Be a Better Writer--IMPROVE YOUR RHYMING SKILLS
Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 8:24 am
It’s been a while since I addressed a lesson specifically to poets, hasn’t it? Well, wait no more. This week and next, I’ll be talking about two poetic terms: rhyme and rhyme scheme. I might also tackle slant rhyme. In the interest of full disclosure—this is a slightly revised lesson from one I did several years ago. Our population has changed enough from that time that I think most of you won’t have read this one before.
You all know what rhymes are—words that have the same ending sounds. We start teaching rhymes when our children are very young, and for most of us rhyming is a pretty basic concept. Therefore. I’m not going to teach you about bat, fat, cat…you don’t need it.
What I will do is to suggest a few ways of rhyming that might not have occurred to you, and to implore you to re-think some of your current rhyming practices.
Regrettably, many amateur poets rarely get beyond the bat, fat, cat mode of rhyming. I was doing some research for something else, and I came across an interesting bit of information: about 99% of rhymed poetry is rejected by publishers of poetry. This is because a) the current state of literary poetry calls for free verse, and b) most rhymed poetry just isn’t sophisticated enough.
I checked through some back weeks of the Weekly Challenge. It only took me a few minutes to find eight poems that rhymed love and above, a particularly tempting rhyme for Christian poets, but way overdone. And a substantial majority of the other rhymes I encountered were exact, 1-syllable rhymes.
Think about these alternatives to “fat/cat” syndrome:
1. Rhyme a 2-syllable word with two 1-syllable words. For example, you could rhyme diet with try it. For experimenting with this (and for my other tips) RhymeZone.com is a great resource. It will suggest words of 1, 2, 3, or more syllables for the word that you input. Play around with that, and don't always feel that rhymes must be one word-to-one word.
2. Rhyme words of more than one syllable with each other. I once wrote a little limerick for a college class in which the rhyme for lines 3 and 4 was the words gazebo and placebo, and another little poem that used Glasgow, fiasco, and Tabasco.
3. An extension of point #2: rhyme interesting words. In fact, your rhymes should be the most interesting words in each line, to counteract that “predictability” factor. If I’m reading a rhymed poem about a cute little kid, and I come across a line that ends with joy, I’m pretty sure that the next rhyming line is going to end with boy. Won’t I be delighted, then, when instead the line ends with destroy?
4. As much as it kills you, consider an inexact (slant) rhyme.
5. A huge rhyming no-no is the forced rhyme. That’s a rhyme put into a poem solely for the purpose of rhyming a word already there, or a rhyme that only works after a bit of mangling of English syntax. Do any of you remember folk-rock band The Turtles? If you do, you’ll remember their song “Happy Together” from the mid-60s. The refrain (that always bothered me, even when I was just a pre-teen) had this little bit of rhyme:
So happy together
How is the weather?
Now that song was a huge hit, and I loved it, but as a very pedantic kid, I remember thinking that it was a ridiculous lyric. What did the weather have to do with anything? Nothing—it was only there to rhyme with together.
Another common way of forcing a rhyme involves using the helping verbs did or does with another verb, just to make an exact rhyme (and sometimes also to make the meter work). Let me see if I can come up with an example on my own….Here’s a little couplet:
My wanderings took me far from home
Far from my Savior I did roam
No one talks like that—the did is just in there to give the second line of the couplet that needed syllable, and to make the exact rhyme of home and roam. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that publishers of poetry hate. It’s true that the syntax of poetry is often different from that of prose, and that good poets from the past have often altered the syntax of sentences to make a line “work”. It’s certainly allowable—occasionally—but knowing how to do it right is absolutely an advanced poetic skill.
This is something I’ve touched on just about every time I’ve done a class that’s purely poetry-related: when I was wearing my judge’s hat, and I came across a rhymed poem, I looked for far more than just rhymes. I'd look for poetic sophistication, which includes:
~high-quality, unpredictable and unforced rhymes
~consistency of meter, especially in a fresh, original pattern (I’ve done lessons on meter in the past).
~poetic “goodies”: metaphor, imagery, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc.
