As you see, there is a lot of terminology in this area. What follows is the
result of my attempt to make sense of it all. I'll add new terms as I encounter
them, if I think I understand what they mean.
None of these definitions is important. What matters is to write poems that work, and/or (as a reader of poetry) to appreciate what the poet has done. It is not uncommon for a reader to think that a poem is unrhymed, when in fact the poet has worked hard to achieve a kind of rhyme that the reader did not
recognise.
The idea of
rhyme (or, archaically or in French,
rime) is simple until you try to define it. My
dictionary says
in two or more words, identity of sound from the last
stressed vowel to the end, the consonant or consonant group preceding not being
the same in both or all cases.
The above rather wordy definition of rhyme only includes the simplest and
least controversial cases,
which we will cover in this section. There are a fair number of useful terms we
can define here. First of all, we will sometimes refer to the syllable that
contains the last stressed vowel as the
tonic syllable.
Words like cat, sat
and mat obviously rhyme according to our definition. So do bait, hate, great, weight, straight,
fête
and eyot. Where words of one syllable rhyme in this
most obvious of ways, it is called a single rhyme or
masculine rhyme. This is
also sometimes called a
rising rhyme (though a
pedant might insist that this required the preceding syllable to be unstressed).
Words like complete, elite, defeat
and mistreat also rhyme, and this is also
single or
masculine rhyme. The stress is on the last
syllable, which is therefore the tonic syllable and the only syllable involved in the rhyming. We can
even throw in the 3-syllable word parakeet, and it
is still a single rhyme.
Words like fitting, sitting
and knitting rhyme. In these 2-syllable words, the
stress is on the first syllable and so both syllables are involved in the
rhyming. This is called a
double rhyme or
feminine rhymeor
falling rhyme or trochaic rhyme. We can throw in words like transmitting
and befitting, where the stress is on the
penultimate syllable, and we still have a set of
double rhymes.
Words like liable, pliable
and viable rhyme. In these 3-syllable words, the
stress is on the first syllable and so all three syllables are involved in the
rhyming. This is called a
triple rhyme or
dactylic rhyme or
sometimes
compound rhyme. It
is another form of
feminine rhyme and of
falling rhyme - even more feminine than a double
rhyme, and falling more comprehensively. We can throw in words like reliable and verifiable, where the stress is also on the
antepenultimate syllable, and we still have a set of
triple rhymes. The effect of triple rhymes tends to be
comical, but it does not have to be.
Similarly we could call flourishingly and nourishingly
a
quadruple rhyme- more
feminine and more falling still - but this phenomenon is so rare in
English that it is not much use for poetic purposes.
Bear in mind that words are not pronounced the same
everywhere, or for all time. A Yorkshireman would not agree that
"farce" rhymes with "grass"; Americans have disagreed with
me about "walk" rhyming with "fork". Poetry written in past
centuries may contain rhymes that were perfect when they were written, but are
not any more, because of pronunciations having changed. The terms
dialect rhyme and
historical rhyme are
sometimes used in these situations.
There is a variety of terms for a correspondence between words that falls
short of perfect rhyme. Such terms include
near rhyme,
half-rhyme,
imperfect rhyme,
off-rhyme,
partial rhyme, pararhymeand slant rhyme(although
the last of these is sometimes used to mean specifically consonance). Most of these terms
tend to sound pejorative, but in fact a poet may well deliberately choose to use
a rhyme that is less than "perfect". A poem with perfect rhymes and
perfect metre throughout can sometimes sound predictable and trite; too tum-ti-tum.
Don't you get bored with song lyrics that rhyme love
with above? Would you really mind if it was
occasionally rhymed instead with enough, or loaf,
or leave, or groove, or stuffed,
or luck, or off? If
you want your less-than-perfect rhyme to sound a more imposing achievement, you
can instead call it
omoioteleton (or
homoioteleuton, or any of
several other spellings) - which is just the Greek for "similar
ending".
In
assonance, the vowels match as
in rhyme, but the consonants don't. Examples of assonances are gape
with hate, feet with sheep, line
with rhyme, gaping with
hating (and arguably
gaping with
hated). Where assonance is used as a substitute for rhyme (i.e. in places,
such as the ends of lines, where rhymes would be expected), it is sometimes
called
vowel rhyme. The French term for this is
rime pauvre or
rime faible.
