Stephen Fry on Rhyme, Part 3
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 2, Section 3, on rhyme.
This section of the chapter talked a lot about bad rhymes, which might be better called “forced” rhymes. The words technically do rhyme, but by only using rhyming words, you sometimes have to force a line of poetry into a strange shape to make it work. This is definitely something I’ve run into with my own writing.
There’s a lot of looking at Victorian era poems with some really torturous lines, forced into those weird shapes so they work within the rhyme scheme the poet came up with. And even in the good examples, there can be weird things like a stanza that uses “them” as the rhyming word across three lines. That one seems like a bit of a cheat to me. It’s one thing to use the same word with different meanings (and that can be super clever when it works), and another thing entirely to use the same word with the same meaning as a “rhyme.”
The exercise in this section involved coming up with a list of words that rhymes with “girl” and a second list that rhymes with “martyr.” I managed to come up with six for the former and nine for the latter. A secondary exercise is to make a list of twenty words by looking or wandering around whatever space you’re in, and then making lists of words that rhyme with each of those.
Fry also talks about rhyming dictionaries and their usefulness, and this is where I disagree with him. He finds them unwieldy and prefers to just talk through potential rhymes aloud. Me? I prefer RhymeZone. Yeah, it sometimes gives you odd options, but it’s pretty solid! And in that first exercise, a quick peek at RhymeZone gave me three more good possibilities for each list that I’d missed in trying to do it based on what I could think of. As with most tools, your mileage may vary, but I love it!
Next up is a longer chapter on form, which obviously won’t get to all the forms, but it looks like it hits some of the most common ones!
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