Comic Rhyme

Melissa Balmain, who wrote this page for the Light Verse Resource Center, has contributed to Light Quarterly and The Formalist.

Head Rhyme: Rhymes at the beginnings of lines (Manic on Wednesday/Panic on Thursday—Martin Bell)

End Rhyme: Rhymes at the ends of lines ("Unfailingly my photograph/Is one at which observers laugh"—Richard Armour)

Interior Rhyme: Rhymes of a syllable in the middle of one line and a syllable at the end of another; or between two syllables in the same line. (The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea—Shel Silverstein)

Wrenched Rhyme: Rhymes that depend on distorted spelling or pronunciation (Lennox/calisthenox; ulcer/Tulsa; vicissitudes/eccentricitudes—Ogden Nash)

Evaluating Rhyme

    What makes a comic rhyme work? For the most part, the same elements that make any rhyme work. Prosody manuals are full of admonitions against rhymes that seem hackneyed or predictable (June/moon, trees/breeze, poet/know it). Variety in rhyme is also key. Poet Timothy Steele, in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, writes: "Since rhymes please most when the words involved make unexpected yet persuasive connections between ideas, objects, and qualities, good rhymers often match different grammatical categories—nouns with verbs, verbs with adjectives, adverbs with nouns, and so forth."
    Other thoughts from mavens of rhyme:

• Rhymes—even when surprising—should seem logical in the context of a poem, rather than random or desperate.

• Word order is crucial to rhyme.  Sometimes the more-contrived word or combination in a rhyming pair belongs first, as in Armour’s glamour a/camera or McGinley’s assail her/Lord & Taylor. This makes the rhyme seem less forced.  On the other hand, consider Byron’s famed intellectual/henpeck’d you all or  Oliver Wendell Holmes’s mahogany/jog any.  If such rhymes were reversed, with the mosaic combo coming first, it would "give the reader the answer before the question, and … let him down rather than lift him up," wrote Armour in Writing Light Verse and Prose Humor.

            • When words with different numbers of syllables are rhymed—use/papoose; mope/cantaloupe—it adds aural and visual spice.

            • Rhyming pairs should carry thematic or emotional weight in the poem. "The more this strategy is adopted, the more powerful the rhymes’ effect will be," writes poet Dick Davis.  "The less it is observed, the more the rhyme will seem incidental, tagged on, an awkward afterthought, or simply a place to display incompetence.  For this reason, nouns and verbs usually make the most effective rhymes."

            • Poets rhyme too often on the "ee" sound, which Davis calls "the easiest sound to rhyme on in English."

            • Unless a poem is the work of Ogden Nash, it’s rarely improved by wrenched rhyme. "One is not likely to achieve [Nash’s] special blend of freewheeling thought and uninhibited expression—which takes more talent and craftsmanship than at first appears," Armour wrote.  "And what if one should?  It would almost certainly mean being branded an imitator."

            • Rhymes shouldn’t rely on skewed syntax. "In my opinion, inverting natural word order to achieve a rhyme is the most common offense," writes poet Bob McKenty in his newsletter Lighten Up! He illustrates that point in a poem titled "Avoid Inversions in Your Verse":

                        Avoid inversions in your verse;
                        Of novice poets they’re the curse.
                        For rhymes their souls they would exchange,
                        Word order freely rearrange
                        Their rhyming to accommodate
                        Like early English poets great.
                        They’ll gladly place (to grammar blind)
                        An adjective its noun behind,
                        Or (pity patient Listener)
                        A verb till sentence end defer
                        Like Latin scholars full of scit.
                        But that’s for muse museums. It
                        Diminishes the poet’s art
                        To place before the horse the cart.

• Words with varied spellings, such as ease/sneeze and whale/grail, tend to please the reader.  But homophones like pair/pear and chute/shoot, which offer no interest to the ear, do not.

• Full rhymes are best.  "Serious poets," wrote Armour, can get away with eye rhymes—words that look alike but sound different, such as love/prove and war/star.  They can use near rhyme.  "But light verse," he went on, "unsupported by high thought and strong emotion, cannot afford such approximate and partial rhyming.  The average reader wants and expects, in light verse, rhymes that are accurate and complete."  Critics may disagree with Armour’s claim that comic poetry can’t be based on high thought or strong emotion.  (A thorough reading of, say, Dorothy Parker or Wendy Cope certainly suggests that it can.)  Still, it’s true that light-verse writers tend to prefer full rhymes.

            • The "rules" of rhyme are made to be broken—especially in light verse.  For instance, as Davis points out, "rhyming on semantically trivial words, especially with lots of run-on lines, can give an impression of garrulity, or of a kind of throwaway insouciance."  And as Lewis Turco notes in The New Book of Forms, "It is possible for trite rhymes to be used in original and interesting ways."

For information scattered throughout this page, many thanks go to Timothy Steele and his excellent prosody book All The Fun’s in How You Say a Thing.

© 2004 Melissa Balmain, special to the Light Verse Resource Center