Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'
Edward Lear, 'There was an Old Man with a beard'

Rhyme is heard everywhere — because it works! In advertising jingles, football chants, birthday-card greetings, tabloid headlines, political slogans, catchphrases, and popular poetry, rhyme makes the sentiments more powerful and more memorable. Learn more about the fascinating history of rhyme here...

Rhyme in history

I'm a poet
And I know it.

Rhyme is a basic possibility of language, and must have occurred(if only by chance) in the earliest human speech. It was formalizedearly in Chinese and Arabic poetry, but in the West the idea ofrhyme as a formal characteristic of poetry is relatively recent. Noclassical Hebrew, Greek, or Latin poets normally used rhyme,depending instead on parallel grammar or metres based on vowel-length, while Anglo-Saxon poets used the repetition of vowels orconsonants known as assonance and alliteration. When rhyme was formally organized in the West as a poetic tool, principally in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, it was in part its new and striking audibility that enabled it so rapidly to spread across Europe, first as a poetic vogue, and then as an established norm for lyric verse and song.

Rhyme was able to displace alliteration and assonance because both earlier modes depend on the repetition of individual letters that may occur anywhere in a word, and so do not necessarily connect the meanings of the words in which they occur. Charles Churchill's famous tag in The Prophecy of Famine (1763) about 'apt Alliteration's artful aid' is remembered precisely because it is self-referentially witty, as most alliterative volleys are not. Rhyme, conversely, is based not simply on whole syllables, but on a word's last stressed vowel and all sounds that follow it, so that larger, grammatically significant elements of a word are likely to be involved.

As a formal principle of poetry rhyme thus represented a paradigm shift, one of many during the transition from 'Late Medieval'to 'Renaissance' and 'Early Modern'. Metrically, for example, the new importance of stress signals a shift from classical metres using duration to new metres using accent, and amid such shifts, 'rhyme' and 'rhythm' (both from Greek rhythmos and ultimately rhein, 'to flow') became distinct. Where alliteration or assonance, however rhythmic, link words only lightly within a line, relying on single sounds without individual meaning, rhyme, by linking multiple syllables (usually) in distinct lines, binds much larger parcels of sense. It is also an intrinsically complex phenomenon, interacting with spelling, poetry's distinctive use of lines, and regional accents, and richly invites variation, while alliteration or assonance can only shift from letter to letter. Rhyme thus helped poets and singers to organize, learn, and present their material, and helped readers or audiences to understand and remember it: a powerful and distinct resource, as Oscar Wilde insisted in calling rhyme "the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre".

His 'we' is more dubious. The immediate sources of Western rhyme were Arabic poetry, in which various kinds of rhyme had been used since at least the 8th century CE, and perhaps some Celtic poetry; the primary European distribution system was the Troubadours, Provençal poet-musicians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who travelled and corresponded across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor. Traces of Late Mediaeval rhyme are as widespread as their contacts, but once rhyme had been adopted (via the 'Sicilian school' at the court of Frederic II Hohenstaufen in Palermo) by the great Italian poets Dante (Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321) and above all Petrarch (Francisco Petrarca, 1304-74), a massive and decisive secondary distribution began, initially in manuscript, then in print also,through the pan-European cultural and educational movement known as Humanism. Though exact dating is contested and uncertain, the 'Gawain-Poet in the mid-late fourteenth century probably represents the first English sign of Petrarch's influence: Sir Gawain and the Grene Knyght itself has a rhyming 'wheel' ending its alliterative stanzas, and the notorious formal complexity of Pearl (preserved in the same manuscript) arises precisely from combining rhyme with alliteration. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1344-1400), writing at the same time, was rarely so elaborate, but his Canterbury Tales established rhyming couplets as a narrative mode, while Troylus and Criseyde did as much for complex stanzas; shorter lyric verse, like the songs to which it is close, was already there. The older traditions of blank or unrhymed verse still prospered towards their dramatic flowering in Shakespeare and his fellows, but new traditions of rhymed verse rapidly joined them as normative within both folk and elite poetic cultures.

Notwithstanding some bad-tempered outbursts, like Milton's famous jibe in the 1667 Preface to Paradise Lost about 'the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming', rhymed and blank verse co-existed happily until the early twentieth century. Poetic tastes swung this way and that, but no one seriously thought less of Pope or Tennyson for rhyming, nor of Wordsworth or Browning for using blank verse. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, some Modernists began to proclaim the supposed death of rhyme and other formal devices. Patently, with Modernism and the birth of free verse, a new energy infused and transformed theblank tradition; equally patently, neither rhyme nor other formaldevices were wholly absent even from High Modernism (think of T.S. Eliot or e. e. cummings), and both within and around Modernism rhyme flowed unabated, in W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and a hundred more. The 'New Formalism' announced by critics in the 1980s was certainly a reaction against the formlessness of some (late) Modernist work, but even so, it was not in any serious sense new, and in practice the augmented blank and rhyming traditions continue, now as then, to co-exist to their mutual benefit.

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