Rhyme
:
This article is about the poetic technique. For the form of ice, see rime ice. For linguistic rime (or rhyme) see syllable rime.A
rhyme is a repetition of identical or similar sounds in two or more different words and is most often used in
poetry. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming
couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as
nursery rhymes.
The word comes from the
Old French rime, ultimately from the
Greek ρυθμος (
rhythmos) from which "rhythm" also derives. In English, the spelling "rhyme" came to be adopted at the beginning of the Modern English period in order to reflect the Greek original, in the same way that a
b was added to the words "
dette" and "
doute" to reflect the original
Latin debitum and
dubitum.
The spelling "rime" survives in English however, as a rare alternative spelling. A distinction between the spellings is also sometimes made in the study of
linguistics and
phonology, where "rime/rhyme" is used to refer to the
nucleus and
coda of a
syllable. In this context, some prefer to spell this "rime" to separate it from the poetic rhyme covered by this article (see
syllable rime).
The earliest surviving evidence of rhyming is the Chinese
Shi Jing (ca. 10th century BC).In Europe, the practice arose only with
Late Antiquity, continuing the
homoioteleuton of rhetorics.
Irish literature introduced the rhyme to Early Medieval Europe; in the 7th century we find the Irish had brought the art of rhyming verses to a high pitch of perfection. The
leonine verse is notable for introducing rhyme into High Medieval literature in the 12th century. From the 12th to the 20th centuries, European poetry is dominated by rhyme.
The concept of rhyme and its role in poetry vary considerably in different cultures. In modern
English, and most
European literary traditions, it is the final
vowel/
consonant combination found at the ends of lines that are repeated across the rhyming words.
When words within a single line are rhymed, it is called an
internal rhyme.
Categories of rhyme include:
*
tail rhyme (or end): a rhyme in the final syllable(s) of a verse (the most common kind)
**
masculine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words. (
rhyme,
sublime,
crime)
**
feminine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate (second from last) syllable of the words. (
picky,
tricky,
sticky)
**
dactylic: a rhyme in which the stress is on the antepenultimate (third from last) syllable (
hesitant,
president)
**
triple: a rhyme in which all three syllables of a three-syllable word are stressed equally.
**
perfect: a rhyme between words that are identical in sound from the point of their first accented syllable forward. (
sight and
flight,
deign and
gain and
quatrain)
**
imperfect: a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. (
den,
siren)
**
identity: a rhyme that starts at a consonant instead of a vowel, or rhyming a word with itself. (
gun,
begun)
**
semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word. (
bend,
ending)
**
oblique (or slant): a rhyme with an imperfect match in sound. (
green,
fiend)
**
sight (or eye): a similarity in spelling but not in sound. (
cough,
bough, or
love,
move)
*
consonance: matching consonants. (
her,
dark)
**
half rhyme (or
sprung rhyme) is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved
*
assonance: matching vowels. (
shake,
hate)
*
anaphora: a word or phrase that takes its reference from a preceding word or phrase. This is not a common rhyme in western poetry but in Tamil (called 'edukai') and to a lesser extent in Sanksrit( called 'Dwiti-yakshara-prasa') such rhyming in the beginning of a sentence is very popular.
A
rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming lines in a poem.
See English poetryOld English poetry is mostly
alliterative verse. One of the earliest rhyming poems in English is
The Rhyming Poem.
Some words in English, such as orange, are commonly regarded as having no rhyme. Although a clever poet can get around this (for example, by rhyming "orange" with "door hinge"), it is generally easier to move the word out of rhyming position or replace it with a
synonym ("orange" could become "amber").The most famous brief remarks in English on rhyme are
John Milton's preface to
Paradise Lost, which begins:THE Measure is
English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of
Homer in
Greek, and of
Virgil in
Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom...
In
French poetry, the typical two-
phoneme rhyme common in English poetry is called
rime suffisante.
The
rime riche ("rich rhyme") of three phonemes is classically more admired. To an Anglophone ear, by contrast, this often sounds like a very weak rhyme. For example, an English perfect or identiomophone]]s
flour and
flower, would seem weak, whereas a French rhyme of homophones
doigt and
doit qualifies as
rime riche.
Rime richissime ("very rich rhyme") is a rhyme of more than three phonemes.
