactly and the unaccented syllables are similar enough not to jar the ear.  Once conventional rhyming is second nature to you, you may wish to vary the position of the rhyming foot in the line or among the line or among lines to meet special needs.  Here are some of the possibilities:

* Random rhyme, which goes beyond the common practice of alternating   
   rhymed and unrhymed lines, instead mixing them irregularly;
* Initial rhyme, occurring at the beginning instead of the end of the line;
* Interior rhyme, occurring within the line;
* Cross rhyme, in which the rhyming sound at the end of one line is matched 
    somewhere inside another.

 Or, if you are acting deliberately and with full awareness of the risks, you may experiment with various sorts of near-rhyme, including the following:

* Identicals.  These match the sound of the consonant as well as the
   vowel, though they are seldom simply repetitions of the same word:

 Praise, prays; bard, barred; coral, choral

* Consonance.  Here not the sound of the vowel in the stressed syllable
   but  instead that of the opening and closing consonants makes the match:

  Tick, tack, tuck, tock; hit, hat, hot, hut.

* Consonantal rhyme.  This matches only the sound that ends the
   syllable,  weather accented or unaccented:

 Easy, Busy; Fast, Waste; Missing, Bussing.

* Assonance.  This simply echoes a vowel sound within a line:

  Old bones move slowly.

* Vowel rhyme.  Here only the vowel sounds of the rhyming feet
   correspond:

  Age, rail, take; blue, move, flute.

* Smothered (imperfect) rhyme.  The match is between an accented and
   an unaccented syllable:

  Bring, going; beaten, pen; hardly, foresee.

* Unaccented rhyme.  The match is between the final unaccented
   syllables:

  Faster, mover, killer; happy, pretty, chummy.

* Half-rhyme.  The rhyming foot ends in one or more unaccented
   syllables, but only the stressed syllable has a match:

  Differ, Fifth; Cavern, ravenous.

* Spelling (or sight) rhyme.  The spellings but not the sound of the
   stressed vowels match:

  Woman, Roman; Love, Grove.

 And if none of these ways of rhyming hits the mark for you, you can always, make up you own rhyming words:

BACTRIAN CAMELS HAVE TWO HUMPS

I met on a tram in exotic Siam
  (known as tramela out in Siamela)
Three Campbellite camels-a sire, dam and lamb
  (in Siamese, Camela familia).
The sire was Ben-Amele-Ben-Abraham,
A suitable name for a Bactrian cam
  (which is Siamese shorthand for camela).
   The femme of the cam was a well-trodden dam

   Whom tram-trippers taunted as Bactrian mam
     On account of her uberous mammilla.
   The lamb of the Cambellite camels was Pam,
      Though sometimes she answered to Pamela.

   And what has becam of that Camela fam
   Since they traveled away on their Siamese tram?
   I know not-and frankly, I don't give a damn,
     Or even a Siamese dammela.

     To lengthen tram to tramela and cam to camela-to shorten camel to cam, mammal to mam, family to fam, became to becam---these are deliberate breaches of contract with the English language.  As with the alteration of a metric beat, it is perfectly acceptable to abuse the language for effect-but only if you are fully aware of the abuse yourself, and are sure that the reader will recognized it as intentional.  There are two other ways to rhyme, one quiet usual and the other rare except as sheer artifice.  The usual way is called mosaic rhyme.  It matches one word against tow, or occasionally more:

    Tiller, kill her; queenly, green lea; Ohio, I owe

     Mosaic matches come readily to mind.  Be sure, though, that the mosaic is a true rhyme.  Tiller does not rhyme with ill sir; queenly does not rhyme with green tea; Ohio does not rhyme with I know. The less common way is Procrustean, or impossible, rhyme, which may stretch words, chop them up, or squeeze several into one to make a match, as the mythical giant Procrustes rearranged the length of his victims to fit them to his bed.   You will find, later in this chapter under "Word Play In Rhyme", verses built around these two rhyming tricks.   Any sort of off-rhyme, if used with knowledge and sensitivity, increases the range and vocabulary of poetry.  But so do the widely varying arrangements available in conventional rhyme schemes, as we are about to see.   I do not know if there is a name for spellings that change their sound, and so their rhyme, from one word to the next, but there should be.  Among such perverse spellings, the syllable -ough has perhaps provided more grist than any other to versifiers.  According to circumstance, it is pronounced at least five says-as uff, ow, oh, off, or oo:

 ON A DISTINGUISHED VICTORIAN POET WHO NEVER
 PRONOUNCED HIS NAME THE SAME WAY TWICE

I seldom stretch beneath a bough
To browse on lines of Arthur Clough.
His work seems rather dated, though
Victorians loved Arthur Clough.
In fact, they could not get enough

Of poems penned by Arthur Clough;
While I-I groan, I snort, I cough
When forced to slog through Arthur Clough.
And I am glad that I am through
With this review of Arthur Clough.

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