As with other formal devices in poetry’s armoury, rhyme can be present in many different guises and in each of them it can generate a wide range of effects. With rhyme too, then, we should observe the (by now familiar) principle that each and every poem creates for itself the rules by which its individual elements set about their business and contribute to the poem’s overall effect and meaning. With rhyme too, that is, it is our job as critics to discover the distinctive code that unlocks the what, how and why of these various devices.
As we search for this code, though, there is one thing to which we can always hold fast: that, in a good poem at least, rhyme is yet another device poetry uses to instil in both the poem itself and our reading of that poem an even stronger sense of activity and drama.
If you ask the following questions of the poem you are analysing, they should at least help you recognise how that poem is using rhyme. The comments that follow immediately after each question, meanwhile, are intended to offer some useful pointers for helping you decide why it is using rhyme and what specifically this rhyme is therefore saying and doing in that particular poem.
- Do you hear a clear rhyme-scheme running through the poem when you read (or listen to) it?
If the answer is no, this very absence of rhyme is likely to bear significance (it could suggest, for instance, that a sense of song, lyricism or music is not appropriate for what the poem wishes to say or for how it wishes to say it. It could likewise suggest a resistance to such things as externally imposed rules or to a sense of regularity and order).
If your answer to this first question is no, you should move straight on to question 3
If the answer is yes, meanwhile, then all the features of rhyme outlined on the previous page are potentially in play and should be looked out for. At the very least you should identify the general ‘mood music’ the sounds of its rhymes instil in the poem as a whole. Do the rhymes, for instance, instil wit or a certain weariness? Are they clichéd and unimaginative or hard-won and inventive?
2. Is the poem’s rhyme scheme regular or irregular, simple or complicated?
The first thing you should do in response to this question is mark out the rhyme scheme of the poem by using the letters of the alphabet. In this system, you assign the letter A to the sound with which the first line ends and then again to every line that ends with the same sound. You assign the letter B to the first end rhyme you come to that does not rhyme with the end of the first line and then to all other line endings that rhyme with it, and so on. Were we to do this for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, for instance, it would look like this:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? A
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: B
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, A
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: B
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, C
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; D
And every fair from fair sometime declines, C
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d; D
But thy eternal summer shall not fade E
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; F
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, E
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st; F
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, G
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. G
Note: you may find it helpful to mark half rhymes using lower case characters
The reason you should start off by marking out the end rhymes in this way is that it enables you to see immediately if there is a pattern to the poem’s rhymes or not – and, if so, what kind of pattern it is.
(In the process, it can also help you spot if the poem belongs to a particular genre or not. As a sonnet, for instance, Shakespeare’s poem is required to contain four different sections: three 4-line sections followed by a final couplet. The rhyme scheme makes it easier for us see this poem is obeying those rules because each of these sections contains a different set of rhyming sounds).
If there is a regular pattern to the rhymes in the poem, this can be interpreted in a variety of ways (not all of which will be relevant for your particular poem). For instance, it can suggest that regularity and order are important motifs in the poem – perhaps even to the degree that they reflect the poem’s (or speaker’s) belief that the world too is ordered in accordance with regular and universal laws. A poem whose rhyme scheme is irregular, meanwhile, may express the exact opposite – a view or experience of the world as disorderly or irregular, say, or an outlook that desires or looks for order in the world but finds it constantly interrupted by episodes of disorder or disruption.
We may seek to make similar connections between what we think the poem is saying and how we think it is saying it by considering whether the rhyme scheme is simple or complicated. Rhyming couplets, for instance, are commonly (though not always correctly) felt to express confidence – or, in a less positive mode, complacency – since they are often associated either with conclusions or at least with an ability to make one thing fit with another. A complicated rhyme scheme, on the other hand, is likely to express a view of the world (or, at least, of the poem’s topic) that is similarly complex: orderly, certainly, but also intricate.
3. Is the poem’s rhyme scheme consistent or inconsistent, persistent or occasional?
If a poem rhymes throughout, but the patterning of those rhymes changes at one or more stages, each phase of the poem is therefore likely to acquire from this its own atmosphere or mood music. You should seek to determine, therefore, whether these changes in the rhyme scheme are in any way in tune with changes in the content or attitude expressed in each successive phase.
