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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Poetry: Internal Rhyme

We've covered rhyme scheme and rhyme (including assonance, consonance, alliteration, and slant rhyme) but I have yet to tell you about internal rhyme.

It is basically what it sounds like: a rhyme between syllables inside the same line.

The best examples of internal rhyme that I know of come from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

There, you see the word "lonely" in the middle of the line rhymes with the word "only" at the end of the line. This is all over the place in "The Raven," to the point that there develops an internal rhyme scheme, which is a pattern like a regular rhyme scheme, but involving internal rhyme. Complex!

I said "The Raven" has the best examples of internal rhyme, but that isn't entirely true. Go turn on your local hip-hop/rap radio station and pick almost any song. The entire musical genre has wonderful examples of internal rhyme. It can be harder to recognize if you aren't looking at the lyrics written out in lines, because you might just think the lines are very short, and rhyme with each other.

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