Writing with Rhymes

Since we’ve talked about rhymes before, you can find previous posts on the subject by typing “rhyme” or other key word in the Search box. Today, though, I’m thinking about the ongoing popularity of rhyming poems and what might be helpful in writing poems that rhyme. 

• Pick rhymes with ample word choices that echo the sound. For example, "care" has many options such as "bare," "dare," "fare," "hair," "lair," "mare," "pair," "rare," "share," "spare," "stare," "there," "ware," and"where."
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• Make sure the rhymes have the same rhythm, stressing the same syllable in both words. i.e. "AsPARaGUS" has the same syllabic emphasis as "don't DARE to FUSS," which might work in a humorous poem.
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• Whenever possible, use rhyming nouns you can picture or verbs that move those pictures along. 
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• Use strong rhymes at the end of lines to add emphasis to the overall poem. 
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• Avoid rhyming words that show no picture or movement. For instance, don’t end lines with identifiers such as “an” or “the.” Also avoid prepositions such as “of” for end-line rhymes. 
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• Like other words in a poem, rhymes must contribute something. For example, they can add drama, humor, or imagery, along with their interesting sounds. 
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• Read your work aloud and listen for its musicality. You can amplify the sound by looking for words within each line that have synonyms with similar consonants as the rhymes. 
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• Repeating vowels sounds can be effective, too, and is usually more subtle. 
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• Consider using a rhyming dictionary to get you over hard spots. Or test every letter of the alphabet with the main rhyming sound. Say, for instance, you end a line with the word “able.” Going through the alphabet gives you “cable,” “fable,” “label,” “Mabel” (maybe for a humorous poem or limerick), “stable,” and “table.” 
  
  

If you have questions about rhyming or other aspects of poetry, feel free to ask in the Comment section below, and, Lord willing, I'll respond in an upcoming post. Also, be sure to Subscribe so you don’t miss responses and other info you might want to know to improve the quality of your poems. 

Until next time…. 

 

 Mary Harwell Sayler

How can a poem have texture?

 

When I think of texture, I think of cable-knit wool sweaters, beach sand, seashells, pine needles, corduroy – all touchable and recognizable by our fingertips. Obviously, we can’t do that with poetry, so how can we give our poems texture?

A definition might help. According to poets who know about such matters, texture can include figurative language (metaphor, simile, etc.) and rhyme or rhythm (musicality.)

To give you an example, let’s look at the well-textured opening of this famous poem that most of us studied in high school but didn’t have a clue about what it mean until now:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

by T. S. ELIOT

 

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent….

Read that verse aloud to get the full impact of its texture and beauty. Then read aloud this bare-bones version, picked clean of the good stuff:

Let us go,        

When evening is spread against sky

Like a patient on a table;

Let us go, through streets,

The retreats

Of nights in hotels

And restaurants:

Streets

Of intent….

See? Hear? Poems need more than flat sentences and totally understandable statements. They need texture – something to alert or even disturb the wandering mind.

This week, I’ve been reading a wonderful book, Painting Abstracts, by Rolina van Vliet. She talks about visual art, of course, but her definition, “What is texture?” helped me to understand more in relation to poetry:

“By texture we mean all the effects which disturb and penetrate the smooth… surface. It is the varied layers we use to construct our work…. It is how we vary the surface area using irregularities, emphases, rhythms, height, differences or roughness. Texture is a very strong artistic element….”

The author-artist goes on to list some of the things texture can accomplish:

• activates imagination, creativity and expression
• initiates experimentation and discovery
• stimulates the discovery of one’s own imagery, our artistic vocabulary
• lead to unexpected, interesting and surprising effects
• ensures variation, contrast, emphasis and dynamics

and more – always more as you revise your poems, play with lines, and experiment with the sounds and meanings of words.

 

©2021, Mary Sayler, poet-writer

 

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Throwing a wrench in rhyme

 

The expression, “throwing a wrench into the works,” typically refers to the effort to prevent a plan or keep something from working properly. In poetry, that wrenching can occur in wrenched rhymes.

