Rhyme Scheme: When to Use It and When to Drop It
Rhyme is the most contested tool in a poem's kit. A judge on the three cases where rhyme is doing real work, the three where it is just decoration, and the failure pattern that kills more contest entries than any other.
Rhyme is the most contested tool in a poem's kit. Half the poets who enter contests think a poem has to rhyme to be a poem, and the other half think a poem that rhymes is automatically a greeting card. Both are wrong, and the wrongness is why the rhyme question is the most argued-about in the pile.
Here is the truth: rhyme is not good or bad. It is a tool, and like every tool, it is good when it is doing work and bad when it is doing decoration.
The three cases where rhyme is doing real work
Case one: the song. If the poem is a song, a ballad, a hymn, a lyric that is meant to be sung, rhyme is the thing that makes it sing. The rhyme is the melody; the melody is the point.
Case two: the form. If the poem is in a form that requires rhyme, a sonnet, a villanelle, a pantoum, the rhyme is the form. Dropping it is like removing the walls from a house; the form collapses.
Case three: the turn. If the poem is built around a turn, a twist, a landing, the rhyme can mark the turn. The rhyme is the hinge; the hinge is the thing the poem swings on.
The three cases where rhyme is decoration
Case one: the forced rhyme. The poet chose a word because it rhymed, not because it was the right word. 'Love' and 'dove', 'heart' and 'apart', 'soul' and 'whole'. The rhyme is driving the poem, and the poem is a passenger.
Case two: the rhyme that is the poem. The poem has nothing to say, so the poet made it rhyme. The rhyme is the decoration that is covering up the lack of a subject.
Case three: the rhyme that is too regular. The poem rhymes on every line, in the same place, with the same beat. The regularity is the monotony, and the monotony is the thing that puts the reader to sleep.
The failure pattern that kills the most entries
The most common way a rhyme poem fails is the slant-rhyme slippage: the poem starts with a strong rhyme and then lets it go. 'Heart' and 'start' in the first stanza, 'heart' and 'art' in the second, 'heart' and 'part' in the third, and by the fourth the rhyme is 'heart' and 'apart'. The rhyme was there and then it was not, and the poem is worse than if it had never rhymed at all.
A poem that rhymes should rhyme all the way through, or not at all. The half-rhyme is the worst of both worlds.
Where the rhyme goes wrong
The trap is the rhyme that is chosen for the sound instead of the sense. The poet picks a word because it sounds right, not because it is right, and the poem loses the sense for the sake of the sound. The rhyme is the decoration; the sense is the structure.
If you want to see rhyme done right, the forms library has examples of the sonnet and the villanelle using rhyme as structure, and the slant-rhyme post has the method for when full rhyme is too much. When your draft is ready, the contest window is open. Rhyme is not the enemy. The lazy rhyme is.
Keep reading
For the craft side, the rhyme-schemes module covers the deeper method. The slant-rhyme module is the page to read next, and the sonnet module is where the work goes when it is done.
By Writory Editorial, for Writory.
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