ANOTHER MAJOR CONSIDERATION IN THE POETIC USE OF WORDS IS, of course, rhyme. The decision to rhyme—and how and when to rhyme—will dictate much not only about the rhyming words but also about the arrangement of all the other words. We’ll talk about rhyme schemes when we get around to discussing stanzas, but for now what we want to focus on is how words that end with the same or similar sounds (or sometimes look as if they should) create a kind of music. When someone talks about a rhyme, they usually mean an end rhyme. That makes sense; they are the most common and recognizable:
Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night.
The first two lines of William Blake’s “The Tyger” have the advantage of not only rhyming but also being a couplet, a rhyming pair right next to each other. Rhyming lines need not be that close to one another, and the patterns in which they rhyme can be quite complex, but for the moment, let’s limit ourselves to the basic concept. Rhymes don’t have to sit at the ends of lines; they can also happen within the line, where a word on the interior rhymes with the one at the end (or sometimes one in the next line), in which case we call them internal rhymes, exhibiting just how imaginative literary scholars can be. One frequently invoked instance of internal rhyme is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” whose first line reads, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.” It’s true: those are full chimes for each other. On the other hand, it feels a little like cheating. What Poe has done here is take rhyming short lines and lay them end to end so that his rhymes fall at the midpoint and the end rather than in couplets:
Once upon a midnight dreary,
While I pondered, weak and weary . . .
There’s nothing wrong with laying the thing out as he does, and it has the advantage of killing fewer trees. Usually, however, internal rhymes are occasional things, as in the example below. Still, Poe’s use does strike a sort of incantatory chord in his fevered verse.
End and internal rhymes are not mutually exclusive, as the witches of Macbeth remind us:
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
They sound nice. All sorts of fun is happening here. First, we have the internal rhyme (triplets!) in line one with “double, double” and “trouble,” and then line two completes the end rhyme with “bubble.” Moreover, in doubling “double,” Shakespeare gives us an identical rhyme. That sort of repetition is usually frowned upon at the end of lines in English but much more acceptable internally, as here. Beyond that, these are feminine rhymes, meaning that two or more syllables rhyme. If we had lines ending instead with “trouble,” and “rumble,” that would still be a rhyme, if your standards aren’t very high, because the last syllables rhyme even though the first ones do not. To be fair, we call that a slant rhyme, which means it only sort of rhymes but fulfills a purpose none the less.
Rhyme schemes come in all sorts of patterns, which can be put to all manner of uses. Let’s say, for instance, that you want to write a long poem and get it to hang together as it meanders southward down page after page. You might want some sort of interlocking yet simple rhyme scheme. And you might decide that some white space would be a nice touch. In that case, you might try three-line stanzas, with the first and third lines rhyming. So where’s the interlocking part come in? Carryover. If you take that second, as yet unrhymed line ending and use that rhyme as line four, it becomes the first line of the second stanza, which means that it also shows up in line three of that stanza, with an orphaned line ending in between. The resulting rhyme scheme will look like this: ABA-BCB-CDC-DED-EFE-FGF-GHG, and so on. Now here is where poets have it better than students of poetry: they never have to remember the lettering for the rhymes. Just establish the pattern and follow it down the page. It will work; you can tie a really long poem together with this pattern. How do we know? Because it’s been around for a while. Dante Alighieri used it for his Divine Comedy in 1320. It found its way into English verse with lightning speed for the Middle Ages when Geoffrey Chaucer used it, still in the fourteenth century. The form, which is called terza rima (third rhyme, which just sounds dumb, hence the adherence to the Italian term), has been used by just about everybody down the centuries from John Milton to Percy Bysshe Shelley to T. S. Eliot to Thomas Hardy to W. H. Auden and on and on.
The original terza rima example is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which, if you’re like me, you can’t read. So how about something we can read? How about “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost? Dante’s work is an epic, a length the rhyme scheme is very well suited to to carry the reader along. This one, happily, is not an epic:
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
This is a fine poem, well worth a discussion about its construction and meaning, but for now, let’s just concentrate on the rhyme scheme. And to do that, it’s easiest if we abstract out the rhyming words:
| Night | (A) |
| Rain | (B) |
| Light | (A) |
| Lane | (B) |
| Beat | (C) |
| Explain | (B) |
| Feet | (C) |
| Cry | (D) |
| Street | (C) |
| Good-bye | (D) |
| Height | (A) |
| Sky | (D) |
| Right | (A) |
| Night | (A) |
At first glance, it might look like a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, but then we notice three things. First, that the rhyming words occur three times. Except, second, the A rhymes in lines one, three, eleven, thirteen, and fourteen. And, third, the reuse of the A rhyme at the end, and especially the A couplet at the end, which means this poem is not continuing.
What’s that you say? A sonnet? How good of you to notice. Yes, there are fourteen lines here, iambic pentameter and everything. It is one of two very famous poems to eschew the Petrarchan and Shakespearean models for the sonnet and to make use of terza rima as the organizing principle. The other is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” For now, though, just the rhymes, ma’am. Or rimes. If it felt to you like alternating rhymes, that’s good: you got the general feel. Where it differs from standard ABAB, however, is in the forward push provided by the interlocking quality that begins with lines two, four, and six (“rain”/“lane”/“explain”) and continues throughout. Because there’s always a third rhyme coming, our awareness of any particular rhyme is extended beyond our expectations. Having heard “rain,” we’re more or less satisfied when “lane” pops up, but then we get “explain” and it catches us off guard, elongating the experience ever so slightly. Think of this as primarily an auditory issue. The eye can perceive three similar words without issue, but we are acclimated to hearing rhymes in twos. If we get three, it changes our relationship to the poem. And the nature of the rhyme scheme, as we shall see a bit later, matters enormously to the organization of information in the poem.
