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Hey there guys, it’s finally time For this video all about rhyme My name is Katie and I’ve got … tips … AHHHH! Hey there guys! My name is Dr Katie Ailes and I am part of the team here at I Am Loud Productions. Welcome to Form Fundamentals. This is our mini-series leading you through the basics of poetic form. This episode is all about rhyme: why we use it, the various types of rhyme in poetry, and how to write poetry with rhyme yourself. Form Fundamentals is kicking off Season 2
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of our Return to Form series which celebrates poetic form and shows how contemporary writers can use it in new and interesting ways. Big thanks to National Lottery funding through Creative Scotland for making this project possible. You can watch all of the videos in the Return to Form project through the playlist linked up in the i. Today I’ll begin this episode by defining rhyme and explaining why poets often choose to use it in their work. Next I’ll go over the core ingredients of
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rhyme, consonance and assonance. From there we’ll explore the categories of rhymes, from perfect rhyme to half rhyme to multi-syllabic rhyme. Then we’ll review the two kinds of rhyme placement: end rhyme and internal rhyme. To wrap up I’ll give you some helpful tips for writing in rhyme so that you can apply of this information to your own poetry. I know that’s a lot, but the great thing about rhyme is that you recognise it when
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you hear it, so this is just putting terms to effects that you’re probably familiar with already. Plus, I’ll be giving you tons of examples through today's video. So without further ado, let’s get to it! First things first - what is rhyme? I like the way that Encyclopedia Brittanica puts it: ‘the correspondence of two or more words with similar-sounding final syllables placed so as to echo one another.’ There’s a couple parts to that, so let's break it down.
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First of all, rhyme is all about sound. It does not matter how the words are spelled on the page - all that matters is that the final syllable - or syllables - sound similar. For instance, the words ‘through’ and ‘rough’ are spelled the same but they don’t rhyme because they sound different, whereas the words ‘through’ and ‘who’ are spelled differently but because they sound the same, they rhyme. Secondly, I want to emphasise that word ‘similar’ in that definition. Rhymes don’t always
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sound exactly the same - cat/bat, moose/goose, etc. You can also have cat/bot and moose/mood! Those are called half-rhymes, and we’ll be getting to them shortly. Third, this definition talks about rhyming words being placed so that they echo one other. I think that that's a beautiful way of putting it, and a really helpful reminder that for rhyme to be effective in a poem, the rhyming words have to be relatively close together.
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For example, if you have the word ‘river’ in Line 1 of your poem and the word ‘shiver’ in Line 67 of your poem, the reader or listener has had a zillion words in between, so they're not going to remember the first word. Those words won't echo, so they don't really count as a rhyming pair. OK, we’ll dive further into the technical aspects of rhyme in a moment, but first of all: why do we rhyme? Why has this been such a core component of poetry across cultures
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for millennia? I'd like you to think back to the nursery rhymes you were sung as a child, for instance: "Jack and Jill / went up the hill," or "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a big fall." You can probably recite a lot of them by heart, even now. There’s something so intuitive about the correspondence of sound that happens in rhyme, something that we can understand and appreciate from a very early
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age. Rhyme works in poetry because it is so universal and so central to sound and to language. And, simply put, it sounds good! It's very pleasing to the ear. Poetry that doesn’t rhyme is of course fine, and in fact that's the vogue today in printed poetry, but there’s something so powerful and harmonious about poetry that relies upon sound, upon the echoes of sound, to create its meaning. Finally, and particularly for performance
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poets, rhyming is an excellent tool for aiding memorisation. Rhymes create links across a poem so that when you say the first word in a rhyming pair, you’re more likely to remember the second word in that pair, thus helping you to flow through the poem as you're performing it aloud. It’s actually theorised that ancient oral poems the The Odyssey used rhyme in part to help the poets performing them to remember these hours-long epic poems. So if you’re
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interested in performing your poetry, I would highly suggest weaving in rhyme as it very much helps onstage. OK, now that you know what rhyme is and how to use it, it’s dive to dive into the details. We’ll start simple here and look at the two core ingredients of rhyme: consonance and assonance. As we know, there are two categories of letters: you have your vowels (A, E, I, O, U - and sometimes Y) and the rest of them are consonants.
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The same is true for sounds - you have vowel sounds built from vowels and consonant sounds built from consonants. Broadly speaking, those are the two ingredients of words (and yes, there are some nuances here but we’re keeping it simple, linguists please do not come attack me with pitchforks). A great technique in writing and the first step on your way to rhyme is to group together these vowel sounds and/or these consonant sounds for a pleasing effect. When you group together multiple words with
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the same consonant sound, that’s called consonance - nice easy one to remember. Let’s see how this works in our example poem, Callum O’Dwyer’s “The Kiss.” Here I’ve highlighted places where the poem has repeated the same consonant sounds close together. The first line uses consonance by repeating the ‘f’ sound - ‘First, off, final.’ You’ll see that the repetition of the sound can occur anywhere in the word - it doesn’t have to be at the beginning or the end.
