Rhyme time

Congratulations to NaNoWriMo participants! You did it! Admirable!

For those of you word nerds, this appeared in the New York Times, and for those of you who are thinking about jobs to support you before you become literary super-stars, lexicographer may be a possibility (I don’t know what the prospects are), but it’s an interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/lies-murder-lexicography-dictionary.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

And my husband found this interview with me on YouTube from my visit to the central library in Pittsburgh. It’s long, and the visual quality is pretty bad, but if you’re interested, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB4ZZHLbJRc.

There’s this post and probably one more coming up on poetry. Then back to fiction. In her question last week, writeforfun asked about rhyme as well as meter, so that’s what this post is about. And writeforfun also asked about rhythm. Rhyme contributes powerfully to rhythm.

When I see rhyme or hear it, a pleasurable buzz runs through me, a little zzzt! Almost any kind of rhyme does it, sometimes with the added fillip of thinking, “Aren’t I clever?”

I say almost any kind of rhyme because there are quite a few. There’s the kind we all know, called end rhyme, obviously because it comes at the end of the line, like this:

Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock.

Dock and clock are end rhymes. But there’s another kind of rhyme in the first line of this nursery rhyme. Hickory dickory is an example of internal rhyme, because it happens inside the line, not at the end.

Here’s a poem (in a poem form called a triolet – see if you can figure out how it works) that I wrote for the poetry section of my new writing book:

Bad Day

When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween,
wish the silence didn’t stiffen with ill will.
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,
brave Bill, who won’t live to turn fourteen.”
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween.

Ill will in this poem is another example of internal rhyme. But for internal rhyme the rhyming words don’t have to appear right next to each other. It’s good enough for them to be in the same line or in a line nearby, and it’s more fun to discover them when they’re apart.

Aside from their internalness, these rhymes – ill will and hickory dickory – are just like the end rhyme example, dock and clock, in that they rhyme exactly. In sound they’re the same except at the very beginning. Such exact rhymes are called perfect.

There are a lot of technical terms in poetry! More even than I’m about to run through.

Here’s a bit of a ditty that used to excite and horrify me when I little. The versions I found online are different, but this is what I used to sing in a quivering voice:

“The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
They eat your guts
and they spit them out.”

Poor starving worms, spitting everything out! The rhyme comes from the repetition of the word out. When a word rhymes with itself, it’s called identical rhyme.

Dock and clock above are examples of what’s known as masculine rhyme. Another example is debate and inflate. Masculine rhyme (those sexist poets of yore!) means that the rhyming syllable is accented. An example of feminine rhyme is mother and rather. The rhyming syllable here is unaccented.

Another kind of rhyme is called slant rhyme, and it may be my favorite. It’s almost rhyme, like stink and skunk. Look at the fifth line of “Bad Day.”

I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,

Last and guest are (internal) slant rhymes – almost but no cigar. That’s the kind of rhyme that makes me feel clever when I notice it. Hey! I think, this poem rhymes! And that little buzz of delight goes off. Last week I mentioned not being fond of forced rhyme, and the example I gave was:

Then Jack did run
to have some fun.

Another example would be:

Jill did frown
when Jack fell down.

I’m here to tell you that frowned is an absolutely completely acceptable rhyme for down. The ear barely registers the ed.

Jill frowned
when Jack fell down

One kind of slant rhyme is called consonant rhyme, because the final consonants are the same but not the vowels, as in guest and last. If there’s consonant rhyme, naturally there must be vowel rhyme, also known as assonance. An example would be elf and spell because of the short e.

Moving right along, there’s rhyme that’s apocopated (I love the sound of this word – pronounced a-POCK-a – pay – ted – sounds to me like popcorn popping). Apocopated rhyme is a kind of slant rhyme, in this case when a syllable is missing, as in stinker and clink.

There’s even eye rhyme, when the sounds aren’t the same, but the letters are, as in lone and gone or dough and cough.

A great online resource for finding rhymes is Rhyme Zone. Here’s the link: http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=boot&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&org3=y.

My favorite kind of rhymed poem – I mean end-rhymed poem – is when the rhyming is so subtle and natural that I don’t notice at first. A poet who’s great at interesting and inventive rhyme is Molly Peacock (generally high school and above). Here are some end rhymes from her poem “Widow” about the sadness of a cat after the loss the other family cat: usual with dull, I let with toilet, and weight with wait. The last rhyme, weight with wait is called rich rhyme, which I learned just this minute .

Last of all, there’s rhyme for pure pleasure in the words. Here’s a poem by Edward Lear:

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);
He used to be one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

Runcible is a nonsense word Lear invented.

Here are some prompts:

• Pick a poem you’ve written and look through it for rhymes you didn’t know were there. Underline them. Look for synonyms you can switch in to add to the internal rhymes.

• Go to a page of one of your stories. Look for places to add alliteration or assonance without changing meaning. When you’re done, read the page over. Try reading it out loud both ways. If you don’t feel you’ve improved your prose, change it back.

• Try a bouts-rimes (from French, pronounced boo ree may), which requires at least two people. Each person writes a list of rhymed words, like joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. They exchange lists and each has to write a poem using those end rhymes. Be wild. Poetry doesn’t have to be logical.

• Use me as your bouts rimes partner and use my words: joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. Don’t worry about meaning. If you’re able to cobble together something that makes sense, fine, but go for the pleasure of the sounds.

