Forced Rhyme

[Harry Rutherford]

One of the most common failings exhibited by inexperienced contributors to PFFA is forced rhyme. Rather than explaining every time what this is, and why it’s a bad thing, I thought I would start this thread, with the hope that when it had accumulated some wisdom, it could be moved to Blurbs.
So if there's anything I've missed, or explained badly, or you've got a better example, please chip in!

I and other critters at this site sometimes advise people not to use rhyme until they are more experienced. This is not because rhyme is, in itself, a bad thing, or that it’s outmoded. Rather it’s because rhyme is difficult to use well; a significant amount of time and concentration needs to be devoted to making the rhymes work. For beginners, that energy could be more usefully spent on other aspects of poetry.

What do we mean by ‘forced rhyme’?

Forced rhyme is not necessarily the same thing as bad rhyme (for example, rhyming ‘Fuji’ with ‘Uzi’). Forced rhyme is when the poem suffers for the sake of the rhyme. Often, the word order is distorted to make a rhyme work. For example-

‘In front of me the pathway forked-
along the narrow path I walked.’

It would be more natural to say ‘I walked along the narrow path’, but the sentence structure has been inverted. Another common problem is the use of unnatural word-choices for the sake of rhyme. For example-

‘And when her lovely eyes I viewed
I saw that they were many-hued.’

We would not normally say we ‘viewed’ someone’s eyes. ‘Looked at’, ‘looked into’, or ‘saw’ would all be more natural. And of course I’ve used more inversion.

When a poem uses a lot of forced rhyme, the result is very awkward, usually sounds dreadful, and distracts the reader from the content of the poem. In the best rhymed poetry the reader is hardly aware of the rhyming; it subtly enhances the sound of the poem without forcing itself down the reader’s throat.

A related issue is multi-syllable rhymes (Amanda/Panda, fission/mission, cannelloni/Tony). These often sound forced in English poetry and are best avoided.
One exception is in humorous verse. Slightly exaggerated, even slightly forced rhyme often works to good effect in comic verse, and multi-syllable rhymes are good for this reason. My favourite example (by Hillaire Belloc) is-

‘I shoot the hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum;
Because if I use the leaden ones,
its hide is sure to flatten ’em.’

or, for another-

‘There once was a gaucho named Bruno
Who said “There is one thing I do know.
A girl may be fine,
and young boys are divine,
but a llama is numero uno”


An example of rhyme used well

Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[Howard Miller]

Harry makes very good points about the kinds of problems which can occur with the use of rhyme by those less than skillful. Here are a couple of other related problems:

Tom falls in love with Sue,
so he her does pursue
although she runs away;
"Will you love me?" he asks,
hiding inside his mask.
But she answers, "No way."

"so he her does pursue"--Here, not only is the syntax distorted by inversion as Harry mentioned, but the "does" is strictly filler, a word that doesn't need to be here stuck in to make the line longer so the rhyme word is in the proper position at the end of the line.


"hiding inside his mask"--This entire line exists solely for the purpose of providing a rhyme word (although it's slightly off as it doesn't end in "s" as "asks" does) for "asks. Moreover, the meaning of this line flatly contradicts everything else we've seen in the poem about Tom who in fact has been quite openly pursuing Sue and makes no secret of the fact. This introduction of contradictory elements is one form of this problem; similar is introducing an idea in a rhyme word which simply isn't developed or used anywhere in the poem, again just for the sake of rhyme.

The "away"/"No way" rhyme--Technically, this isn't a rhyme at all, since the word "way" is the same in both cases. This repetition of a rhyming word is called an "identity," and is considered a serious flaw in rhyming poetry. The same problem occurs in rhyming words like "sea" and "see" because rhyme is based on pronunciation, not spelling, so "sea"/"see" are also identities, not rhymes.

Howard


[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-18-2001).]

[gecian]

Something else that inexperienced writers believe is that lines MUST be end-stopped. Rhyme in end-stopped lines is always more obtrusive than in enjambed lines: for instance, in

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

the "green" and "seen" are so unobtrusive because they're enjambed. Besides, the idea that, say, a sonnet should consist of fourteen sentences each ten syllables long AND rhyme forces one to twist one's syntax & insert filler. The many advantages of enjambment per se are covered in Blurbs.