True rhymes not only have echoing syllables at the end of each rhyming word, they have the same emphasis or syllabic stress. For instance, round/found echo the sound and also the accent. 

Conversely, singing/bring wrenches the true rhyme of sing/bring, whereas rhyming/wing emphasizes the differences in syllables – i.e., RHYming/ WING.

Wrenches can also occur by forcing the poem’s syntax (i.e., normal sentence structure or word sequence) in order to make a rhyme. For an example of such violence to the English language:

Wrenched syntax puts words in a position weird
when a poet tries to make lines rhyme-adhered.

Or to say it the regular way:

Wrenched syntax pushes words around just so they’ll rhyme – even if the phrase or sentence now makes less sense!

That said, you might want to wrench your words and rhymes on purpose for the sake of humor.

For more on rhymes, see the prior post “Good Times to Write in Rhymes.” 

For more help on writing or revising poems in general, my former poetry correspondence course is available in this updated paperback, A Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry.

For a lively way to enjoy poetry and learn more about its many forms and terminology, The ABC's of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun is now available in hardback.

 

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer, book author in all genres, including A Gathering of Poems

 

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Prime Time for Rhyme

Rhymes have the best success when they accentuate the meaning, theme, or purpose of a poem.

Since the repetition of a sound naturally calls attention to it, this can be a useful technique to highlight an important thought or image. Otherwise, the emphasis of rhyme can be distracting – like pointing to an empty doorway and saying, "Ta DA!" when nothing is there.

If you once thought, as I did, that a poem wasn't a poem unless it rhymed, you may have found yourself being faithful to the rhyming pattern rather than the poem’s meaning. However, rhyme for the sake of rhyme can make a line seem odd, awkward or strained, so it's better to omit rhymes altogether than to force the syntax into an unnatural-sounding sentence.

In general, the weakest rhymes use the weakest words to create the weakest pictures.  For example, a preposition, adjective, or adverb can not be envisioned.  Except for providing a senseless sound, nothing is gained by pairing a rhyme with “of,” “for,” “the,” or other abstract word.

Conversely, the opposite is true:  Strong nouns and verbs offer the strongest rhymes, create the clearest pictures, and give the greatest strength and emphasis  to a poem’s meaning, theme, and purpose as I hope this poem will show: 

Congregation

The cardinals convene the color of the day.

Robed in red, they pronounce a benediction

over cawing crow and squawking jay –

an ecumenical procession of beak and plume.

Two tiny titmice, cowled like monks,

begin to chant, and a pair of mourning doves

peck flat wafer seeds from green chunks

of ground, keeping time to some hymnal tune.

A brown thrasher thrashes in a purifying pool,

and into this God-given school of earth and sky –

on my most mid weak day – I

come to be quiet and commune.

by Mary Harwell Sayler from the poetry book Lost in Faith

Note: The above post primarily came from the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry e-book.

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Every poem doesn’t have to rhyme!

When I first began writing poems, they inevitably rhymed and bounced to their own rhythm. Most poets can probably say the same, and that’s fine! Rhythmic and rhyming lines work wonderfully well for humorous verse, nursery rhymes, and greeting card verse.

If, however, you want your poems to have a literary tone or quality, you and your rhymes may need to break up for a while! You won’t be saying goodbye forever, but when you return to rhyming, you’ll have a purpose and appropriate form.

Since haiku has been perennially popular for centuries, it makes a good place to start weaning yourself from rhymes. The brevity of its three lines and picturesque scenes from nature provide an excellent exercise in areas far more important to poetry than rhyme, for example:

• Being concise (aka “writing tight.”)

• Being highly observant (i.e., noticing – really noticing what you see and sense.)

• Using fresh comparisons of This with That (to SHOW, rather than TELL.)

To make a clean break with rhyme, consider writing prose poems, which focus on insights, thoughts, feelings, or even a mini-story, rather than rhyme.

Also, consider writing free verse, which relies heavily on the way in which you arrange and rearrange your line breaks.

