Rhyme
Rhyme is a literary technique defined as the correspondence of terminal sounds in words, lines of verse, or other units of composition. It has a rich history in English poetry, becoming prominent during the Tudor period and evolving through various forms such as exact rhyme, near rhyme, eye rhyme, and others. Historically, rhyme was less common in early English literature, with poets like Geoffrey Chaucer leading its adoption in the fourteenth century. The impact of rhyme is seen in its ability to enhance the musicality and structure of poetry, guiding readers and listeners through patterns and rhythms.
Various classifications of rhyme exist based on sound similarity, syllable stress, and placement within lines. Rhyme has also been influenced by multiple linguistic traditions, with its roots traced back to ancient Chinese and Old Irish poetry. In contemporary literature, while free verse gained popularity in the twentieth century, traditional rhymed forms continue to thrive, with poets often blending both styles. The resurgence of interest in structured rhyme into the twenty-first century highlights its ongoing relevance in poetry and the diverse ways it can be employed for artistic expression.
Subject Terms
Rhyme
Rhyme (spelled rime until the seventeenth century), is defined by Merriam-Webster Unabridged online (2014) as “Correspondence in terminal sounds of two or more words, lines of verse, or other units of composition or utterance.” The qualifications and expansion of the definition that follows is longer than the definition. Scholars use dozens of terms to define the various kinds of rhyme in English. For centuries, poets writing in English have used rhyme to mark line turns and stanzaic order, and to add musicality to their poems. Even when modernist and postmodernist poets turned to free verse, some poets continued to use traditional patterns of rhyming, and free verse was rarely without some form of rhyme.
Background
The Greeks and the Romans did not use rhyme except rarely. Neither did the Anglo-Saxons. In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer famously used it, as did his friend John Gower, but their contemporaries William Langland and the Gawain poet (also known as the Pearl Poet) wrote in alliterative verse, verse in which an initial sound is repeated in two or more consecutive words. It was not until the Tudor period (1485–1603) that rhyme began to dominate English verse, and unrhymed verse was the language of drama even then. Scholars have suggested that William Shakespeare’s use of rhyming couplets in his dramas may have been as much for the practical purpose of prompting actors to enter and exit as for stylistic reasons.
Kinds of Rhyme
Rhyme is perhaps most often defined based on similarity of sound. Exact rhyme (also called perfect, true, full, or whole rhyme) is the recognizable norm: glad/sad. Near rhyme (slant, approximate, imperfect, half, or oblique rhyme) occurs when the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, but the preceding vowel or consonant sounds do not: down/upon. Eye rhyme is based on a similarity of spelling rather than a similarity of sound: love/move. Rich rhyme (from French rime riche) rhymes a word with its homonym: cedar/seeder. Some experts also include assonance (words with similar vowels and different consonants: blown/roses) and consonance (words with similar consonants, different vowels: chuckle/fickle) as kinds of rhyme. Macaronic rhyme uses more than one language to create similar sounds, as in Wilfred Owen’s war poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”: glory / Pro patria mori.”
Rhyme is also classified based on the pattern of stressed syllables: monosyllabic rhyme, so-called masculine rhyme (snow/go); multiple rhyme, or so-called feminine rhyme (motion/ocean; glamorous /amorous); light rhyme, a stressed syllable rhymed with a secondary stress: passageways/days. Yet another way to classify rhyme is according to the position of the rhyming word in line or stanza. End rhyme, or the rhyming of a line’s concluding word, is the most common, but rhymes may also be found at the beginning of a line (initial rhyme) or within a line (internal rhyme). An internal rhyme that rhymes a word near the middle of a line with a word at the end of the same line is called leonine rhyme. One famous example of leonine rhyme is the final stanza of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” which begins: “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
The Start of Rhyme
Scholars have suggested that rhyme may have entered English poetry through various languages, including Persian, ancient Chinese, Celtic, Arabic, Old Norse, and vulgar Latin. The Shijing (Shih Ching; known in English as The Book of Odes, The Classic of Poetry, or Book of Songs) the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, traces the earliest appearance of rhyme in the religious and folk poetry of the Chinese to around 1000 BCE. However, history demonstrates that few advances of early Chinese civilization reached the West, and the complexity of Chinese rhyme patterns makes transmission of rhyme from China even more improbable.
Written records show that Old Irish verse included rhyme by the sixth century CE. The Old English poem, the “Rhyming Poem,” found in the Exeter Book (copied ca. 975), uses both mid-line and end-line rhyme extensively. By the mid-twelfth century, rhyming octosyllabic couplets were used in Anglo-Norman narrative verse. The clearest path is from rhyme within Church Latin, which was in use starting in the fourth century. Such use reasonably explains the appearance of rhyme in English verse and in other vernacular literatures of Europe.
Regardless of the point of origin, the greatest influence on rhyme in English poetry was the troubadours brought to England by Henry II and his sons in the twelfth century. Rhyme was a new tool for these poets, and they used it for sound and sense, inventing new and intricate rhyme schemes. Through their influence, complex stanzaic rhyme patterns outpaced couplet rhymes. The use of rhyme increased throughout the medieval era, and beginning with the Renaissance rhyme was a primary poetic convention. It remained so until the free verse movement began in the early twentieth century.
Rhyme Today
In “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917), T. S. Eliot charged that “excessive devotion” to rhyme muted the music of poetry, but in the same paragraph he makes clear that he is not calling for a moratorium on rhyme. In fact, he suggests that freeing poets from a dependence on rhyme could also allow them to use rhyme to greater effect. Certainly Eliot himself used rhyme, even in the quintessential modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922). To cite a single example, in the lines following the sordid, passionless encounter between the typist and the young man carbuncular in “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot uses an eight-line stanza of alternating rhymes, a conventional form; but there is nothing conventional in the dark humor of rhyming “lover” and “over” and “alone” and “gramophone.”
Eliot was not unique in using free verse and rhymed verse within a single poem and in using unexpected rhymes. However, there were also poets throughout the twentieth century who used rhyme in more traditional ways. The sonnet particularly continued to be popular with poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Berryman, and others using standard sonnet form with set patterns of rhyme. The late twentieth century saw the development of New Formalism as a response to the dominance of free verse for most of the century. The resurgence of interest in strict patterns of rhyme continued into the twenty-first century as poets including Timothy Steele, Molly Peacock, Phillis Levin, Marilyn Hacker, Mark Jarman, Dana Gioia, Andrew Hudgins, and Mary Jo Salter championed traditional forms of verse.
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