Rhyme and Its Kinds

Read these lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) aloud. A ship has been driven into the frozen seas near the South Pole:

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

You hear rhyme twice over. around chimes with swound (an old word for a faint) at the ends of lines, and inside the third line growled chimes with howled. The extra rhyme makes the line itself crack and growl. This unit is about the music of verse: rhyme in this lesson, rhythm and metre in the next two.

1The kinds of rhyme at work

Internal and feminine rhyme. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" (1845) is full of both:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

dreary/weary and napping/tapping/rapping are internal, feminine rhymes (stressed + unstressed syllable); lore/door is a masculine end rhyme. The heavy, repeated chiming creates the hypnotic, haunted mood of a man half asleep.

Slant rhyme. Emily Dickinson used near rhymes so often that they became her signature. Here is the first stanza of one of her best-known poems, as first printed in 1891:

soul and all almost rhyme. The slightly "off" sound fits a poem about hope, which never quite arrives at certainty.

Pararhyme. The First World War poet Wilfred Owen developed a special slant rhyme in which the consonants match but the vowel changes. In "Strange Meeting" (written 1918), a soldier dreams he has escaped from battle into a tunnel:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

escaped/scooped and groined/groaned keep the frame of consonants but drop the vowel to a darker sound. The effect is of a rhyme that has been damaged, like the men.

Eye rhyme, and how pronunciation changes. Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1599) begins: "Come live with me and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove". Today love and prove are an eye rhyme. In Marlowe's time the vowels were probably closer, so the pair may once have been a full rhyme. Old poems sometimes look irregular only because English has changed.

2What rhyme does

• Binds lines into units (couplets, quatrains) and makes them memorable: one reason why proverbs, songs and advertising slogans rhyme.
• Links ideas: rhyme words are often set side by side in meaning, to agree or to clash.
• Creates closure: a rhyming couplet at the end of a poem sounds final.
• Sets tone: heavy, regular rhyme can be comic or hypnotic; slant rhyme can sound uneasy or modern.

Rhyme is not the only way to make verse musical. Much oral poetry, in Africa and elsewhere, builds its music more from repetition, parallel phrasing and the rhythm of speech than from end rhyme, and much modern poetry in English is unrhymed.