Is Rhyme Childish? Defending Rhyme in Modern Poetry
The prejudice against rhyme runs deep in contemporary poetry circles, and it is mostly wrong. A judge explains where the bias came from, when rhyme fails, and six tests for keeping it.
At an open mic last year I watched a poet in her sixties step up to the microphone, clear her throat, and apologize. Not for her poem. For its rhymes. She actually said the words, sorry, this one rhymes, and the room gave the small knowing laugh that rooms give when someone confesses to an outdated habit. Then she read a tight, bitter, beautifully engineered poem about clearing her mother's house, and the rhymes clicked shut on each stanza like the latches on the boxes she was describing. Nobody laughed after that.
The prejudice against rhyme in modern poetry is real, it is everywhere, and I want to argue that it is mostly a misdiagnosis. As a contest judge I score rhymed and unrhymed work side by side every month, and the pattern I see is not that rhyme is childish. It is that bad rhyme is loud, and bad free verse is quiet, so the failures of rhyme get remembered while the failures of free verse just evaporate. We have mistaken audibility for guilt.
Where the Prejudice Actually Came From
The bias has a traceable history. Early twentieth century modernists needed to clear ground for new forms, and rhyme was the most visible feature of the old ones, so it took the most direct hits. Then the greeting card industry spent a hundred years using rhyme as its house style, gluing chime to sentiment until the sound itself started to smell of sentiment. Add primary school, where rhyme is the first poetic device children meet, and you get the modern reflex: rhyme reads as beginner, free verse reads as serious.
Notice that none of these are arguments about what rhyme does in a poem. They are arguments about the company rhyme has kept. Meanwhile, outside the page poetry world, rhyme never lost an inch of territory. It runs hip hop, it runs song, it runs political chants and playground insults and advertising, all the places where language still has to work on people who did not agree in advance to be impressed. That should embarrass the prejudice more than it does.
What Rhyme in Modern Poetry Can Still Do
Here is what I watch rhyme accomplish in the strongest contest entries I score.
- Closure. A rhyme at the end of a stanza is a latch. The reader hears the thought close, which lets the poet end on quietness instead of explanation.
- Binding. Rhyme yokes two words into an argument. When a poem rhymes womb with room, the pairing itself is making a claim no sentence in the poem states.
- Tension. A regular scheme sets up expectation, and expectation is raw material. Delay the rhyme, slant it, or break it once, and you have an effect free verse cannot buy at any price.
- Memory. Rhymed lines get carried out of the room in people's heads. Unrhymed lines have to be extraordinary to earn the same ride.
Emily Dickinson, who nobody accuses of being childish, understood the third item better than anyone. Her rhymes lean and swerve instead of chiming:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
Soul and all. Close enough to hear, far enough to unsettle. That off-center click is called slant rhyme, and it is the single most useful tool for any writer who loves rhyme but fears the greeting card. Dickinson built a body of work on it a century and a half ago, and contemporary poets are still mining the vein she opened.
When Rhyme Actually Is Childish
Now the honest part. Some rhymed entries deserve every point they lose, and they fail in the same three ways every month.
First, inversion. The poet twists natural word order to drag the rhyme into position: the night so dark and cold it grew. No living person speaks that sentence. The rhyme has stopped serving the poem and the poem has started serving the rhyme, and every reader can feel the hierarchy flip.
Second, the dead pairs. Love and above. Heart and apart. Fire and desire. These rhymes are not wrong, they are exhausted; they have been coupled so many million times that the second word arrives before the reader reaches it, and a poem that can be predicted cannot surprise.
Third, rhyme-driven meaning. The poet needed a rhyme for June, so suddenly there is a moon in a poem that had no business looking up. When I score an entry and can reconstruct which word came first, the rhyme word or the meaning, the structure mark suffers, because I am no longer reading a poem. I am reading a solved puzzle.
A Worked Example: Rescuing a Forced Rhyme
Here is a couplet of the kind I see constantly:
I kept the letters that you sent to me,
and locked away my heart without a key.
The inversion (sent to me), the abstract padlocked heart, the too-perfect chime: all three diseases in two lines. Watch what slant rhyme and natural syntax can do with the same material:
I kept your letters in a biscuit tin.
Some doors rust shut. You do not lock them in.
Tin and in still click, but now the syntax is spoken English, the heart has become a rusted door, and the rhyme lands on a small hard word instead of a flourish. The couplet did not need less rhyme. It needed less obedience to rhyme.
Six Tests Before You Keep a Rhyme
Run every rhyme in your draft through this sequence. It takes about a minute per couplet.
- The syntax test. Read the line aloud. Would you ever say those words in that order to a friend? If not, the rhyme forced an inversion. Rewrite in natural order first, then find a new rhyme.
- The prediction test. Cover the second rhyme word and ask someone to guess it. If they guess right, the pair is dead stock. Reach for a slant.
- The cause test. Ask which came first, the image or the rhyme. If the moon only exists because of June, evict the moon.
- The weight test. Rhyme spotlights its words. Check that your rhyme positions hold nouns and verbs that deserve the light, not filler like indeed or so true.
- The volume test. Read the stanza to yourself and notice whether you hear the rhyme or see the poem. If the chime is louder than the image, slant it or bury it mid-line.
- The removal test. Rewrite the couplet unrhymed. If nothing is lost, the rhyme was decoration. If the couplet goes slack, congratulations, the rhyme was structural. Keep it.
The Villanelle That Beat Everything
Two winters ago an entry arrived in strict form, a villanelle about a father with dementia, its two refrains trading places like his good days and bad days. Around it sat several hundred free verse entries, many of them strong. The villanelle won the month, and not as a novelty act: it took the top structure score I gave all season, because the obsessive returning rhymes were not a costume. They were the subject. The form repeated because the man repeated. Rhyme was doing load-bearing emotional work that plain sentences could not have done.
Judges from fifty-plus countries' worth of entries later, I can report the pattern holds: rhyme never loses points in serious contests for being rhyme. It loses points for being obedient, predictable, or ornamental, which are failures available to free verse too. The tool was never the problem.
The Case for Growing Back Up
Somewhere in your writing life, someone probably implied that rhyme was training wheels, something to be outgrown on the way to serious work. I want to hand you the opposite frame before you close this page:
Rhyme is not childish. Unearned rhyme is, and so is unearned freedom.
The apologizing poet at that open mic did not need to apologize. She needed the room to update its prejudice, and by the last stanza it had. If you have a rhymed poem sitting in a drawer because you absorbed the bias, run it through the six tests, tighten what fails, and then send it to a contest that scores structure and language on their own merits. Every entrant sees a five-part breakdown, so you will learn exactly how the rhymes landed rather than guessing at a silent rejection.
Write free verse when the poem wants open water. Write rhyme when the poem wants a latch, a bind, a spell. The only childish move is letting fashion make the choice for you.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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