The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Rhyme, like alliteration (which is sometimes called head rhyme) is thought to have originated in pre-literate times as a way of allowing the words of sung odes, lyrics, epics and sagas more easily to be memorised. Whatever its origin, the expectations it sets up in the mind seem deeply embedded in us. Much of poetry is about ‘consonance’ in the sense of correspondence: the likeness or congruity of one apparently disparate thing to another. Poetry is concerned with the connections between things, seeing the world in a grain of sand as Blake did in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, or sensing loss of faith in the ebbing of the tide as Arnold did in ‘Dover Beach’. You might say poets are always looking for the wider rhymes in nature and experience. The Sea ‘rhymes’ with Time in its relentless flow, its eroding power, its unknowable depth. Hope ‘rhymes’ with Spring, Death ‘rhymes’ with Winter. At the level of physical observation, Blood ‘rhymes’ with Wine, Eyes with Sapphires, Lips with Roses, War with Storms and so on. Those are all stock correspondences which were considered clichés even by Shakespeare’s day of course, but the point is this: as pattern-seeking, connection-hungry beings we are always looking for ways in which one thing chimes with another. Metonym, metaphor and simile do this in one way, rhyme, the apparently arbitrary chiming of word sounds, does it in another. Rhyme, as children quickly realise, provides a special kind of satisfaction. It can make us feel, for the space of a poem, that the world is less contingent, less random, more connected, link by link. When used well rhyme can reify meaning, it can embody in sound and sight the connections that poets try to make with their wider images and ideas. The Scottish poet and musician Don Paterson puts it this way:Rhyme always unifies sense […] it can trick a logic from the shadows where one would not otherwise have existed.

An understanding of rhyme comes to us early in life. One sure way to make young children laugh is to deny them the natural satisfaction of expected end-rhymes, as in this limerick by W. S. Gilbert:There was an old man of St BeesWho was horribly stung by a waspWhen they said: ‘Does it hurt?’He replied: ‘No it doesn’t–It’s a good job it wasn’t a hornet.’

We all know of people who are tone-deaf, colour-blind, dyslexic or have no sense of rhythm, smell or taste, but I have never heard of anyone who cannot distinguish and understand rhyme. There may be those who genuinely think that ‘bounce’ rhymes with ‘freak’, but I doubt it. I think we can safely say rhyme is understood by all who have language. All except those who were born without hearing of course, for rhyming is principally a question of sound.

The Basic Categories of RhymeEnd-rhyme s–internal rhymes

While it is possible that before you opened this book you were not too sure about metre, I have no doubt that you have known since childhood exactly what rhyme is. The first poems we meet in life are nursery rhymes.Humpty Dumpty sat on the wallHumpty Dumpty had a great fallAll the King’s horses and all the King’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

That famous and deeply tragic four-line verse (or quatrain) consists of two rhyming couplets. Here is an example of a ballady kind of quatrain where only the three-stress (second and fourth) lines bear the rhyme words:Mary had a little lambIts fleece was white as snowAnd everywhere that Mary wentThe lamb was sure to go.

In both examples, the rhyme words come at the end of the line: fall/wall, men/again, snow/go. This is called END RHYMING.Little Bo Peep has lost her sheepAnd doesn’t know where to find them.Leave them alone and they’ll come home,Bringing their tails be hind them.Little Bo Peep fell fast asleepAnd dreamt she heard them bleatingBut when she awoke she found it a jokeFor they were still afleeting.

Here we have end-rhymes as before but INTERNAL RHYMES too, in the four-beat lines: Peep/sheep, alone/home, Peep/asleep and awoke/joke. Coleridge used this kind of internal rhyming a great deal in his ‘Ancient Mariner’:The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free:We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.

As did Lewis Caroll in ‘The Jabberwocky’:He left it dead, and with its headHe went galumphing back.