Rhyme has a different impact on us, and accordingly makes a different contribution to the activity of the poem, depending on whether it is a persistent feature of the poem or if it appears only intermittently. As with other formal elements of poetry that can involve the creation of regular patterns – such as metre or stanza structure – any sudden break from, or alteration of, these kinds of patterns can have an especially powerful impact on us. If a poem that otherwise consistently rhymes suddenly ceases to do so, for instance, it is likely this will take place when the poem registers a sudden collapse in the certainties of the world or thought processes it has to this point expressed. In this way, it can help us feel for ourselves the sense of unease or disorientation which it, its speaker or its characters have themselves undergone as a result of this collapse.
By the same token, when a poem that has for the most part not made use of rhyme suddenly starts to do so, this too can mark a change in attitude, level of expression and/or worldview. In some cases, the appearance of rhyme may mark a rise in tone, a movement from speech to song, conversation to pronouncement, disorder to order, and so on. Couplets in particular tend to feature when some kind of resolution is reached or a particular movement in the poem comes to a close.
4. Is our understanding of any of the actual words that rhyme enriched as a result of their rhyming?
The belief that every word that rhymes must acquire additional meaning of its own above and beyond the contribution they make to the sonic patterning of the poem as a whole is the cause of many of the most fanciful and misguided interpretations of poetry. Not every rhyme should be expected to act like a lightening bolt from God and offer us a flash of insight into the semantic properties of the word that we – and anyone else who has not yet read this poem – had previously failed to observe.
It is probably better to assume that the primary value of many of a poem’s rhymes lies in the contribution they make to the general patterning outlined above. Nonetheless, poems do sometimes use rhymes to bring together words and concepts that are conventionally kept apart and in so doing use them to encourage us to reflect upon the possible relationships between them. One example of this is the persistent rhyme of ‘night’ and ‘light’ in Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ This poem addresses someone on the threshold of life and death and as such explores the degree to which they are entirely different states and the degree to which each is somehow folded into the other. Part of the power of this poem, then, lies in the way this weighing up of these two supposedly separate states is focalised through a constant interplay (and rhyme) between the words ‘light’ (signifying life) and ‘night’ (signifying death).
5. How close are the rhymes?
This question actually has two parts, each of which opens up a different (but still related) area of investigation: a) how close together on the page are they (or in the time it takes to hear them if we are listening to the poem in recital)? and b) are they full rhymes, half rhymes, eye rhymes and so on?
As with most aspects of rhyme, it is difficult to generalise about the effects the proximity or distance of a poem’s various rhymes generate in any given instance. Nonetheless, rhymes that are close together (both on the page and in sound) are likely to be more insistent than those which are kept apart (either because there are many lines between them or because the rhyme itself is not exact). The more insistent a poem’s rhyme scheme is, moreover, the more prominently it is likely to be generating the effects outlined on the previous page: drawing our attention to the work’s status as a poem; marking the end of each line; impacting upon our experience of the transition from one line to the next; raising the volume on the overarching soundscapes (or mood music) of the poem as a whole; and so on.
Exercises
We have been using two poems as case studies in this unit: Emily Dickinson’s poem 657 (‘I dwell in Possibility’) and R. S. Thomas’s ‘Comparisons.’ If you have not yet completed the preliminary analysis of Dickinson’s poem we conducted here, please do so now. You may also find it helpful to have considered her use of metre in this poem (see here). As far as R. S. Thomas’s poem ‘Comparisons’ is concerned, you should begin with the preliminary analysis of that poem we conducted here, and also complete your analysis of that poem’s use of line (here: bottom of page) and stanza (here: bottom of page).
Once you have completed these preliminary exercises, you should turn your attention to assessing how these two poems employ rhyme in particular, using the list of questions above to guide your analysis.
After that, watch the following video, in which I offer some of my own thoughts about how rhyme contributes to the meaning and effect of these two poems as a whole.
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