By Liz Mastin
The
The poetic conversation has been “non-stop”
concerning rhyme and whether it is passé in this day. However in his book Writing Metrical Poetry by William Baer,
many famous poets have argued strongly in favor of rhyme, among these are poet
George Santayana saying, “Like the orders of Greek Architecture, the sonnet or
the couplet or the quatrain are better than anything else that has been devised
to serve the same function; and the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms
does not abolish the freedom of all men to adopt the old ones.”
Edgar Allen Poe said, “Contenting myself with the certainty that music, in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected – is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance – I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.” Robert Frost stated: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Of course most of the famous English poets used rhyme and meter, among these Shakespeare, Pope and Donne, but times have changed greatly, and as always, unless rhymed poetry is done correctly it will fall under scrutiny! For instance, using what is called “forced rhyme” is considered particularly grievous, for a poet should not use a rhyming word “just” because it rhymes. The rhyming word should further the idea of the poem. It may mean adjusting a line’s phrasing to make the chosen idea-word work well for him.
Edgar Allen Poe said, “Contenting myself with the certainty that music, in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected – is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance – I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.” Robert Frost stated: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
A Little Poem
Poems needn't rhyme
All of the time.
But if they do,
That's okay too. - Anonymous
Of course most of the famous English poets used rhyme and meter, among these Shakespeare, Pope and Donne, but times have changed greatly, and as always, unless rhymed poetry is done correctly it will fall under scrutiny! For instance, using what is called “forced rhyme” is considered particularly grievous, for a poet should not use a rhyming word “just” because it rhymes. The rhyming word should further the idea of the poem. It may mean adjusting a line’s phrasing to make the chosen idea-word work well for him.
Here are some
types of rhymes taken from “Rhyme – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”:
Masculine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words:
rhyme
sublime
Feminine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the second from the last syllable of the words:
picky
tricky
Syllabic: a rhyme in which the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily contain stressed vowels:
Cleaver
Silver
Slant Rhyme (Imperfect – Near – half): Slant rhyme, known also as half-rhyme or
imperfect rhyme , refers to words that have final matching consonants and almost
rhyme (farm, yard) or appear to the eye to do so (said, paid). “Many poets use
slant rhyme to introduce an element of the unexpected and prompt their readers
to pay closer attention to words themselves rather than the sounds of words.” Emily Dickinson, for example, pairs “soul”
with “all” in one of her poems. She was a prominent pioneer in slant rhyme.
*Slant rhymed
words appear to be of one syllable.
Assonance: words (within a line) having matched vowels
The horse coursed through the
field.
Consonance: words having matching consonants
The robbers
had rabies.
Semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word
Bend – ending
Weak Rhyme: A rhyme between a pair of one or more unstressed syllables. Unlike syllabic rhyme, the pair of words will contain differing numbers of syllables.
hammer – carpenter
Among those using rhyme and metrics
today are rappers, songwriters, metrical poets, and there are those of us who enjoy
writing both metrical and fee verse. In free verse, cadence takes the place of
counting stresses (feet), and rhymes normally appear as internal rhyming,
assonance, consonance and alliteration.
1. In the poem below: You will find syllabic rhyme in “dizzy” and “easy” in the first stanza; “breath” and “death” constituting a masculine rhyme.
2. In the second stanza, “pans” and “countenance” form an example of weak rhyme and “shelf” and “itself” form a semirhyme.
3. In the third stanza, “wrist” and “missed” is masculine and “knuckle” and “buckle” form a feminine rhyme.
4. In the fourth stanza, “head” and “bed” is masculine and “dirt and “shirt” are also masculine.
My Papa’s Waltz
By Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on
your breath
Could make a
small boy dizzy;
But I hung on
like death:
Such waltzing
was not easy.
We romped until
the pans
Slid from the
kitchen shelf;
My mother’s
countenance
Could not
unfrown itself.
The hand that
held my wrist
Was battered on
one knuckle;
At every step
you missed
My right ear
scraped a buckle.
You beat time on
my head
With a palm
caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me
off to bed
Still clinging
to your shirt.
While she enjoys free verse as well as metrical poetry, her
main interest lies in prosody. She notices that most of the enduring poems are
those we can remember and recite. Liz enjoys poetry forms such as the sonnet,
the sestina, the couplet, blank verse, simple quatrains, etc. and she hopes to
see modern poets regain interest in studied metrical poetry.
Liz is currently putting together her first collection of
poems which should be completed this winter. The poems are a mixture of
metrical and free verse poems.