Homework: write a bit of poetry (or share one you’ve previously written) that contains some great rhyming. A rhymed couplet or a quatrain will be fine.
OR share your favorite rhymed poem, and tell why you think the rhymes in that poem work.
OR respond to something I’ve written about in this class.
OR ask a question about great rhymes.
You all know what rhymes are—words that have the same ending sounds. We start teaching rhymes when our children are very young, and for most of us rhyming is a pretty basic concept. Therefore. I’m not going to teach you about bat, fat, cat…you don’t need it.
What I will do is to suggest a few ways of rhyming that might not have occurred to you, and to implore you to re-think some of your current rhyming practices.
Regrettably, many amateur poets rarely get beyond the bat, fat, cat mode of rhyming. I was doing some research for something else, and I came across an interesting bit of information: about 99% of rhymed poetry is rejected by publishers of poetry. This is because a) the current state of literary poetry calls for free verse, and b) most rhymed poetry just isn’t sophisticated enough.
I checked through some back weeks of the Weekly Challenge. It only took me a few minutes to find eight poems that rhymed love and above, a particularly tempting rhyme for Christian poets, but way overdone. And a substantial majority of the other rhymes I encountered were exact, 1-syllable rhymes.
Think about these alternatives to “fat/cat” syndrome:
1. Rhyme a 2-syllable word with two 1-syllable words. For example, you could rhyme diet with try it. For experimenting with this (and for my other tips) RhymeZone.com is a great resource. It will suggest words of 1, 2, 3, or more syllables for the word that you input. Play around with that, and don't always feel that rhymes must be one word-to-one word.
2. Rhyme words of more than one syllable with each other. I once wrote a little limerick for a college class in which the rhyme for lines 3 and 4 was the words gazebo and placebo, and another little poem that used Glasgow, fiasco, and Tabasco.
3. An extension of point #2: rhyme interesting words. In fact, your rhymes should be the most interesting words in each line, to counteract that “predictability” factor. If I’m reading a rhymed poem about a cute little kid, and I come across a line that ends with joy, I’m pretty sure that the next rhyming line is going to end with boy. Won’t I be delighted, then, when instead the line ends with destroy?
4. As much as it kills you, consider an inexact (slant) rhyme.
5. A huge rhyming no-no is the forced rhyme. That’s a rhyme put into a poem solely for the purpose of rhyming a word already there, or a rhyme that only works after a bit of mangling of English syntax. Do any of you remember folk-rock band The Turtles? If you do, you’ll remember their song “Happy Together” from the mid-60s. The refrain (that always bothered me, even when I was just a pre-teen) had this little bit of rhyme:
So happy together
How is the weather?
Now that song was a huge hit, and I loved it, but as a very pedantic kid, I remember thinking that it was a ridiculous lyric. What did the weather have to do with anything? Nothing—it was only there to rhyme with together.
Another common way of forcing a rhyme involves using the helping verbs did or does with another verb, just to make an exact rhyme (and sometimes also to make the meter work). Let me see if I can come up with an example on my own….Here’s a little couplet:
My wanderings took me far from home
Far from my Savior I did roam
No one talks like that—the did is just in there to give the second line of the couplet that needed syllable, and to make the exact rhyme of home and roam. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that publishers of poetry hate. It’s true that the syntax of poetry is often different from that of prose, and that good poets from the past have often altered the syntax of sentences to make a line “work”. It’s certainly allowable—occasionally—but knowing how to do it right is absolutely an advanced poetic skill.
This is something I’ve touched on just about every time I’ve done a class that’s purely poetry-related: when I was wearing my judge’s hat, and I came across a rhymed poem, I looked for far more than just rhymes. I'd look for poetic sophistication, which includes:
~high-quality, unpredictable and unforced rhymes
~consistency of meter, especially in a fresh, original pattern (I’ve done lessons on meter in the past).
~poetic “goodies”: metaphor, imagery, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc.
Homework: write a bit of poetry (or share one you’ve previously written) that contains some great rhyming. A rhymed couplet or a quatrain will be fine.
OR share your favorite rhymed poem, and tell why you think the rhymes in that poem work.
OR respond to something I’ve written about in this class.
OR ask a question about great rhymes.