• Look at my triolet and follow the form (repeat lines and rhyme sequence) to write your own triolet.

• Write a poem about yourself or about someone you know or about a dragon along the lines of Edward Lear’s poem about himself.

Have fun, and save what you write!

33 Responses on “Rhyme time”

  1. Leslie Marie says:

    I haven't been here in a while (Nanowrimo and such keeping me busy!), so I stopped in to catch up today, and I saw you answered my questions on hyperbole and blogging. Thanks!

    And now, I can't wait to read these two posts on poetry and rhyming. I have such trouble with poetry but still want to write it. So thank you for writing posts on it 🙂

  2. E.S. Ivy says:

    Love this! And I know someone else I'm going to send this post to.

    I had no idea there were so many different kinds of rhymes. I wonder if I have forgotten it, or my teachers neglected it. 🙂 Looking forward to more of these!

  3. Sophia says:

    I love this post! It's so helpful, because most of what I write is poetry.
    Oh! The other day I was reading The Mysterious Benedict Society. One of the characters is named "S.Q. Pedalian" and it made me think of you, Gail. 🙂

  4. MistyBen says:

    I've never written poetry but I always try to do one of your prompts every week. It was slow to start out but once I fell into a rhythm it was fun and I ended up with some funny stuff! Thanks for the challenge!

  5. gailcarsonlevine says:

    Ilsa Eruaistaniel–After giving it some thought, I'm deleting the lovely poem. I'm sure you didn't think about this, but the poem isn't in the public domain, and in copying it in, Mr. Collins's copyright is being violated. If you can give us a link to it instead, that would be wonderful!

  7. Lark says:

    I've been quite busy with NaNoWriMo and such and it's so nice to be back and catching up on some of the blog posts! I'm not big on poetry, but I just entered a poetry contest a few weeks ago and won first place in my age category! I wasn't expecting that!
    Gail (and anyone else) do you ever spend a lot of time writing something or pursuing an idea then just trashing it? I wrote 20,000 words for my NaNo novel but most of it was junk; I just kept saying to myself, "At least it's words. And at least it counts." However, probably only about 20% of it is acceptable writing, and the other 80% would need LOTS AND LOTS of revisions to even make it make sense. Do you ever stick it out if you're in that situation?

    • writeforfun says:

      If you really like the idea and it still fascinates you, then you should keep going! But if working on it seems like a waste of time to you and it's hard to even get yourself to write because you hate the idea now, maybe you should stop working on it. Don't trash it, of course! Save it but forget about it, and maybe, someday when it excites you again, you can work out the kinks then, and even have fun doing it. Just my thoughts.

  8. Lark says:

    Sorry, just one more question: is it okay to start a story if you have wonderful, realistic, well-rounded characters, but no plot or idea of where your story will go? Or on the flip side, starting a story with a great idea and thought-out plot but hastily pieced together and un-thought-out characters? Or do you wait until you have everything thought out? I'm having quite a problem with that… and what if one of your characters vastly changes in the middle of the story, but they're not supposed to?
    By the way, are you going to see The Hobbit? 😉

  10. Kathryn Briggs says:

    Mrs. Levine,
    I keep leaving comments, but they disappear do you know why? There should be one under this, if you don't see it, that is and example, because I wrote two yesterday(of the same comment) and neither of them are showing up. Do you know why?
    Kathryn

  11. Kathryn Briggs says:

    Mrs. Levine,
    I have trouble with my writing. I am always getting bored and ending my stories quickly. How long is your shortest princess tale? (In words, and how long it took you to write it.) In case you want to know why, it is just so I don't feel helpless when I end a story and it is really short.

    • gailcarsonlevine says:

      I don't know why your comments are disappearing. I haven't deleted them.

      My shortest PRINCESS TALE is too old to get a word count on from my computer. FOR BIDDLE'S SAKE, for example, is just under 11,000 words. But the length of one of my short books has no bearing on the length of your stories, which may be exactly right for themselves.

    • carpelibris says:

      Kathryn, have you ever tried writing Drabbles? A drabble is a story that's exactly 100 words long. They're short and a fun challenge to write.

      Or you might have fun writing flash fiction, which is generally defined as a story under 1,000 words long.

  12. writeforfun says:

    Alright, this will sound like bragging, but I don't mean for it to be! In fact, I'm hesitant to post this, but I just have to share with someone that can understand.

    I am so happy now! Ecstatic, actually! The play that I started writing last March, worked at fixing up all spring, edited some more all summer and practiced with the kids all fall was performed Sunday! It was amazing! They all did such fantastic jobs! It was truly the neatest thing to see them performing MY play! I couldn’t be happier if it had been on Broadway instead of my church. I’m rapturous – in fact, I’m giddy! This is like the closest I’ve ever come to publishing, and it feels…wonderful. Oh, I had a fantastic night!

  13. 7355lyn says:

    Dear Mrs. Levine,

    Please forgive me for not following your posts for moths.
    I am here to show a fanart of Elodie (apologetically)here:(since this doesn't work, you can look it up in Google.)http://idontknowwhoyouknow.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d5ms3i0 Sorry if this looks ugly.
    And one concept art of June (do you remember?) here:http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/7972/img38w.jpg which I always claimed that she's not mine but adopted her for 'sanity'. 🙂

    All for now, J.

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