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And again, note that this has to do with sound, not spelling - so in Line 4, even though ‘loss’ is spelled with ‘s’s and ‘circle’ is spelled with a ‘c’, they both make the ‘sss’ sound so that’s an example of consonance. So the repetition of consonant sounds in proximity is known as consonance. What about the repetition of vowel sounds? That is assonance. Let’s see it in action on Callum’s poem. Oho boy that’s a lot, and you could probably
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find even more assonance if you kept looking! One of the reasons I love this poem is because it is so wonderfully rich in assonance as well as consonance. From the very first line it uses repeating vowel sounds to really knit the piece together and make it sound cohesive. In that first line you have ‘promised,' 'this,' and 'kiss.' All of them have that 'i' sound, 'ih.' Again spelling doesn’t really matter here,
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just sound. A single vowel can make multiple vowel sounds; for example, in line 5 you have ‘yet / when / met’ and ‘we.’ They’re both spelled with ‘e’ but they make different sounds: 'eh' or 'ee.' Assonance just refers to the repetition of the sounds, not of the vowel itself in how the word is spelled. Assonance and consonance are fantastic tools in poetry, and particularly for poetry that you’re planning to perform aloud. They work
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great on their own, but as I mentioned, they’re also the building blocks of rhyme. So now let’s look now at how to construct rhymes and at the multiple types of rhymes. Let’s begin with the type of rhyme you’re gonna be most familiar with: perfect rhyme. Simple example to start: cat / bat. Here, the vowel sound is the same in both words - cat and bat both have 'ah' in it - so these words have assonance. The ending consonant
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sound is also the same as well: 'cat' and 'bat' both end with the ‘t’ sound, so these words have consonance. The only difference is at the start of the word: ‘c’ for 'cat' and ‘b' for 'bat.' Because 'cat' and 'bat' have assonance and consonance at the end of the syllable, this forms a perfect rhyme. Nice and simple so far. However, because poets love bending the rules, there are also multiple other kinds of rhyme which, while not perfect rhyme, still create a weaker rhyming
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effect by using similar-sounding syllables. The most common are half rhymes, also known as partial, slant, imperfect, or near rhymes. There are several different ways of creating half rhymes; I’ll show you through examples. Let’s take our perfect rhyme example - cat / bat, and tweak it a little to make it cat / bad. Here, again there is assonance because 'cat' and 'bad' share the vowel sound 'ah.' However, the words end with different consonant sound - you have 'caT' and 'baD.' Because those
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end consonant sounds are different, this cannot be a perfect rhyme - it's a half rhyme. This works the other way as well, with consonance. So let’s tweak the original example and make it ‘cat’ / ‘bot.’ Here, the end consonant sound is the same - ‘t’ - but the vowel sounds are different - 'caaaat' 'boooot' - ‘ah’ ‘ahhhh.' Now you may now be yelling right now ‘CHEAT! CHEATERS! THAT’S NOT PERFECT RHYME! IN THE BIN!’ That’s fair, and you absolutely do not have to use half rhyme if it grates
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your ears the wrong way. But do know that there is a long tradition of poets using half rhyme in their work - Shakespeare heckin’ loved 'em - and it's a great way of expanding your possibilities if you're finding it difficult to find a perfect rhyming pair. OK, moving on to another category of rhyme. Cat/bat ain’t all that’s out there; you can also add in multiple syllables to make multi-syllabic rhyme, also known as compound rhyme. Sure, you can rhyme sleep / creep, but you
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can also rhyme sleepy / creepy, and sleepiness / creepiness. And to take it to the next level, you can even combine these kinds of rhyme. Let me show you how you can use half rhyme in multisyllabic rhyme. For example, sleepiness is a perfect rhyme with 'creepiness' but it's a half rhyme with 'floppiness.' Again here the consonant sound is the same - p in 'sleep' and 'flop,' but the vowel sound is different - 'sleeeep'
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/ 'floooop' - 'eee' / 'ahh.' So that is an example of a multisyllabic consonant half rhyme. Say that five times fast! OK, we're gonna dive into the technical weeds here for just a moment, but bear with me. Something to be aware of with multi-syllabic rhyming words is that whether they’re perfect rhymes or half rhymes depends on where the stress falls in the word. We’re gonna review how to identify stresses in words in the next
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episode of Form Fundamentals on metre, but basically it’s where you place emphasis when you say a word. Essentially, for a set of multi-syllabic words to be perfect rhymes, the stressed syllables of those words need to rhyme with each other. Take the words ‘today’ and ‘away.’ In both you stress the second syllable - 'to-DAY,' 'a-WAY.' We would say the sentence 'I'm going a-WAY to-DAY' rather than the sentence 'I'm