In
consonance, the consonants
match but the vowels don't. This will often be restricted to the final consonant
(or consonant cluster) of the stressed syllable e.g. rhyme
and scheme, dust and frost, moth
and breath, trinket and rankle. Where consonance is used in this way, it is sometimes called
consonant rhymeor
slant rhyme. Where all the consonants in the stressed syllable match - both fore and aft - this
is sometimes called
bracket consonance
e.g. rhyme with ream, moth with myth, breath
with broth, rankle with wrinkled.
For an example of bracket consonance used as a substitute for rhyme, see
Wilfred Owen's famous war poem
Strange Meeting (or any of several other poems
by him e.g. Insensibility,
Futility and
Exposure); for another, see
Norman Cameron's
Green, Green is El Aghir.
A related phenomenon - though much less nearly a rhyme - is
alliteration.
Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant (or consonant cluster)
of a stressed syllable e.g. in the tongue-twister "round
the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran". Alliteration, rather than
rhyme, was the basis of Old English poetry such as
Beowulf, but it is not used as a direct substitute
for rhyming at the end of lines in modern poetry. [A very similar concept is
paroemion or
parimion (or any of several other spellings). The
difference between alliteration and paroemion is not clear, and seems to vary. It may be that in paroemion, the
alliteration specifically affects the initial letters
of words (and not other stressed syllables), and/or that there is simply too much of it.
Or to some people, the two words are perfect synonyms, apparently.]
The words move, rove and love
look as though they ought to rhyme, but in fact they don't. These are called eye
rhymes or sight rhymes.
Sometimes a poet will use an eye rhyme deliberately; sometimes an eye rhyme
results from the reader and the writer coming from different places or different
times.
Rhyming a stressed syllable with an unstressed one - e.g. thing
and having - is a dubious practice but was once
considered respectable.
John Donne used to do it. It is sometimes known as light
rhyme, or
hermaphrodite rhyme,
or (despite its lack of virtue) virtual rhyme.
(I have also heard this called apocopated rhyme, but apocopated rhyme is really something
else). For a long time I was baffled by a number of pages on the web
that refer to
virtual rhyme as "wrenched rhyme", for I
was convinced that that phrase ought to refer to something quite different. It
turns out that
Peter Dale (a distinguished poet and translator)
has produced a categorisation of rhymes, among which he includes wrenched
stress rhyme(which is my "virtual
rhyme") and
wrenched sense rhyme (which is my wrenched
rhyme). The two different meanings of the word "wrenched" may well
pre-date Mr Dale.
In the
Celtic world they have different view of virtual rhyme, however. There
is an Irish verse form, the deibideor deibhidhe (pronounced
"jayvee"), in which this kind of rhyme is obligatory throughout; it is therefore sometimes
known as deibide rhyme. There
are also Welsh forms in which this kind of rhyme is positively required e.g. the cywydd
deuair hirion, and its little brother the cywydd
deuair fyrion.
Also dubious is
"rhyming" unstressed syllables with one another e.g. risible with farcical.
This is called
unstressed rhyme.
A possibility which our original definition of rhyme specifically excluded
was the matching of the initial consonants of the tonic syllable, in
addition to everything else e.g. ring
and wring, great and grate,
reduce and deduce, dog handler and
panhandler. This is known as
rich rhyme. For an excellent
example of this, see
Thomas Hood's
A First Attempt at Rhyme. Going a step further, we
can have words which are spelt the same and pronounced the same but have
different meanings, such as hold (contain) and hold
(part of ship), or dyke (ditch) and dyke
(mound). The relationship within such pairs is also known as
rich rhyme.
Where the "rhyming" words are identical in spelling, pronunciation and
meaning, we have gone beyond rich rhyme to what is sometimes called
identical rhymeor
tautological rhyme, and
sometimes called cheating. There are verse forms such as the sestina, which are based on repetition of the final words of lines, rather than
rhyming.
Where one of the rhyming words contains (phonetically) the whole of the other
we have
mirror rhyme e.g. start
with tart or art, straight
with trait or rate or eight
or stray or tray or
ray or ay.
For an example of the use of mirror rhyme, see
Paradise by
George Herbert (1593-1633).
Skelton cites
Paradise as an example of
Diminishing Verse i.e.
the mirror-rhyming words get shorter as the stanza goes on. If they get longer,
he calls it
Cumulating Verse. In
both cases, 3-line stanzas are usual - largely because it's hard to keep it up
for any longer than this.
The French term
rime riche, when used in the
context of English poetry, is equivalent to rich rhyme.
Rime léonine goes
further, demanding that one or more syllables preceding the tonic syllable
should also be the same e.g. decommission, High
Commission. (This is not the same as the English term leonine
rhyme.)
