by Tom Adam
Not too long ago I spent some time talking about rhythm and meter in poetry, but I haven’t yet said much about rhyme, which is the other big thing in formal poetry. And not only is rhyme interesting, it is generally an easier topic to address.
Why rhyme?
In terms of poetry, what does rhyme bring to the table aside from another reference book (the rhyming dictionary)? Harkening back to the days when poetry was still a memorized and spoken art form, it served a couple of purposes. It made for much easier memorization: The repetition of sounds provided a built-in cue for what came next. Also, the highly rhythmic style of accentual poetry emphasized important parts of the lines (especially kennings).
Contemporary rhyme
Now that we tend to “see” poetry more often than hear it, the use of rhyme as memorization tool is a lot less useful (at least in terms of literary poetry, though performance poetry and song lyrics still often include it). For centuries, though, rhyme was an important – no, necessary - element of poetry in most European forms.
In some cases, such as the original villanelle, it was used by troubadours as a sign of their linguistic creativity. More fixed forms such as sonnets use it in conjunction with stanza length to form relationships between ideas.
(A short digression: Anymore, most prosodic devices are used “just because.” While there isn’t anything wrong with that line of reasoning, it being one I myself frequently use, it does make the sweeping pronouncements I favor somewhat less accurate. So, in order to save myself a huge amount of qualifications throughout the rest of this article, let me just say that rhyme used as a prosodic device usually follows what I say, but rhyme is used much, much more loosely as well.)
Rhyme creates connections. The repetition of the sound is a referent to the other items using the same sounds in a way that says, “Hey! You! Remember that other line, two up? Yeah: we’re related in some way.” It’s a delicate act to use the device effectively, yet not distract the reader by too constant rhyming.
End-rhyme and internal rhyme
Rhyme tends to occur in two places in a poem (and I’m not sure if there are any others): at the ends of lines or within lines. End-rhyme is literally that, rhyming at the end of a line. Formal poetry uses this as an element. Internal rhyme, rhyming within a line or stanza, tends to be a less formal effect, used more like alliteration. It still connects elements of the poem, in what can be a subtler way than end-rhyme.
This verse from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” shows both types of rhyme. Lines two and four are linked by end-rhyme while line three has an internal rhyme between bright and right.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Types of rhymes
Rhyme has a pretty diverse set of specific types related to which parts of the word or words have similar sounds. Most types are interesting from a view of linguistics, but within most poetry the important types of rhyme are masculine, feminine and slant.
Masculine and feminine rhymes are based on the last stressed syllable of the word sharing the same sound. In a masculine rhyme the stressed syllable is the final syllable of the word. Feminine rhyme has the stress on the second to last syllable though the final, unstressed syllable must also have the same sound.
From Coleridge’s example above, all of his rhymes are masculine: he/sea, bright/right. Feminine rhymes are common in English with verbs: trying/vying, writing/kiting, plunder/sunder; but can be found within nouns as well: cavern/tavern.
Slant rhyme occurs when the sounds being rhymed are not exact matches in sound, but are close: time/fine, meager/seeker, under/candor.
Rhyming on the phrase
In song lyrics, especially in hip hop, but also within performance poetry, there is the idea of rhyming a phrase, often with slant or imperfect rhymes, often using internal rhyme, to rhyme entire phrases. It can be very tricky to pull off well, but the Barenaked Ladies used the technique in their song “One Week:”
Gonna make a break and take a fake
I’d like a stinkin achin shake
“Make a break” and “take a fake” could be a series of four internal rhymes, but the identical structure, later followed by “achin shake” shows that the extended rhyme of the phrase is what they sought.
Fun with rhyme
I don’t think it’s any accident that most people’s first experiences with language tends to come from nursery rhymes. Rhymes have been used in some of the “great literature of the ages,” but they can just be fun. As with anything from Mother Goose, to Jabberwocky, to rhyming slang, it’s OK to play with words just because it sounds cool. So next time you want to rhyme, remember to have fun with it!
