PD30 Day 20: Rhyme, Sound and Repetition

Rhyme has been an important part of poetry for as long as there has been poetry. We can trace written rhyme back to at least 1000 B.C. There are two simple reasons for this. The first is that rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They sound nice. They are even fun to say. One of the reasons that we read nursery rhymes to children is that, even before they can understand the words, they like the sounds.

The second reason for rhyme, and another reason why we read rhyming poetry to children, is that rhyme makes words much easier to remember. This is especially important when you are trying to teach children to use language. They can hear the pattern, and that makes it easier to remember the words There are plenty of people who can’t quote a single line of prose, but there is almost no one in the English-speaking world that cannot finish this sentence:

I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them ___ ___ ___.

Rhyme allows oral poets and storytellers to string together long stories. Rhyme provides both a structure for the poem and a mnemonic device for remembering what comes next. Remembering fifty lines of unrhymed poetry is much harder than memorizing fifty lines of rhymed poetry. When you consider that an epic poem could run 5000 lines, you can see the value of rhyme, especially in the days when epic poems were performed much more regularly than they were read.

One of the problems with rhyme in the English language, however, is that our language does not have masculine and feminine endings that many of the romance languages do. It is easy to create rhyme in Italian or Spanish, for example, because many words end with either an “a” (feminine ending) or an “o” (masculine ending). In English we don’t have those easy rhymes. This creates a problem because, when there are only a few words that match each other, the next word in the sequence becomes very predictable. That is why in English, we often rely on patterns other than direct rhyme.

Rhyme is a form of auditory repetition. There are other forms such as assonance (repeating vowel sounds such as boot, tune, fool) and consonance (repeating consonant sounds such as but, feet, knot) and meter (repeating stress patterns as we’ve discussed). You can also do less direct repetitions, such as repeating vocalizations such as stops (kit, tap, pock) or fricatives (seize, fourth, thighs). Gathering these different elements together gives you other tools for creating auditory patterns that sound good together, but have more variety and less predictability than rhyme.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Create a poem that uses one of the following word combinations (they don’t have to be in the same line):

boot, tune, fool

but, feet, knot

kit, tap, pock

seize, fourth, thighs

Related links

• 30 Poems in 30 Days set for September (0.500)
• All About 30 Poems in 30 Days (0.500)
• PD30 Day 1: I Believe in Poetry (0.500)
• PD30 Day 2: Generally Be Specific (0.500)
• PD30 Day 3: A Review of Meter (0.500)