The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

A rarer form of internal rhyming is the leonine which derives from medieval Latin verse.¹ This is found in poems of longer measure where the stressed syllable preceding a caesura rhymes with the last stressed syllable of the line. Tennyson experimented with leonine rhymes in his juvenilia as well as using it in his later poem ‘The Revenge’:And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace.

I suppose the internal rhyming in ‘The Raven’ might be considered leonine too, though corvine would be more appropriate…But the raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke onlyThat one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.Nothing further then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered;Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other friends have flown before;On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.’Then the bird said, ‘Nevermore.’

Throughout the poem Poe runs a third internal rhyme (here uttered/fluttered) into the next line (muttered).

Hopkins employed internal rhyme a great deal, but not in such predictable patterns. He used it to yoke together the stresses in such phrases as dapple-dawn-drawn, stirred for a bird, he cursed at first, fall gall, in a flash at a trumpet-crash, glean-stream and so on.

Partial Rhymes

Partial rhymes: assonance and consonance–eye-rhyme and wrenched rhyme

On closer inspection that last internal rhyme from Hopkins is not quite right, is it? Glean and stream do not share the same final consonant. In the third line of ‘Little Bo Beep’ the alone/home rhyme is imperfect in the same way: this is PARTIAL RHYME, sometimes called SLANT-rhyme or PARA-RHYME.² In slant-rhyme of the alone/home, glean/stream kind, where the vowels match but the consonants do not, the effect is called ASSONANCE: as in cup/rub, beat/feed, sob/top, craft/mast and so on. Hopkins uses plough/down, rose/moles, breath/bread, martyr/master and many others in internal rhymes, but never as end-rhyme. Assonance in end-rhymes is most commonly found in folk ballads, nursery rhymes and other song lyrics, although it was frowned upon (as were all partial rhymes) in Tin Pan Alley and musical theatre. On Broadway it is still considered bad style for a lyricist not to rhyme perfectly. Not so in the world of pop: do you remember the Kim Carnes song ‘Bette Davis Eyes’? How’s this for assonance?She’s ferociousAnd she knows justWhat it takes to make a pro blush

Yowser! In the sixties the Liverpool School of poets, who were culturally (and indeed personally, through ties of friendship) connected to the Liverpool Sound, were notably fond of assonantal rhyme. Adrian Mitchell, for example, rhymes size with five in his poem ‘Fifteen Million Plastic Bags’. The poets you are most likely to find using assonantal slant-rhymes today work in hip-hop and reggae traditions: Here’s ‘Talking Turkey’ by Benjamin Zephaniah. Have fun reading it out à la B.Z.–Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmasCos’ turkeys just wanna hav funTurkeys are cool, turkeys are wickedAn every turkey has a Mum.Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,Don’t eat it, keep it alive,It could be yu mate, an not on your plateSay, ‘Yo! Turkey I’m on your side.’I got lots of friends who are turkeysAn all of dem fear christmas time,Dey wanna enjoy it,dey say humans destroyed itn humans are out of dere mind,Yeah, I got lots of friends who are turkeysDey all hav a right to a life,Not to be caged up an genetically made upBy any farmer an his wife.

You can see that fun/Mum, alive/side, time/mind, enjoy it/destroyed it and perhaps Christmas/wicked are all used as rhyming pairs. The final pair life/wife constitute the only ‘true’ rhymes in the poem. Assonantally rhymed poems usually do end best with a full rhyme.

Now let us look at another well-known nursery rhyme:Hickory, dickory, dock,The mouse ran up the clock.The clock struck one,The mouse ran down!Hickory, dickory, dock.