As long as your free verse stays FREE of any pattern, including a rhyme scheme), the poems might scatter rhymes internally, rather than end-line, but they’re more apt to use sound echoes – word pairs that echo off of one another, creating audial interest.

Once you’ve spent some time with these alternatives to rhyme, learn how to scan a poem, which is much easier than it sounded in high school! (You can do it!)

Then, you have the tools you need to write rhyming poetry in such traditional patterns as the sonnet and villanelle. Writing in these classical forms not only gives you a strong sense of satisfaction in your work, it can elevate your level of poetry-writing into literary realms. There, you’ll be more apt to find poetry journals and anthologies waiting for your poems to fill their hungry pages.


Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children), Faces in a Crowd, PRAISE! and Kindle e-books on poetry

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Enjambment and rhyme placement tone down jangling rhymes

Rhyming poetry often gets criticized for bringing readers to a full stop at the end of a line where words loudly jingle-jangle. The effect works well in nursery rhymes and humorous verse as reverberations add to the sense of play, levity, and humor, but in serious poetry, jingles seem to annoy free verse lovers and poetry critics!

To retain your rhymes but tone them down, a couple of workable options depend on how you break the lines.

1. Change the placement of rhyming pairs from end-line rhymes to internal rhymes. Making this happen is just like it sounds. i.e., Move lines around until the rhyming words appear inside a line, rather than at the end. Here’s an example from my Speaking Peach chapbook:


Accent
by Mary Harwell Sayler

Maybe it's my low voice, slow drawl, or way
of saying, "Y'all," (meaning, of course, a choice
of two or more individuals), but for some reason,

most people – male or female – think I need
some help. "Here let me do that for you," they
say, just trying to be kind. Most of the time,

I do not mind the opportunity to be cradled,
even coddled, by bolder folk than I –
those who feel best when they assist, but
perhaps I should resist the temptation

to be babied, even though I must persist
in a voice too hushed to sound insistent.


If you read the poem aloud, you’ll hear the rhymes – hopefully echoing without jangling – within the lines and also within some of the words – for example, voice/choice, way/say, drawl/y’all, assist/resist/persist/insistent.


2. Use enjambment to soften the ring of rhymes. This technique lets you place rhymes at the end of the lines for couplets or other traditional forms such as sonnets or villanelles that have a distinctive rhyme scheme pattern. Instead of coming to a full stop on each end-line rhyme, however, you keep the sentence going onto the next line or beyond. As an example of enjambment, here’s a poem from my Winning the Wars chapbook.


Postcard after the Scene
by Mary Harwell Sayler

In straight lines strung with golden light, the sun-
washed houses make a pleasing sight – the ones

still left, that is. Some stores stay open if they can:
sidewalk café, hair dresser, and vegetable stand,

but what I’ve seen seems pitiful and bleak.
Someone said five officers were killed last week

by a rifle. I didn’t hear the gun explode,
but I saw stone-silent shadows as we rode

through town in trucks. Our camp sits on a hill,
overlooking a village: so beautiful before blood spilled.


In that poem, “can” and “bleak” come to a full stop, but for the other lines, enjambment wraps the sentence around a rhyme before slowing down to a softened sound.

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© 2012, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved.

 
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Good times to write in rhymes

Steady rhyme and rhythm with no variations usually produce boringly predictably poems with a sing-song beat and end-line ping that sometimes prejudice readers (and other poets!) against rhyming poems of any kind. Nevertheless, rhymes have been popular for many, many centuries, and their echoing sounds continue to expand our options as poets, writers, readers, and people ready to learn.

Repetitive sounds help readers to remember the poems they like. Strong rhymes and a lively beat also help people of all ages to learn, relearn, or retrieve information. Therefore, poems with rhythmic rhymes can be very useful in helping children to learn new information or helping elderly patients and stroke victims to retrieve information and recover memories.

Effective rhymes emphasize thoughts and feelings. If rhymes happen to be key words at the end of the lines, the emphasis increases – again, making a poem easier to recall.

Sometimes poems with regular rhymes and rhythm readily sing their way into song lyrics and hymn ballads.

