Sound and Rhyme

Sound and Rhyme in Poetry

Sound

•Euphony: the sound of words working together with meaning pleases mind and ear.

•Cacophony: a harsh discordant effect.

•Onomatopoeia: an attempt to represent a thing or action by a word that imitates the sound associated with it (Kennedy and Gioia, 168).

 

A poet may repeat any unit of sound from the smallest to the largest. He may repeat a vowel and consonant sounds, whole syllables, words, phrases, lines, or groups of lines. The repetition will please the ear, emphasize the words, and give structure to the poem.

Rhyme

•Rhyme is a play with words and its first effect is pleasure (Wainwright, p. 102)

•Rime (or rhyme) is the repetition of the accented vowel sound and all succeeding sounds in important or importantly positioned words (Perrin, pp. 168, 170).

•Rhyme is another form of punctuation closely bound to lineation and layout, helping on the page and in performance audibly to organise the relations of words (Lennard p. 190).

 

Approximate Rhyme

•Approximate rhymes include words with any kind of sound similarity, from close to fairly remote (Perrine, p. 168).

•Approximate rhymes include alliteration, assonance, and consonance and their combinations when used at the end of the line.

Alliteration

• the repetition of the initial consonant sounds.

  Tale as old as time

  True as it can be

  Barely even friends

  Than somebody bends

  Unexpectedly

Assonance

•The repetition of vowel sounds

Why does it feel like night today?

Something in here's not right today.

Why am I so uptight today?

Paranoia's all I got left

Consonance

•The repetition of final consonant sounds

  Moon so bright, night so fine

  Keep your heart here with mine

  Life's a dream we are dreaming

  Race the moon, catch the wind

  Ride the night to the end

  Seize the day, stand up for the light

  I want to spend my lifetime loving you

  If that is all in life I ever do

Rhyming Patterns

•A poet rhymes the way he wants to make the poem sounds.

•Terza rima: aba bcb cdc ded.

•Rhyme royale: ababbcc

Rhyme is powered by stanza which can be long or short to represent a message or idea.