Another example, in my opinion, of unforced rhyme:

Church Going, by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

[This message has been edited by gecian (edited 11-19-2001).]

[Dunc]

I shoot the Hippopotamus / With bullets made of platinum, / Because if I use leaden ones / His hide is sure to flatten 'em. - that's Hillaire Belloc. Regards / Dunc

[sree]

Howard
Just read your points on rhyming.

Does this mean that only full rhyme (as defined below) is the traditionally accepted form ?
For instance while writing a sonnet (rhyming type) does one have to employ only full rhyme ?

Please elaborate.

**********************

This is how rhyme is defined in the book "A Poetry Handbook - John Lennard, Oxford Univ Press".

Rhyme is classified into :
Full rhyme - the last stressed vowel and the succeeding sounds are the same

Rich rhyme - the last stressed vowel and the preceeding and succeeding sounds are the same

Slant rhyme - either last stressed vowel or succeeding sounds differ. If last stressed vowel is the same and the succeeding sounds differ (vowel rhyme) and if the stressed vowels are different but the succeeding sounds are the same (pararhyme)

Eye rhyme - same spelling but differing sounds (eg. cough/bough)

Auto rhyme - repetition of the same word
eg. Macbeth Act II, Sc II (use of the word 'Amen')

MACBETH
One cried 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other;
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
When they did say 'God bless us!'

LADY MACBETH
Consider it not so deeply.

MACBETH
But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat.

***********

Originally posted by Howard Miller:
Harry makes very good points about the kinds of problems which can occur with the use of rhyme by those less than skillful. Here are a couple of other related problems:

Tom falls in love with Sue,
so he her does pursue
although she runs away;
"Will you love me?" he asks,
hiding inside his mask.
But she answers, "No way."

"so he her does pursue"--Here, not only is the syntax distorted by inversion as Harry mentioned, but the "does" is strictly filler, a word that doesn't need to be here stuck in to make the line longer so the rhyme word is in the proper position at the end of the line.


"hiding inside his mask"--This entire line exists solely for the purpose of providing a rhyme word (although it's slightly off as it doesn't end in "s" as "asks" does) for "asks. Moreover, the meaning of this line flatly contradicts everything else we've seen in the poem about Tom who in fact has been quite openly pursuing Sue and makes no secret of the fact. This introduction of contradictory elements is one form of this problem; similar is introducing an idea in a rhyme word which simply isn't developed or used anywhere in the poem, again just for the sake of rhyme.

The "away"/"No way" rhyme--Technically, this isn't a rhyme at all, since the word "way" is the same in both cases. This repetition of a rhyming word is called an "identity," and is considered a serious flaw in rhyming poetry. The same problem occurs in rhyming words like "sea" and "see" because rhyme is based on pronunciation, not spelling, so "sea"/"see" are also identities, not rhymes.

Howard


[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-18-2001).]

[This message has been edited by sree (edited 11-23-2001).]

[This message has been edited by sree (edited 11-23-2001).]

[Clive2]

sree - I think you'll find most pre-20th century sonnets were written in full rhyme. I'm prepared to be proved wrong on this, as I'm not enormously well-read in pre-20th century poetry. The other forms of rhyme you mention are, I believe, more or less later inventions.

The auto-rhyme you mention would, I'm sure, not be considered acceptable in a traditional sonnet. Sonnets aren't just 14 lines and a rhyme scheme: a good sonnet should demonstrate the development of an idea. In an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, an initial statement, thought, whatever would be described, examined etc. in the first eight lines or octet. Then there is a volta or turn at line 9, a shift in thought which is then carried through the next six lines, or sestet. This, to my mind, precludes the repetition of words.

I hope this makes some sort of sense - I am insomniac at the moment!

Clive

[gecian]

I believe slant-rhyme came into fashion in Eng poetry about Yeats's time. Consonance, of course, was Wilfred Owen's contribution to English prosody. Pre-20th cent writers, to the best of my knowledge typically used only full rhymes and eye-rhymes.