Check out Wikipedia’s rhyme article for more information on types of rhymes as well as views on how different languages have treated it.
by Tom Adam
Most formal poetry has rules about how words are arranged on the page. Sometimes they’re based on sound patterns, sometimes on stress patterns, sometimes on counting letters or syllables. These rules are often based on a way of arranging the content of poem, allowing the form to emphasize an idea or a style. While they can be worked against — often in creative and pleasurable ways — it is usually a good idea to follow them.
an easel
in the herb garden –
scent of sage.
As a form, the Japanese renga has rules for both structure and content, including a series of rules about how topics and themes could be addressed. Wikipedia has an excellent page with many of the traditional rules for renga, so I won’t go over the whole of them. Originally, the renga was a collaborative form with different poets adding verses in a linked form. Each added verse related to the one immediately preceding it, but, other than the rules regarding themes, did not have to continue with any other verses. Ultimately, each two-verse section could be considered its own poem within the larger context of the renga. These linked stanzas represented a conversation among the poets and ranged across a variety of topics.
welcome party –
three rabbits lined up
by the station
Structurally, the renga became somewhat standardized on stanzas alternating between a 17-sound stanza and a 14-sound stanza (the “linking” stanza). The 17-sound stanza was grouped into a 5-7-5 structure, the 14-sound stanza into a 7-7 structure. Commonly, English renga are written based on syllable count. Rhyme is not a traditionally incorporated element.
golf course –
lost pet rabbits
run wild.
The first stanza has an especially important place in renga. Known as the hokku, it has to include a season word and a kireji, or cutting word. The season-word generally comes from a traditional list (I find this one pretty good) that refers to the time of year the renga was written. The kireji (from wikipedia):
Kireji have no direct equivalent in English. Mid-verse kireji have been described as sounded rather than written punctuation. In English-language haiku and hokku, as well as in translations of such verses into this language, kireji may be represented by punctuation (typically by a dash or an ellipsis), an exclamatory particle (such as ‘how … ‘), or simply left unmarked.
The kireji in Japanese is a word or conjugation that marks a shift, of sorts, in the poem. In Basho’s well-known haiku masterpiece, the first phrase “old pond” (furuike ya), is set off from the second two lines and marked by the kireji “ya” which is not translated but the shift is felt in the poem, which might be marked by a colon if written in punctuated English.
tall damp grass –
rabbits leap from rock to rock
on the hillside
Renku is a derivative style of the renga. It relaxes many of the rules that are considered necessary in a traditional renga (what words may be included, what references and allusions are permissible and some of the thematic elements it contains). You can call the renku (also called haikai no renga) a pop-culture version of the renga. It maintains the overall form and variable length of the renga, but it allows much greater creative freedom. In fact, most contemporary renga is actually renku. William Higginson has a great, though not recently updated, page about the renku at Renku Home.
dandelions
brighten roadside verges –
missing my rabbit
Although it is more relaxed, the hokku stanza and the concept of the kireji are stylistic elements still commonly maintained. Renku also keeps the concept of the poem as a conversation, even as it has moved from the reaches of high society to everyday life, and only later developed into solo-author sequences, and ultimately, into the modern haiku.
hot pavements –
littered with
tired bees.
Below are some additional links to get you started in your exploration of traditional Japanese forms.
Aha poetry, by Jane Reichhold. On this site you can read a collaborative renga with author notes to see what was going through their minds as the poets responded to each other.
Renga is a site written by various authors from the UK. They have an events page highlighting various renga days throughout the year. Below are two renga from written collaboratively by several participants.
Poets.org offers a short overview of the renga and how teachers are now using the form to teach students how to write poetry and to work collaboratively.
Many of the poets in the Read Write Poem community are experienced in writing haiku, renga, and other Japanese forms. Others might try this type of verse for the first time after reading about it.