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going A-way TO-day' - that would just sound weird. Because the stressed syllables of these words rhyme - ‘way’ and ‘day’ - rhyme, this is a perfect multisyllabic rhyme. But switch it up and let's take the pair ‘today’ and birthday.’ In 'today,' the stress again is on the second syllable, 'DAY,' but in 'birthday' the stress is in the first syllable - 'BIRTH-day.' You would say 'to-DAY is my BIRTH-day,' rather than 'TO-day is my birth-DAY’ (unless you’re
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very cool). So the stressed syllables are actually 'day' from 'today' and 'birth' from 'birthday', and of course 'day' and 'birth' don’t rhyme. So even though this set of words ends with the same syllable, ‘day,’ because the stressed syllables don’t rhyme, this is not a perfect multisyllabic rhyme. Technically we would call this a multisyllabic half rhyme. I get that that is all pretty confusing, and to be honest it took me a while to understand
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as well. If you’re feeling a bit lost, do not worry about all of that jargon, honestly. Rhyming is ultimately all about the echoes of sounds, perfect and imperfect, and as you’re writing your ear will pick up on what sounds good and what works in your poetry. You want to rhyme 'today' and 'birthday'? Freakin' go for it! As I keep saying in these videos, there are no poetry police. It is all groovy. And as a note here, what words rhyme will also depend on the poet’s accent - some
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words rhyme in some accents and not others. For instance, ‘basil’ rhymes perfectly with ‘nasal’ in my American accent, but for my Scottish pals, ‘basil’ rhymes perfectly with ‘dazzle.’ It’s not about who’s right *cough* basil *cough* it’s about celebrating our linguistic diversity *basil!* Phew. That was a lot of types of rhyme in poetry and a lot of rules and exceptions to rules. We’re going to move on now and consider
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where rhymes can occur in poetry. Happily, this is pretty simple, as there are only two kind of rhyme placement: end rhyme and internal rhyme. First, end rhyme. When we talk about rhyming poetry, we almost always are talking about end rhyme. It means that the words at the ends of a set of lines rhyme with each other. ‘Jack and Jill / went up the hill’ - Line 1 ends with Jill, Line 2 ends with hill, Jill and hill rhyme - voila, end rhyme!
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For a more sophisticated example, let’s check out the end rhyme in our example poem, Callum O’Dwyer’s “The Kiss.” This is a Shakespearean sonnet, so it follows a set rhyme scheme. It requires end rhymes in a certain pattern. When you’re trying to figure out the rhyme scheme of a poem, the easiest way is to go down the end words of the lines and give each new rhyme a new letter. So here, the first end word is ‘kiss,’
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so we mark it with a A. The next end word is ‘land.’ That doesn’t rhyme with ‘kiss,’ so it’s a new rhyme - we’ll mark it ‘B.’ The end word of line 3 is ‘this’ - aha, it rhymes with ‘kiss’, so we mark it A. Line 4 ends with ‘sand,’ which rhymes with ‘land,’ so that’s ‘B’ again. Then for line 5 we have ‘found,’ which doesn’t rhyme with our 'A' rhyme or our 'B' rhyme, so we mark that as C. And so on and so forth! When you’ve marked up the whole poem in
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that way, you can read out the rhyme scheme like this: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. That is the rhyme scheme used by all Shakespearean sonnets. As I said, end rhyme is usually what we’re talking about when we discuss poetic rhyme, and it’s often the easiest to recognise - it's very easy to see the rhyming words at the ends of lines, or hear them at the end of lines. But the ends of lines are not the only places that you can whack a rhyme in a poem; you can put rhyming words anywhere in a line or
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a stanza. We call rhymes that don’t take place solely at the ends of lines ‘internal rhymes,’ because they take place internally within the poem rather than just at the ends of the lines. Let me show you on Callum’s sonnet. I've found two examples of internal rhyme in this poem. The first two are at the end of Line 2 - ‘land’ - and the start of Line 3 - ‘and.’ But Katie, you may be saying, ‘land’ is an end word! Yup, but
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‘and’ isn’t, so because part of the pair is not an end word, this counts as internal rhyme. Line 13 gives us another example: the words ‘kiss’ and ‘miss’ are both inside the line. So as you can see, internal rhyme can be across lines or limited to a single line. The point here is that rhyme is not limited to line endings; you can play with it anywhere in your poem. I love internal rhyme; it’s probably the poetic technique that I use the most when
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I’m composing my own work. As I noted earlier, rhyming really helps with memorisation, and so I like to use internal rhyme to link stanzas together, so that when I end a stanza I already have a reminder of what I'm going to do in the next stanza. It helps me remember it and it also helps to sonically link the poem together across the stanzas. And in highly structured poems with rigid rhyme schemes like sonnets, using internal