Where several short words are used together to rhyme with one longer one,
this is known as
mosaic rhyme (or sometimes
compound rhyme). An example is this well-known contender
for the title of the world's shortest poem:
Lines on the antiquity of microbes
Adam
Had 'em.
Broken rhyme - a favourite of
Tom Lehrer's - is the device of splitting a word
between lines in order to manufacture a rhyme e.g. (my own example!)
Unless you let me split interpol-
ate I'll find no rhymes for purple.
(though
Roger Miller in his song
Dang me had the chutzpah to rhyme purple
with maple surple - this is a wrenched
rhyme.) Rhymes with silver (the third
colour notorious for having none) is a topic I have not addressed yet,
although...
Hang on a sec! - If broken, will va-
nilla yield a rhyme for silver?
That just leaves month to be dealt with. (I did once
rhyme it with ninety-oneth, but perhaps that's
cheating.)
When last I saw her in the eve-
ning hour I could no more believe.
the difference being that "eve" on its own would make sense.
A similar phenomenon to broken rhyme is
enjambed rhyme, in which
the opening consonant of the new line completes the rhyme for the previous line
e.g.
She turned away and heaved a sigh -
No trace of love to answer mine.
It seems to me that if we combined compound rhyme with broken rhyme, that
would produce something we could reasonably call
compound fracture rhyme,
something like this:
Never trust a jail's inhabit-
ants; hide stuff before they grab it.
(If we could arrange also for the second element of the rhyme - here
"grab it" - to be an enjambed rhyme, a
case could be made - based on jambe being French
for "leg" - for calling the whole phenomenon
compound
fracture of the leg rhyme. But perhaps that is going too far.
Devising an example of this preposterous phenomenon is left as an exercise for
the reader.)
A
wrenched rhyme is one
where the poet is blatantly cheating, usually for comic effect e.g.
Tom Lehrer's outrageous use of Harvard
and discovered at the end of
The Elements. Whether a rhyme appears wrenched or
not will sometimes depend on how closely the reader's dialect matches the poet's
e.g. when
Ogden Nash rhymes turtle with
fertile that's seen as (presumably) a perfect rhyme in the US, but
as a wrenched rhyme in the UK (where
fertile is pronounced the same as fur
tile).
In
Schüttelreim, the last two
words of the line swap initial consonants, as in a spoonerism:
I will show no fear
Since there's no foe near.
Anarhyme is an interesting idea
which has not yet gained much favour. Here, the "rhyming" lines end
with the same three consonants, though not necessarily in the same order e.g. humanity
and not me, or honest and
sit on.
In
amphisbaenic rhyme
the rhyming words are the reverse of one another, either in spelling or in sound
e.g. taps/spat, timer/remit,
fine/knife. (The
"amphisbaena" was a fabulous two-headed snake.)
The most familiar situation is that the rhyming words are each at the end of
a line. This is known as
end rhyme.
It is possible, though rare, to use
initial rhyme, also known
as
head rhyme, where the
rhyming words are each at the beginning of a line. A nice variation is to rhyme the last word of one line with the first
word of the next; this is known as
linked rhyme.
With
internal rhyme, a word
from neither the beginning nor the end of a line rhymes with something. The most common form of
this is where the "something" is the word at the end of the same line;
this is sometimes known as
leonine rhyme(NB this is
not the same as the French term rime léonine).
Another form of internal rhyme has a word in the middle of one line rhyming
with the the word at the end of a different line; this is
sometimes called
cross rhyme- which is
liable to be confused with cross-rhyme, a
particular kind of 4-line stanza. One particular form of cross rhyme, in
which the word at the end of one line rhymes with a line in the middle of the
next, is common in Irish poetry, where it is known
as
aicill rhyme. (An Irish
friend tells me this is pronounced to rhyme with the English word
"tackle".)
Rhyming a word in the middle of one line with a word in the middle of another is called
interlaced rhyme.
Confused? You won't be...
There are several pairs of terms with confusingly similar names, and a fair
number of terms that can have more than one meaning. This section is a clearing
house for such confusion.
Apocopated rhyme is a mild form of broken
rhyme, but the term is also sometimes used as a synonym for virtual
rhyme.
Cross rhyme can be either a form of internal
rhyme, or a particular rhyming scheme for a
quatrain. I have tried to distinguish the two by using a hyphen for the
rhyming scheme, but that's just my own convention.
Wrenched rhyme properly means (in my opinion)
what is sometimes also known as wrenched sense
rhyme, but there are those who use it to mean what is also sometimes
known as wrenched stress rhyme.