In the spirit of the Japanese tradition of collaborative renga, we’d like to start a renku chain here, in the comments section. After you read the first three-line hokku (for our purposes, think of it as a haiku) beginning the series, add your own two-line renku as a response, then the next person will follow with another two-line renku and so on, until the 17th writer ends with a three-line hokku (we get to set our own patterns). We’ll continue the poem until we reach 36 lines, the traditional Japanese length of a Kasen renga.
Read Write Poem contributer Juliet Wilson is the author of the haiku you see interspersed throughout this article. You can read more of her haiku and nature-inspired poems on her blog, Crafty Green Poet.
by Tom Adam
Aside from Christine’s excellent post on Shakespearean Sonnets, there hasn’t been much written here about metrically formal poetry. There are a couple of reasons, one being that I wanted to write a piece on meter before I started writing about verse forms that use it, and another is that I rarely write in meter. It’s hard having to sculpt the lines to use the words you want to use in a fairly normal syntax while following the dictates of a meter.
Yet for a very long time English and European verse cleaved to meter as fundamental to the art of poetry, and a lot of that was probably due to the influence of song and music on poetry. The ballad is an excellent example of this effect. (Note: the ballade is something totally different.)
First, the mechanics of the form:
- Ballads are written in quatrains (four line verses).
- Each Quatrain is written in ballad meter, A more specific form of Common Meter. The meter of the poem is iambic with the first and third lines having four beats and the second and fourth having three beats. This results in alternating lines of Iambic Tetrameter and Iambic Trimeter.
- The second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. Sometimes, the first and third do as well. Each Stanza is its own unit, with no need to keep rhyme throughout the poem. The rhyme scheme is then abcb or abab.
But the mechanics don’t capture the essence of the Ballad. Ballads are about telling stories.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by John Keats
O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
II.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
III.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
V.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
VI.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
VII.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said —
“I love thee true.”
VIII.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
IX.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d — Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
X.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
XI.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
XII.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
While people debate about the meaning behind this poem, it is a story about a Knight and a Fairy.
Some key notes about this work of Keat’s, emblematic of the Ballad, are:
- Most of the poem is in the form of narration. The first three stanzas are written from the perspective of the Fairy and the remainder from the perspective of the Knight. Though ballads need not be entirely narrated, the use of speech is very common.
- It’s kind of dark. There are a lot of images associated with death. For whatever reason, most ballads are dark. Demons and fairies and death are common topics.
- There is the use of repetition. “On the cold hill’s side,” “And no birds sing,” both close two stanzas, and the first two stanzas begin with the same line. This is indicative of the oral tradition: the repetition of lines and words keeps the story more contained. Some ballads repeat entire stanzas as a chorus.
Of course, these rules are just tradition. Strong tradition in the case of using iambic meter and rhyme, but still only tradition. It’s important to always feel free to take these forms and change them to suit your needs. Keats certainly did, changing elements of rhythm, and you can too. It’s about telling the story the way you want to tell it.
Learn more at La Belle Dame Sans Merci on Bartleby and Wikipedia and The Poetry Foundation’s page of Ballads.
by Tom Adam
Following up on last month’s talk about the two “root” styles of verse, today we’ll explore metrical verse. Most formal poetry uses this as its basis.
Metrical verse
Most English verse uses an accentual-syllabic rhythm. While this could be four stresses in an eight-syllable line with no regard to the pattern, most accentual-syllabic verse uses meter: iambic pentameter, trochaic trimeter, etc. In a “best of both worlds” type of scenario, metrical verse gets to use the strong beats of the English language to give the poem an aural structure, and it gets an air of “refinement,” because it is clearly a crafted work, while purely accentual could just be prose broken (without taking the other elements into consideration) into lines by beats.
Formally, there are many types of meter, though only six have any real use. When talking about meter, there are two elements: what type of foot is used, and how many feet per line. How many per line is the second half of the description: it is (some) meter where some is a numerical prefix (penta=5, di=2, hep=7, etc.). The foot describes the repeated pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The six that cover the overwhelming majority of English verse are these (again, the bolded syllables are the stresses):
- Iamb: generally considered the most common foot in the English language, and therefore in English poetry, the iamb is the repetition of unstressed followed by stressed syllables. If you want to get a feel for Iambic verse, check out Shakespeare, it’s just about all based on Iambic lines.