Poets with a strong sense of musicality – and poets who fret over where to break a line in free verse – may find traditional forms useful to study and liberating to write.

Poets who enjoy writing humorous poetry can often bump up humor with the drum roll of a strong beat and sound of true rhymes. If those rhyming words have three or more syllables, so much the funnier.

Amusing or not, end-line rhymes work best when active verbs and strong nouns add sense to each sentence.

Conversely, end-line rhymes usually do not work well when they consist of abstract concepts or weak words that cannot be pictured such as love/of/above.

End-line rhymes can become problematic, too, when they hinder creativity or the flow of ideas, locking a poet into rhyming words that torture syntax (sentence structure) or thwarting poets from developing their unique voice.

If you like to write in true rhymes but don’t like end-line jingles, enjambment will often soften the sound as you wrap a sentence around one line onto the next.

To vary sound echoes, slant rhyme and alliteration provide interesting substitutes for true rhymes.

For more help with rhymes, see these articles on The Poetry Editor blog:

• Rhyme, rhythm, and reality: traditional English verse
• Unlocking clockwork rhyme



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© 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved. Please do not use the above without permission.

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Sonnets traditionally require poets to use rhythmic rhymes and argue nicely in fourteen lines

Poets who prefer writing with rhyme and rhythm do well to get acquainted with traditional forms of English poetry. Why? Traditional verse forms, such as the villanelle discussed last time or the sonnet this time, have been popular since their appearance many years before Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450.

If you’re inclined to write poetry of 20 lines or less with strong rhymes and solid rhythmic beat, consider revising those poems with the sonnet in mind. If you’re inclined to write poems with strong opinions and solid arguments, that’s even better!

So, what do you need to do to shape a poem into a sonnet?

Even up the meter. Although other types of meter can certainly be used, let’s stick with the old standby – iambic pentameter. As discussed in the previous article “Scan a poem. Catch the beat,” iambic pentameter means each line has five feet, most of which are iambs. And, as previously discussed in the same article and in “Poetry forms help re-form a poem as you revise,” an iamb is a foot of meter consisting of two syllables that end on an upbeat note.

Occasionally, a poem might have an extra syllable or two to allow variation without losing the beat, but generally a line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables per line with the even numbers accentuated the majority of the time.

Confine your sonnet to 14 lines.

Follow a rhyme pattern of your choice. An “a” marks the first rhyme, “b” the second, and so on with the most long-lived patterns being Italian (Petrarchan), Spenserian, and Shakespearean. Each of those forms has its own rhyme scheme as follows:

Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet – The first eight lines (octave) have a rhyming pattern of a b b a a b b a, while the last six lines (sextet) offer rhyme options such as c d c d c d or c d e c d e.

Spenserian Sonnet – Edmund Spencer, author of The Faerie Queen, invented the pattern of a b a b b c b c c d c d e e.

Shakespearean Sonnet – William Shakespeare experimented with the use of three quatrains (verses of four lines each) in his sonnets, which closed on a couplet (two rhyming lines.) That rhyme scheme usually followed this pattern:

a b a b
c d c d
e f e f
g g

The couplet at the end of a Shakespearean sonnet can nicely close a debate or open the ending of the poem into a new way of thinking. An Italian sonnet, however, might state a case in the octave and present the other side in the last six lines. So, while a villanelle works well when you want to emphasize and repeat a particular thought or obsession, the sonnet works great when you present an unusual viewpoint, express an opinion, make a case, or just feel like arguing!

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© 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler
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Unlocking clockwork rhyme

If you noticed the lock/ clock rhyme tucked into the title, you discovered a subtle option for poets who want to tone down the sound of end-line rhyming pairs:

Slide rhymes into unexpected places.

Traditional metered poetry in English seldom uses that option, preferring instead true rhymes placed in the end-line position, which empathetically ends a line as predictably and regularly, yeah, as clockwork.