NOW THEN, IF WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT RHYMED VERSE, WE need something to compare it to, just so we know that it’s special. That something is called blank verse. So what’s that? “Blank,” in this instance, is simply the going term for “unrhymed.”
So in a chapter on rhyme you’re talking about stuff that doesn’t rhyme?
Yeah, pretty much the size of it. Rhymed and blank verse are actually more closely related than you might think. Let’s begin by stipulating that we’re not talking about free verse, which is also usually unrhymed, here. “Free” in this case would indicate an absence of normal rules of the road involving meter, line length, stanza arrangement, and overall regularity of composition. Blank verse, by contrast, follows the conventions with a single major exception: it doesn’t rhyme.
The first use in English of blank verse seems to have been a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, published between 1554–7. And he may have done so for the best of reasons: the original didn’t rhyme. Classical verse, whether Homer’s Greek or Virgil’s Latin, had no use for rhyme. Why that was, someone who actually knows the languages would have to say. Once the earl had shown us the way, poetry in English really embraced blankness. Most of Shakespeare’s plays, like those of his immediate predecessor Christopher Marlowe (d. 1593), are in blank verse. John Milton’s greatest work, Paradise Lost (1667), is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, as are such Romantic-era poems as William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” John Keats’s “Hyperion,” and Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” Modern poets as various as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden have all used blank verse. There’s a lot of it out there. How much? In Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell estimated that “about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse.” So yes, a lot.
Not free. Blank. And here’s the funny part: virtually all of that blank verse is in the metrical form Milton used, iambic pentameter. There’s no Divine Ordinance decreeing this choice—which actually seems like no choice at all. Still, there it is. As common as iambic pentameter may be generally in English verse, it is as nothing compared to its ubiquity when said verse is unrhymed.
So does that mean that it all sounds alike? Not at all. The results are as varied as the practitioners of the form, from Shakespeare and Marlowe to Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky.
There is one fact, however, common to all writers of blank verse in all eras: they have to avoid rhymes. To clarify just a bit, they have to avoid end rhymes. Interior rhymes, as well as assonance and consonance and alliteration, are just fine. But once your plan for a blank sonnet becomes clear, the echo of a line with one of its near neighbors isn’t a chime but the clang of a cracked bell. That’s easy, you say? Try it sometime. There’s an imp of the perverse (to use Poe’s term) who will maliciously introduce rhyming words exactly where you don’t want them. Writing rhyming poetry may be one of the hardest tasks in all of literature, but writing poetry that consciously—and conscientiously—avoids rhymes is a close second.
Which brings up a final point on blank verse. We tend to think of it as primarily a tool of the narrative poem or the stage drama, but it can take many forms. Yes, indeed, there are blank sonnets. Fourteen lines, possibly a separation between the initial octave and the closing sestet. The poet will have to work to signal that separation, however, because the traditional means, the ending of one rhyme scheme and the beginning of another, is not possible in a poem with no rhymes. So, too, with other forms: as long as rhyme isn’t the main constituent element of the form, adapting it to unrhymed lines is possible. Sometimes it is possible anyway. Heaney has at least one instance of nonrhyming terza rima, which is a little odd when “rima” is its last name.
What does blank verse sound like? Almost anything you want it to. Here is the beginning of one of the great poems about thoughts and memories, William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”:
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
In truth, the full title is “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Whew! You see why we shorten it. If Hamlet is conducting an argument—fraught, sometimes violent—with himself in his soliloquys (also blank verse), Wordsworth is taking a stroll down memory lane. Which overlooks a river. Like the soliloquy, the poem, part ode, part interior monologue, is written in scrupulous decasyllabics, although it has a more relaxed approach to its still-dominant iambic pentameter—ten syllables, but not always five metrical feet. The soundscape is softer, more rounded. The first three lines, for instance, have almost no hard consonants, and those are in the middle or at the end of words. Consider, for instance, “Five years have past, five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!” The repeated “five” provides a sort of vibration of all those f and v sounds, which are further softened by the m/n sounds and sibilants, and the liquid r/l sounds, the whole thing landing as if on a pillow, “With a soft inland murmur.” Violent language would not befit Wordsworth’s purpose here, when the goal is only “powerful emotions recalled in tranquility,” as he elsewhere describes the purpose of poetry. Hamlet’s speech is declamatory, as befits the stage and the moment; Wordsworth’s poem is reflective and introspective. Rhymes? Who needs them?
What we learn from blank verse, ultimately, is that rhyme is not poetry. It is an option, in English at least, although not in all other languages. Not only that, it was there first. The moment Old English gave way to that blend of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French that would become our language, rhymes found their way into our poetry. So while hearing someone say some variation of “It’s not poetry if it doesn’t rhyme” sets my teeth on edge, I do understand where that person got that idea. It isn’t wrong to expect poems to ring the changes that rhyme makes possible; it isn’t right to believe that those are the only poems in the language. Hey, with a vocabulary drawn from Germanic, French, Latin, Spanish, Gaelic, African, Indian, Persian, Arabic, and Native American roots, finding rhymes is just fun. And nearly limitless. Just stay away from “orange.”