This isn't really the type of poetry that NaPoWriMo is about, but it usually gets included in elementary school poetry lessons, so I thought I'd use it for some fun.
They're called Hink Pinks. You get a clue, and you have to come up with the two-word rhyming phrase that fits the clue. They're usually really groan-worthy, too.
What lawyers feel when they lose: brief grief
Hobbies at a convent: nun fun
A rodent's wife: mouse spouse
Yeesh, right? There are also two-syllable versions called Hinky Pinkies, and three-syllable versions called Hinkety Pinketies:
Fruit that needs to shave: hairy berry
Exhausted flower: lazy daisy
Riot among churchgoers: devotion commotion
Ape ships: gorilla flotilla
I told you they were awful. But they're fun!
Showing posts with label rhyme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rhyme. Show all posts
Monday, March 25, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Poetry: Beyond Rhyme
We've already discussed rhyme when we talked about rhyme scheme, but there are other ways to make poetry sound lyrical and "pretty," other than rhyming.
Alliteration refers to several words in quick succession starting with the same sound. Hey, look; I just did it: "starting with the same sound" is an example of alliteration. The words don't have to start with the same letters, since we sometimes spell things differently but pronounce them similarly. (Did you catch the alliteration in that sentence? Beautiful.)
While rhyme usually refers to the ending sound of a line of poetry, assonance appears throughout the line, specifically looking at vowel sounds. An example might be if we see the... ha, there it is. "be if we see the": all of those words contain the same long "e" sound, and therefore give us assonance.
Consonance is similar to assonance in that it appears in the middle of lines of poetry (or prose) but it refers to the ending consonant sounds of words, like, "tip, tap, top." (I don't know why those three words would appear together in a line of poetry; poets and poems can be a bit odd.) These three words all end with the same "p" sound, and combined, are an example of consonance.
There is also something called slant rhyme that basically means you're cheating when trying to rhyme something. Sometimes slant rhyme comes about from translating or updating the language of a poem, or regional differences. For example, if we have a poem with these lines:
We wanted some privacy,
So we went by the sea.
Weird poem. Anyway, an American would pronounce the last word of the first line "PRY-vuh-see." An English person would pronounce it "PRIH-vuh-see," and it wouldn't rhyme as closely with the second line's phrase "by the sea." It would still rhyme, but not as thoroughly.
An American might rhyme "mobile" (like a cell phone... if we were stuck in the 1990s) with "global," whereas an English person would rhyme it with "while" or "tile." So regional differences can causes slant rhyme.
Or, sometimes, it is done on purpose: perhaps because the poet wants to draw attention to a certain pair of lines, or perhaps because s/he cannot come up with a closer rhyme, or rhyme just isn't that important to this poet or poem.
Alliteration refers to several words in quick succession starting with the same sound. Hey, look; I just did it: "starting with the same sound" is an example of alliteration. The words don't have to start with the same letters, since we sometimes spell things differently but pronounce them similarly. (Did you catch the alliteration in that sentence? Beautiful.)
While rhyme usually refers to the ending sound of a line of poetry, assonance appears throughout the line, specifically looking at vowel sounds. An example might be if we see the... ha, there it is. "be if we see the": all of those words contain the same long "e" sound, and therefore give us assonance.
Consonance is similar to assonance in that it appears in the middle of lines of poetry (or prose) but it refers to the ending consonant sounds of words, like, "tip, tap, top." (I don't know why those three words would appear together in a line of poetry; poets and poems can be a bit odd.) These three words all end with the same "p" sound, and combined, are an example of consonance.
There is also something called slant rhyme that basically means you're cheating when trying to rhyme something. Sometimes slant rhyme comes about from translating or updating the language of a poem, or regional differences. For example, if we have a poem with these lines:
We wanted some privacy,
So we went by the sea.
Weird poem. Anyway, an American would pronounce the last word of the first line "PRY-vuh-see." An English person would pronounce it "PRIH-vuh-see," and it wouldn't rhyme as closely with the second line's phrase "by the sea." It would still rhyme, but not as thoroughly.
An American might rhyme "mobile" (like a cell phone... if we were stuck in the 1990s) with "global," whereas an English person would rhyme it with "while" or "tile." So regional differences can causes slant rhyme.
Or, sometimes, it is done on purpose: perhaps because the poet wants to draw attention to a certain pair of lines, or perhaps because s/he cannot come up with a closer rhyme, or rhyme just isn't that important to this poet or poem.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
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.
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.
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