In the pursuit of writing poetry, beginners in the craft often find themselves hung up on one particular element: the rhyme. This hang up appears in two dread forms: obsession and abandon.
To those with an obsession, forget your obsession. Perfect rhyme is unnecessary. Poems hung up on dainty end-rhymes are the refuse that fertilize the fields of Hallmark and American Greetings. Heavy structuring with perfect rhymes, while hard-wrought and well won when done well, are also inhibiting. Know the limits of your vocabulary and break free from this rigidity.
To those suffering from apathetic abandonment of the rhyme altogether, those who relish in free verse poetry, with multiple indentations and queer bolds and italics, take a step back. You may not be a good, decent, fair, anything-more-than-downright-poor rhymewright, but you are writing poetry, and poetry is about sound and substance. Discover how words work together.
Your three best friends in working with words are the following fine fellows: alliteration, assonance, and consonance. These are three kinds of sidelining rhyme not often recognized but always immensely appreciated.
Alliteration
Alliteration is the effect generated when a bunch of words begin with the same sound. This ties a series of words together, but beware! It also becomes extremely annoying. Observe:
Cats couple, counting costly coinage.
Cute, but irritating. Too much alliteration becomes problematic, but break it up, spread the sounds out, or combine two and you’re in a sweet place. For example:
The cats couple there, thinly counting their costly coinage.
Much better, right? While counting something thinly may not be an everyday idiom, the point is that this device can connect words, and by extension sentences, stanzas, entire epics with the appropriate distribution, and your lines don’t need to end in rhymes.
See how lines and rhymes sound sort of the same? Queue the segue to assonance.
Assonance
Assonance is the result of two like-sounding vowels. Not two like vowels, but like-sounding. Even though the consonants are totally different in rhyme and line, the long I sound unites them, as other sounds unite bill and win, man and fat, lust and muck. These may seem like stretches of the imagination, but in reality they help to bring a poem together as well as alliteration. Again, assonance can, in excess, become annoying, though admittedly not as annoying as alliteration. Take a look at the annoying version:
Cats can have bad backs.
Then, split it up and add in a second layer for a smoothing effect:
Cats, in fact, will have bad bits.
Now you’re on your way to good, nice to read and easy to hear poetry.
Consonance
Assonance’s opposite is consonance, which is the same idea as assonance, but substituting consonants for vowels. Throw a number of Ss into a line, with all different words and vowel sounds, and there will remain an unspoken, understated harmony similar to that demonstrated above. It works for any consonant:
Will idly listens till leaving Albany, lamenting all.
Not as annoying as its two cousins, but still a bit intrusive, so mix it up:
Will is idly listening still as leaving Albany’s misty ills.
Putting in an S, and beyond that the tighter St’s, keeps the line moving and tightly-knit.
Blend these three elements together, and you get an amazing slam of poetic language, which, with a pinch of substance, will have your audience enthralled. Take my favorite example from the Barenaked Ladies’ song "What a Let Down" ( from the album Barenaked Ladies are Me, 2007, Desperation Records [lyrics source]):
Even if I let this settle, it'll lead to a little fight
Even when I get to meddlin' I need to remain polite
I could cut across this field but it hits pretty close to home
Maybe if I jiggle it a little it'll open up on its own
Benjamin Royce Jaekle - Benjamin Jaekle is a cum laude graduate of the State University of New York at Brockport. He writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays, ...
