Rhyme

In addition to creating balanced rhythms or cadence through the use of meter, poets give richness to their language through shadings of sound, orchestrating the musical quality of vowel and consonants through the words they use. Perhaps the most familiar form of sound patterning is end-rhyme, a similarity of sound carried by word endings. It began as an aspect of oral poetry (poetry composed, transmitted, or performed orally rather than through writing), and was probably intended to help people memorize poems. Over centuries written verse forms developed using rhyme in set patterns known as rhyme schemes. In the following typical English ballad unrhymed and end-rhymed lines alternate:

O wha is this has done this deed,
This ill deed done to me,
To send me out this time o' the year,
To sail upon the sea?

(Anonymous, “Sir Patrick Spens,” Child, No. 58.A., 1765)



In some cases, rather than making use of a full end-rhyme such as “me” and “sea,” poets instead employ off-rhyme or slant rhyme for a strange unsettling effect, as 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson does with “One” and “Stone” in the example below.

I’ve known her—from an ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of her attention—
Like Stone—

(Poem #303, 1890)



Wilfred Owen, a 20th-century English poet, expresses the senselessness of war through the use of slant rhymes:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?
–O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all

(“Futility” 1920)



Although end-rhyme is the most common form of rhyme, poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath intricately crafted their work by embedding additional internal rhymes, full or slant, at various points.

. . . In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways
My wishes raced through the house-high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In his tuneful turning. . .

(Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill,” 1946)