Which Kind of Rhyme?
This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets
In another article, I went over how to find two different kinds of rhyme: full rhyme and slant rhyme. Now, as I promised, I’m going to go over when you might want to use them. It’s going to be a wild ride, so hang on!
Let’s start with why we even need to think about this.
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What’s the big deal about choosing kinds of rhyme?
There are a couple of answers to that:
The history of rhyme makes it matter; and
Different rhymes create different effects.
Let’s start with the history.
Rhyming with full rhyme used to be pretty much automatic: if you opened a book of poetry from 1820, chances are all the poems (except perhaps long ones telling stories) would use full rhyme at the end of almost every line. But fast forward two centuries, and now it’s a surprise to see any poem that uses that much full rhyme.
What happened? Why did full rhyme fall out of favor in such a big way?
The answer I like is that full rhyme, with its perfect sound linkage between two words, doesn’t fit very well with the fractured, confusing world we live in now. Poets (and readers) have just found that full rhyme often sounds too easy and neat to represent our complex, messy life experiences.
But slant rhyme, with its imperfect, edgy sound, actually fits rather well with the modern world. So slant rhyme has been used a lot during the time when full rhyme has declined, especially by poets from Ireland and the UK.
What does this mean for you now?
Well, it means that you have choices—which is a good thing, since it lets you fit your rhyme to your intentions.
If you choose to use a lot of full rhyme, you’re aligning your poem with an older tradition. If you want to sound traditional, that’s great! But if you want to sound radical and new, full rhyme might not be the best tool.
If you use slant rhyme, on the other hand, you’re using a tool that’s bang up to date, and won’t make you sound at all old-fashioned. You can still get all the benefits of using a structured form such as a sonnet or a quatrain, but you shouldn’t sound like you’re from 1820.
Does this mean you should never use full rhyme?
NO!! Full rhyme and slant rhyme are still vital components in any poet’s toolkit. And that’s because of the second reason: The rhyme you choose will do different things for your poem.
What full rhyme can do for you
(To start with, a little disclaimer: the effects of full rhyme are hugely varied—that’s part of why it was so dominant for so long. So it’s pretty much impossible to sum it up in a short article. But I’m going to try to focus on some of the most common things it does, to give you some starting points. After that, just try using it and reading it, and learn for yourself how much it can do!
With that said, let’s get going…)
Because of the close similarity in sound between two full rhyme words, it’s easy for full rhyme to signal things like:
Neatness and order
Beauty, harmony, and musicality
Completeness.
For example, let’s look at part of “Honeycomb” by Alison Brackenbury, a poet who uses full rhyme in most of her poems:
… but then I taste the honeycomb,
its waxen white upon my teeth,
its liquid sun which hides beneath.
Small deities, of wind or moon
behold me. In my shabby room
I am a god. I lick the spoon.
The rich sound of the full rhymes here (teeth/beneath, moon/spoon) helps to show the loveliness of the honey and the sweetness of eating it.
The rhyme pattern also creates a sense of order and structure that fits well with the happy, harmonious experience that the poem describes.
So if you want to create a poem—or even just part of a poem—that sounds ordered, melodic, or beautiful, lots of full rhyme might be the right technique.
Other ways to use full rhyme
Full rhyme can be used throughout a poem, as Brackenbury does, but you can also use it just occasionally—whenever you want to make a particular point.
Poets tend to do this especially at the ends of poems, because the chime of a full rhyme rounds off a poem so neatly. Here’s an example from a section of Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full Of Stars”:
I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.
Without the full rhyme stark/dark, there wouldn’t be much to signal that this section of the poem was ending. But with it, the “click” of that rhyme sounds like something locking into place, finished, done.
Another way that full rhyme can be used without sounding “hokey” is internal rhyme. That means putting rhyme words not at the ends of lines.
Tracy K. Smith uses this strategy a lot, too. Here it is in her poem “The United States Welcomes You”:
…What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel?…
And again later in the poem:
… Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night…
These internal full rhymes give her poem musicality. And the second rhyme, afraid/invade, links together two important ideas, suggesting that the speaker is really the one who’s afraid, because the two words are joined so closely by sound.
So we have: beauty, smoothness, harmony, order, completion, and linking meanings. Is this all full rhyme can do?
No way! I’m just trying to give you a general overview here. As you see more poets using full rhyme here and there, you’ll see it being used lots of other ways too.
For example, in Sylvia Plath’s famous “Daddy,” the relentless “oo” rhymes build up until they sound obsessive and haunting. Here’s the first stanza:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo…
So full rhyme is absolutely still a thing that poets use, and you can too. But first:
Just pause to think whether full rhyme seems a good fit for the effects you want to create.
