Good Rhyme Schemes for Poems
- The matching sounds that comprise rhymes are meant to draw the reader’s attention to the words in the poem or lyric, contributing to the impact of the piece. For simple verses, such as those on greeting cards or invitations, a good rhyme setup is the true rhyme (moon, June, soon) that appears at the end of each line. A more complicated setup is the internal rhyme, which matches two words within the same line. Lyricist Stephen Sondheim used this setup often; in “West Side Story,” Maria sings, “It’s alarming how charming I feel.”
- Some rhymes don’t sound “true.” Alliteration matches the first consonant of two or more words. For example, William Blake started “The Tyger,” with “Tyger, tyger burning bright,” incorporating two alliterative rhymes in one line. Assonance rhymes repeats the vowel sounds in the interior of words as opposed to the ends of words. John Betjeman’s “A Subaltern’s Love Story” includes "westering, questioning settles the sun / On your low-leaded window,” demonstrating an assonance rhyme on the vowel “e” in westering, questioning and leaded.
- Good rhyme schemes fall into no set categories; they are the ones that work best for the poem and its message. The most basic scheme is ABAB or ABCB (each letter refers to a matching ending rhyme) as in the archetypical “roses are red” poem. The scheme of AABB or AABA might appear as part of rhyming couplets, which are rhymes consisting of two consecutive lines, and quatrains with four consecutive lines. The scheme AABBA is typical of limericks. William Shakespeare combined couplets and quatrains in a scheme of ABABCDCEEFEFGG for his sonnet, “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds.”
- Part of the rhyme scheme is the poem’s foot, which refers to a group of syllables that form a metric unit; iamb (two syllables, with the second stressed), anapest (three syllables with the third stressed) and spondee (two syllables with equal emphases) are among them. The rest of the unit is comprised of the metric feet in the line of the poem, ranging from diameter (two feet) to octometer (eight feet). Shakespeare’s sonnets are famous examples of iambic pentameter, two syllable words strung in five combinations in a line (“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”).
- Some rhyme schemes forgo traditional rhythms and sounds, making them a good alternative for beginning poets who lack confidence in their rhyming ability. Free verse has no regular rhyme or scheme; blank verse consists of nonrhyming iambic pentameter; while haiku, a three-line poem, follows a strict pattern of nonrhyming lines consisting of 5-7-5 syllables.