The latter were always quite common. Shakespeare's sonnets are full of them, esp love-move-prove.

Actually, Heaney's sonnet from Clearances has an identity/autorhyme:

The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

But it's not a traditional sonnet.

Any device is acceptable (in my view), as long as it helps the poem.

[Howard Miller]

sree--

Let me clarify the intent of my statement:

Harry began this thread in order to provide an answer to questions a number of beginning poets have had about the term "forced rhyme." As a result, the discussion here has focused on what sorts of things beginners should avoid. My response should be taken in that context and not as a universal dictum. All too often in poems by beginning writers one finds identities rather than true rhymes, either because of laziness or a lack of understanding of the proper use of rhyme. Certainly there are other methods of rhyming, as Clive and gecian have correctly pointed out; however, the ability to use those alternative forms effectively--including identity-rhyme--requires considerable knowledge and skill on the part of the poet, and beginning poets almost always lack those abilities in sufficiently-developed form to allow them to use those "advanced" techniques correctly and effectively in ways that further the poem's capacity to communicate with the reader. Just as beginners are frequently told to develop a solid facility with handling basic strict iambic pentameter before venturing into attempting more sophisticated metrical variations, so they need to acquire the ability to work with full rhyme before attempting more sophisticated forms of rhyme.

As for the correct use of identity-rhyme, gecian has cited an excellent example. Another is to be found in the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, where, in ll. 17 & 19, he uses identity-rhyme by repeating "drowning"--the key word to the whole poem as it accurately describes precisely how one dies of mustard-gas poisoning. These are sophisticated uses of identities, however, unlike the bland and pointless repetitions often found in the work of beginners.

Howard

Howard

[This message has been edited by Howard Miller (edited 11-23-2001).]

[Dunc]

gecian - in Shakespeare's day, love / move / prove rhymed. That's why his contemporaries did the same thing - eg Donne's The Canonization rhymes love / improve, approve / love, love / remove, move / love, love / dove (ha!) &c. And Donne's Song [Go and catch a falling star] demonstrates another rhyme correct in its day - 'And find / What wind / Serves to advance an honest mind.' Regards / Dunc

[gecian]

Originally posted by Dunc McReil:
gecian - in Shakespeare's day, love / move / prove rhymed. That's why his contemporaries did the same thing - eg Donne's The Canonization rhymes love / improve, approve / love, love / remove, move / love, love / dove (ha!) &c. And Donne's Song [Go and catch a falling star] demonstrates another rhyme correct in its day - 'And find / What wind / Serves to advance an honest mind.' Regards / Dunc

Thanks. Did they pronounce love as loove or prove as pruv?

Were ALL of them rhymes, though? None/stone, wound(n.)/found, try/virginity, glass/was, dash/wash, haste/fast, pastoral/all (Keats, 19th cent) and so on?

G
guilty of assuming
Shakespeare was a modern

[Clive2]

Gecian, love/prove/move were acceptable sight-rhymes - they pronounced them, I believe, more or less as we do.

Full rhymes, of course, can vary with regional accents. Americans rhyming toward/ford always throws me, as does me rhyming jaw/door, Americans have told me. For Wordsworth matter/water was a full rhyme (water being pronounced "watter" in some Northern English accents).

[gecian]

Thanks, Clive. Actually, that's what I thought (see initial comment): perhaps I misunderstood Dunc.

[Harry Rutherford]

I don't know about the particular example- move/prove/love- but certainly the pronunciation of English has changed significantly in the last 400 years.

The amount of linguistic change tends to be obscured by the fact that, whereas medieval texts are normally printed with the original spelling, early modern texts are usually modernised.

The other danger of citing examples from great poets of the past is that they are not always immune from forced rhyme themselves. Also in Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen, under the pressure of rhyming between English and Latin, comes up with

'...My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desparate glory,
the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.'

While this is a great ending to the poem, and more than justifies itself, it's hard to argue that the rhymes are not rather contrived; particularly 'tell with such high zest'.

And in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats writes-

'Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.'

The use of 'elf' here is clearly stretching the word beyond its natural limits for the sake of the rhyme.

Harry
like I said, rhyming is hard