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Angela has taught middle and high school English, Business English and Speech for nine years. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology and has earned her teaching license.
When you think of poetry, what is the first thing that comes to mind? For many people it is the sing-song aspect of poems, of which rhyme is a major factor. Rhyme occurs when two or more words repeat the same sound.
There are many types of rhyme. Perhaps the most obvious is called masculine rhyme. Masculine rhyme occurs when the rhyme is on the final syllable of the two rhyming words. In one syllable words, masculine rhyme is easy to identify. For example, book and cook are only one syllable, and the repetition is the vowel sound ending with the k sound.
However, masculine rhyme can also occur in multi-syllable words. In the pair, decays and days, the rhyme is still on the final syllable of decays and the only syllable in days. Look at one final pair: disdain and complain. Both are two syllable words, and the rhyme occurs on the second syllable with the sound -ain. However, in order for multi-syllable words to have masculine rhyme, the stress must be on the final syllable as well. This means that words that stress the first syllable of the word cannot have masculine rhyme. For example, water and banter are multi-syllable words ending with the same sound. However, both these words stress the first syllable. Therefore, the two do not have masculine rhyme.
Poets use rhyme as a means to create sound patterns in their works. These patterns often either create a specific audio effect on the reader, or can be used to emphasize a message from the author. Masculine rhyme also serves those purposes. Often masculine rhyme occurs in the final words of lines in poems and thus links those lines together to create a specific sound or to stress a concept. Let's look at some examples in poetry. Read these two lines by A. E. Housman:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
The words showing masculine rhyme are now and bough. These are easy lines to see how a poet can use masculine rhyme to link lines. The thought is not complete in the first line and the reader must continue to discover the true meaning, which is that Housman is appreciating a lovely cherry tree in bloom.
Here's another example of masculine rhyme used in the first four lines of Alexander Pope's poem 'An Essay on Criticism:'
But most by numbers judge a poet's song;
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
In the bright muse though thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire;
The final words of each line are great examples of masculine rhyme. The one-syllable word pair, song and wrong, are obvious examples, but there is also the two-syllable word pair conspire and admire. In this last pair, note how the rhyme occurs in the last syllable with the sound -ire and that those are the stressed syllables as well. In addition, you can see how Pope uses the rhyme to connect his ideas. The first two lines discuss readers judging a poem based on how smooth or rough the sound is. The third and fourth lines center on the muse for poems, which is usually an admirable woman.
These excerpts from poems show how authors can use rhyme to their advantage, specifically, how masculine rhyme can be used to create sounds and link ideas.
Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds in different words. One type is masculine rhyme, which occurs when the rhyme is in the stressed final syllable of the words. Some examples include fair and compare, dog and log, and collect and direct. Poets use masculine rhyme to create specific sound patterns and to link lines as a means to help emphasize their message or theme.
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