Rhyming Schemes

Rhyming schemes:  Rhyming couplets is not the only rhyming scheme.  Here are two examples of  different rhyming patterns.

Read the last two verses – stanzas -  of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Love’s Philosophy 

See the mountains kiss high heavens

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister flower would be forgiven

If it disdain’d its brother:

And the sunlight clasps the earth

And the moonbeams kiss the sea –

What are all those kisses worth

If thou kiss not me?

Here we can see that lines  1 & 3 rhyme  ( heavens /forgiven; earth/worth)  while lines 2 & 4 rhyme ( another/brother; sea /me).  If the first line is line A and the second line is line B,  the rhyming pattern can be  expressed as ABAB.

 Wendy Cope’s Bloody Men has a different rhyming scheme:

Bloody men are like bloody buses-

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You’re trying to read their destinations,

You haven’t much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back

Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by,

And the minutes, the hours, the days.

Here the rhyming scheme is ABCB to reflect the fact that lines 2 & 4 rhyme, while lines 1 & 3 do not. This is a very common rhyming pattern.

The rhymes we have looked at so far are end rhymes – so called because they come at the end of a line. This is the most common form of rhyme in English poetry but we also have internal rhymes. For example,

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

And doesn’t now where to find them

Leave them alone and they’ll come home

Wagging their tails behind them

Here you can see that the ends of line do not rhyme at all, but that rhyme occurs within a line.