Here is a
holorime (an extreme example of
rime richissime spanning an entire verse):
Gall, amant de la Reine, alla (tour magnanime)Gallamant de l'Arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîmes.Gallus, the Queen's lover, went (a magnanimous gesture):Gallantly from the Arena to the Great Tower, at Nîmes.
Alphonse Allais was a notable exponent of holorime.
Classical French poetry also used to have a complex set of rules for rhymes that go beyond how words merely sound. It included whether the unsounded letters
s,
x,
z and
e were present at the end of each line and this distinction was often considered part of the
meter of the poem.
* A line that ends with a silent
e is a feminine rhyme, even if the word itself is a masculine.
* A line that ends with a silent
s,
x or
z is a plural rhyme, even if the word itself is a singular.
* A line that ends with a silent
es is a feminine plural rhyme, even the word itself is not a feminine plural.
For example the singular feminine "une souris", which means "a mouse", would be a masculine plural rhyme.
A set of rhymes is only valid if the sound, number and gender all match. In the 19th century, Baudelaire made some poems that dropped the sound requirement. In those poems, words that ended in the same spelling were considered as valid rhymes even if they sounded different. He called those "rhymes for the eye", "rimes pour l'œil."
A feminine rhyme cannot follow a different feminine rhyme and a masculine rhyme cannot follow a different masculine rhyme. Masculine and feminine rhymes
must alternate.
If these rules were to be applied to English "there" and "fair" would not rhyme; and "lean" and "cuisine" would not rhyme either. Furthermore, a couplet rhyming in "-er", like "better" and "after", could not be followed by a couplet rhyming in "-ight", like "right" and "fight". These would be two different masculine rhymes "touching" each other. There must be a feminine rhyme in between.
That is why, in French
sonnets, the first four lines (1 to 4) and the second four lines (5 to 8) often have the exact same rhymes, with the structure
abba abba: it allows for a mirror gender structure. The edge lines of both quatrains (lines 1, 4, 5 and 8) can be of one gender and the middle lines (lines 2, 3, 6 and 7) can be of the other. The trick is that the fourth and fifth lines of the sonnet must be the same, or else the fourth and fifth lines would have to alternate gender. Of course, a structure like
abba acca would technically follow the rules, but it would be very ugly.
All this comes from the fact that the marks for the plural and the gender of words that are now silent used to be sounded, but they did not count as being part of the meter. These rhyming rules are almost never taken into account from the 20th century on. Still, they are in almost all of the pre-20th century French verse texts. For example all of the French plays in verse of 17th century alternate masculine and feminine
alexandrine couplets.
Ancient
Hebrew verse did not generally rhyme. However, many
Jewish liturgical poems rhyme today, because they were mostly written in
medieval Europe, where rhymes were in vogue.
See Homoioteleuton rhyme
Rhyme was unknown in
Latin poetry until it was introduced under the influence of local vernacular traditions in the early
Middle Ages. This is the
Latin hymn Dies Irae:
Dies irae, dies illaSolvet saeclum in favillaTeste David cum SybillaMedieval poetry may mix Latin and
vernacular languages. Mixing languages in verse or rhyming words in different languages is termed
macaronic.
There are several rich rhyme('prAsa') patterns in sanskirt, both in the beginning of a line and at the end of a line. Examples: Dwitiyakshara prasa (the second syllable rhyme), AdiprAsa, antyaprAsa, yati etc.
See cynghaneddThere are some unique rhyming schemes in Dravidian languages like Tamil. Specifically, the rhyme called 'edukai'(anaphora) rhymes on the beginning of subsequent line of a poem. The other rhyme and related patterns are called 'mOnai' (alliteration), 'thodai' (epiphora) and 'irattai kilavi'(parallelism). 'edukai', its effect, a little strange at first, rapidly becomes pleasant to the reader, and to the Tamil it is as enjoyable as the end rhyme.
Some classical Tamil poetry forms, such as Venpa, have rigid grammars for rhyme to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar.
*
Rhyme in rap*
Rhyming spiritual*
Consonance*
Alliteration*
Assonance*
List of songs whose title has 2 or more rhyming words*
wiktionary:Wiktionary:Rhymes*
McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme (and Free Software Rhyming Dictionary download)*
Online Rhyming Dictionary*
RhymeZone