What slant rhyme can do for you
Slant rhyme is not as neat as full rhyme. This means that it creates a connection between words, but it’s not as final, or as complete, as in full rhyme. And where full rhyme has perfect harmony between the sounds of the two words, slant rhyme has some dissonance—which can suggest some scratchiness or unease.
For these reasons, as I said above, slant rhyme sounds more “modern” or up to date. It avoids the too-neat problem of full rhyme, and it is also more subtle, which readers and editors tend to prefer. Therefore:
One thing slant rhyme can do is replace full rhyme in traditional poetic forms.
Seamus Heaney proved that if you use slant rhyme, you can dozens of Petrarchan sonnets and still sound so contemporary that you get the Nobel Prize! Derek Walcott did it too.
For example, here’s part of a sonnet by Heaney in his poem “Clearances”:
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
If you weren’t looking for the slant rhymes, you might not even notice them: Mass/potatoes, one/iron, share/water, and splashes/sense. But they’re there, and they help to structure the sonnet just as full rhymes would.
So, next time you feel like trying a sonnet, or terza rima, or a villanelle, maybe try slant rhyme instead of full rhyme and see how it sounds.
Another way to think about slant rhyme is what it signals.
Where full rhyme indicates harmony, completeness, and so on, slant rhyme tends to suggest rather different things, such as:
Dissatisfaction and unease
Doubt and uncertainty
Disharmony
Incompleteness.
For an example, let’s go back to Tracy K. Smith’s “The United States Welcomes You”:
Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
This is the end of the poem, so we can see that just like full rhyme, slant rhyme (Fail/appeal) can also be used to round off a poem and bring it to a stop, just like slant rhyme.
But there’s more going on here. In this poem, the speaker gets increasingly agitated as the poem goes on, and by the end they are pretty anxious. So it wouldn’t sound right for Smith to end the poem with neat, orderly full rhymes. Instead, the slant rhymes confess/test and fail/appeal help to suggest that the speaker is searching for meaning and completion but not quite getting there; the sound shows the feeling.
Mixed full and slant rhymes in action
Last stop! I hope you’re enjoying the ride…
Let’s round this all off by looking at a few uses of both full rhyme and slant rhyme in the first section of a really excellent poem, “The Unforgiven” by Christopher Reid. This poem is about the death of the poet’s wife, and the first section depicts the moment of her passing.
It begins:
Sparse breaths, then none –
and it was done.
Listening and hugging hard,
between mouthings
of sweet next-to-nothings
into her ear –
pillow-talk-cum-prayer –
I never heard
the precise cadence
into silence
that argued the end.
Yet I knew it had happened.
Most of the rhyme here is slant rhyme: hard/heard, mouthings/nothings, ear/prayer, cadence/silence, end/happened. And it’s not hard to see that, with its uneasy feeling, slant rhyme works better for grief and loss than full rhyme would.
But the first couplet is different: none/done is a full rhyme, which creates a sound of completeness that reinforces the meaning of “done.” I think it’s a brilliant choice to convey the sudden realization of a life being over.
At the end of the section though, Reid reverses his earlier strategy:
Kisses followed,
to mouth, cheeks, eyelids, forehead,
and a rigmarole
of unheard farewell
kept up as far
as the click of the door.
After six months, or more,
I observe it still.
This time, the full rhyme door/more does not end the section. Instead, it’s the slant rhyme—still/rigmarole/farewell—which is actually a pretty distant slant rhyme. Here Reid is using the unsettling part-echo of that last rhyme to show in sound how the experience of loss is not over yet—it does not have the completeness that full rhyme would have suggested.
It takes a long time to develop this much skill with rhyme—and no one says you even have to use it this much, or at all!
But as I hope you’ve seen, rhyme can still create some really powerful and useful effects in your poetry, and I hope you’ll experiment with it and learn more about it.
Next Steps
Write 2 lines of poetry describing something you can see or hear wherever you are right now.
Take the 2 words that are on the ends of those lines, and find a bunch of potential rhymes for them, both full rhymes and slant rhymes. (The Rhymewell I describe in this article is a good way to do this.)
Use your rhyme words to create 3 different versions of a short poem:
— Use the first 2 lines, then add 2 (or more) lines that full-rhyme with the first two
— Use the first 2 lines, then add 2 (or more) lines that slant-rhyme with the first two
— Use the first 2 lines, then add 2 (or more) lines that use internal rhyme but not end rhyme.Re-reading your different versions, what approach seems to work best? Is there one approach where the rhyme fits the meaning and mood of the poem better?
Create a final version where you mix and match rhyming approaches, trying to get them to work with the meaning.