There’s nothing wrong with that. However, it helps to have a reason. For instance, you might want to stay in line with a previously cut pattern of verse, such as the sonnet or villanelle. Or, you might want to emphasize something strongly, knowing full well that end-line rhymes offer full impact.

Heavy repetition of sound can seldom be ignored. If you want to turn up the volume, active verbs or strong nouns give you the strongest emphasis with the heft to carry the weight of your thoughts and rhyming stress. Conversely, the use of weak words such as of/ above, when/ then, or me/ the does not help a thought, sound, or picture.

Scattering rhymes within the lines provides one possibility for toning it down. Another is to use slant rhyme or off rhyme instead of true rhyming pairs. Generally, this involves a slight change in one word to make a similar, corresponding sound echo, such as occurs in summer/ simmer.

If thinking of off rhymes gives you a headache, aim for assonance or consonance.

To define:

Assonance – Repeats vowel sounds to create a mood or poetic alternative to rhyme. For an example of the moodiness that often echoes in an “o” sound: “Only a forlorn loon broke the silence on our pond.”

Consonance – Repeats consonants and adds a stronger sound echo than assonance. For an example of repetition sizzling with “s” and “m” sounds then flaring into the roar of “r”: “Summer simmered in smoldering fires.”

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© 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved

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Rhyme, rhythm, reality: traditional English verse

As holidays make the rounds again, most of us reach toward the familiar ring of tradition before that circle passes by for another year. Somewhere in the rounds, poetry holds a special place of honor with holiday patterns of rhyme and rhythm, for example, in hymn lyrics, carols, Christmas bedtime stories, and those favorite nursery rhymes that go over the rivers and into the woods to find Grandma’s idyllic house among the oaks and pines. But stop! Grandma not only lives in a condo near the strip mall where she works, she will seriously chastise you if you call her Granny.

Despite such deterrents, some of us just want to go back. Some of us still want poetry that chimes each line’s end with the regular beat of our own hearts. Some of us cling to old traditions, but more likely, we simply do not want to throw out the customs, practices, or convictions of many, many hundreds of years of traditional English verse. Maybe we like repetition and meter. Maybe we hold sentiments even though we do not want our poems to be sentimental. Maybe we don’t want our writing to be ritualized but want it to be real.

So how do we keep old patterns yet adapt them realistically to contemporary poetry? First we need to hear the rhythm that pulsed within our ancient English predecessors. Usually this could be counted as regular thumps of four beats per line with a slight pause or caesura mid-way. On either side of that mini-break stretched vowels with fairly equal waves of sound. In addition, alliteration echoed the consonants from line to line, turning up the volume and making each poem more memorable – a particularly important technique since pen and paper had not yet confined poems to silence on the written page.

Those patterns of Old English verse still provide a fun form for practicing poetry writing. But language developed, and so did sophisticated, sometimes highly intricate, patterns of end-line rhyme. The rhythmic rap changed somewhat, too, as iambic pentameter became the popular choice of poets and readers. Why? Practicalities! Each line of approximately ten syllables nicely fit the width of the page and also the natural breath of the reader.

To break down that line-break even more: Pentameter = the Latin word penta (meaning five) + meter (measure) of iambic feet. These feet do not make a yardstick, but they’re just as basic. i.e., An iamb is two syllables with emphasis placed on the second syllable, which makes the iambic foot upbeat. The next most popular foot, a trochee, also has two syllables but with the accent first, and it’s downhill from there. So a trochee is downbeat. Poems can be written in trochees, of course, but usually a trochaic foot steps into a line of iambic pentameter to bring a little jazz step – a variation that does not lose the beat.

Once you know this basic two-step dance of poetry, it’s as though you’ve learned a new language or discovered how to fly, and you feel like your poems can do anything! You can rhyme or not. You can devise a mid-line rhyme scheme or begin lines with rhyme or substitute slant rhyme in a Shakespearean sonnet pattern. Yes, your poems might draw from another time, but absorbed by sound and beauty, you’ll find lively ways to adapt old traditions to your renewed voice and perhaps step into a unique place in poetic history.



(c) 2010, Mary Harwell Sayler