What rhyme is
Rhyme is the matching of sounds, usually at the ends of words. Words rhyme when their final stressed vowel sound and whatever follows it are the same, such as cat and mat, or loud and proud.
Rhyme depends on sound, not spelling. Fly and eye rhyme although they are spelt differently, while love and move look alike but do not rhyme in modern English. Some older poems also contain rhymes that no longer match because pronunciation has changed since they were written.
Poets use rhyme to give a poem music, to link ideas, and to mark the shape of a stanza.
Rhyme schemes with examples
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes in a stanza or poem. To find it, give each new end sound a letter, starting with A. Lines that rhyme share a letter.
AA BB CC (couplets)
In this pattern, lines rhyme in consecutive pairs. The first two lines rhyme (AA), the next two rhyme with each other (BB), and so on. Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism uses rhyming couplets:
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, (A) As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. (A)
The nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Jane Taylor also begins with a couplet:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, (A) How I wonder what you are! (A)
ABAB (alternate rhyme)
The first and third lines rhyme, and so do the second and fourth. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 opens with an ABAB quatrain:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (A) Thou art more lovely and more temperate: (B) Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (A) And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; (B)
ABBA (enclosed rhyme)
The outer lines rhyme with each other, enclosing a rhymed pair. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is written in stanzas like this one:
I hold it true, whate’er befall; (A) I feel it, when I sorrow most; (B) ’Tis better to have loved and lost (B) Than never to have loved at all. (A)
AABA (and chained rhyme)
Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” uses an AABA pattern in each stanza:
Whose woods these are I think I know. (A) His house is in the village though; (A) He will not see me stopping here (B) To watch his woods fill up with snow. (A)
The unrhymed third line in each stanza supplies the rhyme for the next stanza, which links the stanzas together like a chain. The opening line also reorders normal word order, a device called hyperbaton.
Types of rhyme with examples
End rhyme
Words at the ends of lines rhyme. Frost’s “Fire and Ice” begins:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.
and later returns to “fire” with the rhyme word “desire”. All the examples in the section above are end rhyme.
Internal rhyme
A word inside a line rhymes with another word in the same line or a nearby one. Poe’s “The Raven” opens with it:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Here “dreary” in the middle of the line rhymes with “weary” at its end.
Slant (near) rhyme
Slant rhyme, also called near or half rhyme, uses words that share some sounds but not all. Emily Dickinson often used it. In “Hope is the thing with feathers”, the words “soul” and “all” echo each other without matching perfectly:
That perches in the soul – And never stops – at all –
The opening stanza of “Because I could not stop for Death” pairs “me” with “Immortality”, which readers also commonly describe as a near rhyme.
Masculine and feminine rhyme
- Masculine rhyme matches a single stressed syllable at the end: light and night.
- Feminine rhyme matches a stressed syllable followed by one or more unstressed syllables: flying and dying. “Dreary” and “weary” in Poe’s line are a feminine pair.
Famous rhyming poems
- “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Jane Taylor
- “The Tyger” by William Blake (rhyming couplets)
- “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
- “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
- “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
- Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
- “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
- “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“’Twas the night before Christmas”), traditionally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore
- An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope
Comparing the rhyme patterns of two of these is a useful exercise. The comparison poem examples explain how to set out that kind of comparison.
Words that rhyme with “best”
Poets writing with “best” as a rhyme word have many perfect rhymes to choose from:
- rest, test, nest, west, chest, guest, quest, crest, zest, jest, vest
- past-tense forms with the same ending sound: blessed, dressed, pressed, guessed, impressed
Longer words with the same ending can also work, such as request, contest and suggest. A quick test is to say both words aloud and check that the final stressed vowel and what follows it match.
Try it: label the rhyme scheme
Label the end rhymes in each short poem below. These poems were written for this page.
Poem 1
The sun goes down behind the hill, The birds fly home across the sky, The evening air is calm and still, And day says one more soft goodbye.
Poem 2
I saw a cat upon the mat, It wore a very funny hat. It sipped its tea and read the news, Then stretched out for a nap in shoes.
Poem 3
Winter spreads its quiet snow, Silver stars above us gleam, Children sleep and softly dream, While the chimney embers glow.
Answers: Poem 1 is ABAB (hill/still, sky/goodbye). Poem 2 is AABB (mat/hat, news/shoes). Poem 3 is ABBA (snow/glow, gleam/dream).
Related reading
Rhyme is only one part of how a poem sounds and what it means; refrains such as “Nevermore” are covered in repetition in literature. For another element, see how point of view poem examples change the way a poem is heard, or look at how poets echo earlier work in intertextuality poem examples.