Rhyme and Free Verse

1. Rhyme and Free Verse

2. Types of Rhyme • End rhyme • Internal rhyme • Half rhyme

3. End Rhyme • occurs at the end of verse lines • is the most common rhyme form • Example: • Now my days are lonely, And night drives me wild, In my heart I’m crying, I’m just Miss Blue’es child! (Langston Hughes)

4. Internal Rhyme • occurs within a line of a verse • Example: • The splendor falls on the castle walls And snowy summits old in story; And long light shakes across the lakes And the wild cataract leaps in glory. (Lord Tennyson)

5. Half Rhyme • also known as near rhyme • occurs when the rhyme is imperfect and approximate, rather than “dead on” • Example: • I was the slightest in the House-- I took the smallest room-- At night, my little Lamp, my Book-- And one Geranium. (Emily Dickenson)

6. How do we recognize rhyme patterns? • We use rhyme scheme! • …a type of letter pattern. For example: • I laid me down upon a bank, (A) Where Love lay sleeping; (B) I heard among the rushes dank (A) Weeping, weeping. (B) (William Blake)

7. What about… I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. (William Wadsworth)

8. Try this one, too! In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests as ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

9. What is free verse? • poetry that does not conform to any type of meter or rhyme scheme