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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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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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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