To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme

Often ideas about rhyme fall into two extremes. The traditionalists believe a poem is no poem if it has no rhyme. The modernists believe rhyme is an outdated, outmoded, and artificial contrivance. Personally, I used to write free verse only, concentrating on strong imagery and figures of speech to carry the meaning of a poem. Then, I began to experiment with rhyme and found it fun. It challenged me greatly to drop in bits and pieces of rhyme that did not sound forced. You know what I mean.

Sometimes, people twist their lines around to get a rhyme. What a mess!

Or in other cases, people will use a word, not because it is the best word, but because it rhymes. Another danger of rhyme is that writers who do not have a good vocabulary wind up using the same old rhymes over and over. An example is breeze and trees. In those sappy greeting cards you always see year and dear together.

If you like writing rhyming poetry or song lyrics, for that matter, invest some money in a rhyming dictionary. I use one and it proves to be extremely helpful.

You may have heard an English teacher mention the rhyme scheme of a poem.

You may ask yourself what a poem could possibly scheme about. You might also think that English teachers scheme to drive their students crazy by talking about rhyme scheme and stuff like figurative language. Well, that's true, but that's not what we're talking about here. Rhyme scheme is merely a way of labeling which words in a poem actually rhyme.