“But soft, what light through yonder window break“
- Trochee: Easiest way to think of trochaic verses is that it is the opposite of Iambic-it has stressed syllables followed by unstressed. For most English speaker, this has a very strange feel, but (courtesy of Wikipedia) the lines from Poe’s “The Raven” are trochaic:
“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
- Finishing out the two-syllable patterns are spondees and pyrrhics, respectively two stressed and two unstressed syllables. Apparently, this line from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, is a good example of a pyrrhic foot, a spondee, a pyrrhic and a last spondee:
“When the blood creeps and the nerves prick“
- Three syllable patterns are also common. The anapest is two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable:
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold“
-Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
- Opposite the anapest is the dactyl: one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. A poetic form (of usually nonsense or children’s verse) is called the double-dactyl where all the lines dactylic dimeter. While not nonsense, the word ‘lexicographical’ is a double dactyl.
While there are technical terms for patterns longer than three syllables, they are pretty much not used (as patterns or terms), because they can usually be broken down into patterns of patterns. It is also important to note that most writers don’t stay strictly to meter; Shakespeare frequently added an unstressed syllable at the end of his iambic pentameter line to have a feminine ending, and switched trochees in every once in a while.
Meter, like accentual verse, can act like a metronome for the poem. By keeping the speed of the lines fairly consistent, it leaves a solid base for the poet to explore variations that stay connected because of the meter. On the other hand, the types of words used can force the speed of the meter to become faster or slower to affect pacing. Alexander Pope comments on this in his Essay on Criticism:
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks’ vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
The most important thing about working in meter, and the hardest, is to make it work for you, not to bend your work to the meter, or to form in general. The rhythm in your poem should seem natural and necessary to the reader, never forced or contrived.
by Tom Adam
There are two traditional areas in the exploration of poetic forms: rhythm and rhyme. For the most part, stanza or line length is based on choices concerning both of these areas.
I’m saving issues about rhyme for another time; this article will be focusing on rhythm and the varieties of it in poetry.
At a basic level, rhythm is a reflection of the language it is based on. English is a heavily accentual language, and uses rhythm based on patterns of stress, while a language such as Japanese is without stress, and is focused more on how many syllables there are.
Accentual poetry
Accentual poetry is very close to the roots of English poetry. A good example of early English accentual verse is the epic poem Beowulf. When reading or listening to Beowulf in Old English, you can almost feel the drumbeats pulling the lines along. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf remains faithful to the word-stresses of the original.
Accentual poetry is based on the number of beats, or stresses, in the line, however many that ends up being. In many of the poetry workshops I’ve taken, a lot of people seem to have problems understanding the stresses in a line. In the following lines from Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” I have set the stressed words in bold:
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
(A.1.8-13)
Try pounding a table when you say the bold words. It’s pretty easy to feel the stresses on those words. The beats form a metronomic pattern with the syllables that come between each stressed sound. Vachel Lindsay uses four beats per line in this section (not all of “The Congo” holds to that, though it is heavily accentual throughout) which is very common in accentual verses. It probably also influenced Ballad meter, which was based on song.
Syllabic verse
On the other end, syllabic verse is based on the number of syllables in a line, and nothing else. This comes to English primarily through the influence of French (where the twelve syllable Alexandrine line is very common).
The Japanese Haiku, with its seventeen syllable structure, is another example of syllabic verse. Japanese Haiku consist of shorter sounds than most English Haiku; the brevity would be better thought of as thirteen syllables or so.
Historically, English verse uses an accentual-syllabic rhythm. While this could be having four stresses in an eight-syllable line with no regard to the pattern, most accentual-syllabic verse uses meter. You’ll have to wait till next month to hear my talk about the bread and butter of English Formal Verse: metrical systems.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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