Poetry: Rhyme Schemes

As promised on Monday, here are the answers to my mini-quiz on meter:


dactylic hexameter (six dactylic feet (S U U) per line)
trochaic octameter (eight trochaic feet (S U) per line)
iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet (U S) per line)

Today we're looking at rhyme scheme, which focuses on the last syllable(s) of each line in comparison to each other.

If you studied poetry in school (and didn't we all sit through that) you probably remember writing letters at the end of each line of a rhyming poem to indicate a rhyme scheme. Example:

I saw in the kitchen a cat so large,
It was truly bigger than a barge;
The Kitchen Lion, it was named,
And my roommate it had completely maimed.

(Really dark poetry about the Kitchen Lion.) So what you would do to determine the rhyme scheme of this poem is to start with "A" on the first line. The "A" represents rhyming with "large." Any other line that ends in a sound that rhymes with "large" would get an "A." That means the second line, ending with "barge," gets an "A" for rhyming with "large."

The third line's last word, "named," does not rhyme with "large" and "barge" so it does not get an "A." Instead, it gets a "B," which will now represent rhyming with "named." The fourth line ends with "maimed," which rhymes with "named," so it also gets a "B."

So this is what our poem would look like:

I saw in the kitchen a cat so large,     (A)
It was truly bigger than a barge;        (A)
The Kitchen Lion, it was named,       (B)
And my roommate it had completely maimed.   (B)

So the rhyme scheme of my sad little poem about the Kitchen Lion is AABB. These are called couplets, when two lines in a row rhyme with each other, then the next two lines rhyme with each other, and so on. There are also triplets, which are exactly like couplets, but in groups of three lines instead of two lines. (AAABBBCCC...)

Alternate rhyme is an ABABCDCD pattern, like in this example:

He had eaten the bread,
And eaten the fruit.
He ate my roommate's head,
And his freshly pressed suit.

Morbid, and in alternate rhyme.

Rhyme schemes can be fairly simple, like the examples above. They get more complicated, like AABA (rubaiyat), or limericks (AABBA) or ABABB (a cinquain). But then they can also get a little crazy. A fire-and-ice stanza (named after the poem "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost) has the rhyme scheme ABAABCBCB. A rhyme royal is ABABBCC. A terza rima is ABA BCB CDC... until you get to the end, and you have YZY ZZ or YZY ZYZ.