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rhyme is a great way of distracting from the rigidity of the set rhyme scheme and helping the poem to flow more naturally, emphasising that it’s not just certain words that have to chime, that have to echo throughout the poem, but that sort of chiming, that sort of harmony, happens throughout the breadth of the poem. A final note on this: I’ve talked about internal rhymes which are freely placed somewhat
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randomly over the course of a poem, but internal rhyme can also be structured in the same way as end rhyme in some poetic forms. A great example of this is in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “The Raven,” which as part of its unusual rhyme scheme uses a fair amount of internal rhyme. In this first stanza you can see how there are two instances of the A rhyme in Line 1 - 'dreary' and 'weary' - and how the C rhyme - 'rapping,' 'tapping,'
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etc - occurs mostly in the middles of lines. Poe mixes up the rhyme scheme throughout this zany poem, but this is an example of relatively consistent, strategic placement of internal rhyme. Okeydoke. You may also be hallucinating ravens at this point; that was a lot of information and terminology. We’re going to round off this episode with some light guidance on how to actually use all of this in your own writing.
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First of all, if you’re writing poetry in rhyme, you may be tempted to immediately open the rhyming dictionary - and I would urge a little bit of caution there. Don’t get me wrong - I love rhyming dictionaries - they are very, very helpful resources when you're writing poetry - but I would urge you not to go to them first when you're starting to compose a poem. For one, they usually they only offer you perfect rhymes, and as we’ve seen there’s a whole glorious world of half-rhymes out
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there to explore as well. For another reason, because rhyming suggest all of the words that rhyme with whatever word you've searched with, they'll probably tempt you to use some words in your poem that do rhyme but might sound a little bit unnatural. Just because ‘cheese’ rhymes with 'Peloponnese' does not mean that that's going to be a good fit for your poem. If you’re stuck for a rhyme, try sounding it out, playing with a couple of different options, then consult the dictionary for some
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support. But try it out in your own noggin and in your own mouth first. For my next tip - as I'm writing poetry with a fixed rhyme scheme, I like to generate word banks. And these are lists of words that rhyme that I can refer to as I’m composing my poem. This is particularly helpful for those poetic forms which require you to use the same rhyming sound many, many times. For instance, in a villanelle you need to come up with 7 rhyming words for the A rhyme and 6 rhyming words
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for the B rhyme. When you kick off writing a poem like that it’s really, really helpful to make a list of all of the potential rhymes that you can use so that you have that on your desk as you're composing the poem. Finally, again when I'm writing in fixed rhyme scheme that require the rhymes need to occur in certain places, I find it helpful to write out what I call a rhyme map. This is simply a guide, a key, to where all of the rhyming
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words in your new poem are gonna go. For example, here’s how I would draw out a rhyme map for a Shakespearean sonnet. Doing this on a piece of paper or on your computer gives you a handy guide to follow as you’re composing your work. You can just write out the key - ABAB CDCD, etc. - and then you can fill in the rhyming words as you go. My final advice for writing in rhyme: enjoy it, sound it out, and do not be too strict
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with yourself. Rhyming is all about leaning into the joy of sound and playing with how words harmonise with each other, how they echo each other, chime together. Whether it’s end or internal, perfect or half, single-syllable or multi-syllabic, basil or basil, have fun with it. You got this! And that's it for this third episode of Form Fundamentals. I really, really hope that this was helpful for you guys in understanding how rhyme works in poetry. As always, if you have any questions after
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watching this video please pop them in the comments below; I am more than happy to help. And don’t miss our final episode of Form Fundamentals, coming out shortly - it focuses on metre, which is often considered the trickiest aspect of poetic form, but do not worry, I break it all down for you with plenty of examples - and kittens. If you enjoyed this video please consider giving it a like, subscribing to the channel,
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and ringing that bell icon so that you don't miss any of the other upcoming videos we post. You can also directly support our work and receive so many amazing perks by signing up to our Patreon for as little as £1 per month. Guys, thank you so much for watching and happy writing!
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