In the next line it "whispers through the trees;"
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep."

Hackneyed rimes such as love: dove; poet: know it; bower: flower; soil: toil; fair: hair, which give a very commonplace tone to a poem, are to be avoided.

In contemporary poetry there is a tendency toward slight variations in rime. Such poets as William Butler Yeats and Wilfred Scawen Blunt feel that perfect rimes are too easy, and that most of the interesting combinations of them have been already used too much. They find a particular charm in the echoes and suggestions of rime in such work as the following:

When I hear others speak of this and that

In our fools' lives which might have better gone,
Complaining idly of too niggard fate

And wishing still their senseless past undone,
I feel a childish tremor through me run,
Stronger than reason, lest by some far chance
Fate's ear to our sad plaints should yet be won
And these our lives be thrown back on our hands.
I tremble when I think of my past years,
My hopes, my aims, my wishes. All these days
I might have wandered far from love and thee.
But kind fate held me, heedless of my prayers,
A prisoner to its wise mysterious ways,

And forced me to thy feet-ah fortunate me!

(W. S. Blunt: Love Sonnets of Proteus, IV.)

Emily Dickinson's fondness for imperfect rimes is part of the strange fragmentary suggestiveness of her style.

There are a few words in English that have no exact rimes. Persons who delight in writing letters to the newspapers, from time to time triumphantly announce that they have found mates for some of them, but these are always imperfect and rather useless rimes. Such words are, April,

August, chimney, coif, crimson,3 forest, microcosm, month, nothing, open, orange, rhomb, scarce, scarf, silver, statue, squirrel, temple, widow, window.

Rime is not only a musical embellishment to verse, but a very useful aid as well. It gives the listener the pleasure of expectancy in the recurrence of sounds according to a definite scheme. It helps him remember verses more easily. It defines the metrical pattern of a form so that the listener may know at once whether to expect tetrameter or pentameter or octameter as a recurring meter. In this way arrangements of rimes make a great number of stanza forms possible and add enormously to variety in verse.

A further possibility of the use of rime is to bring out emphatically the important words of a poem. Tennyson's St. Agnes' Eve, one of the most perfect poems in the language, is a fine illustration of this. Here is the second stanza:

As these white robes are soil'd and dark,

To yonder shining ground;

As this pale taper's earthly spark,

To yonder argent round;

So shows my soul before the Lamb,

My spirit before thee,

So in mine earthly house I am,

To that I hope to be.

Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,

Thro' all yon starlight keen,

Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,

In raiment white and clean.

Byron's Isles of Greece furnishes another example of emphasis through rime:

The mountains look on Marathon

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dream'd that Greece might still be free;

See below, p. 92, Browning's rime for crimson.

For standing on the Persians' grave,

I could not deem myself a slave.

These two instances show also the possibilities of antithesis in the terminal words. Pope, the great master of antithesis and epigram, with consummate art made his rimes serve his purpose:

But when his own great work is but begun
What reason weaves, by passion is undone

Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his work unite:
These 'tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes man can man destroy?
(Essay on Man, II.)

The most constant use of antithesis in Pope is in the single line, between the word before the cesura and the rime word,

e. g.

Alike in what it gives and what denies ..

All are parts of one stupendous whole...
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.

(Essay on Man, I.)

Two principles in human nature reign,

Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain.

(Essay on Man, II.)

If the poet does not choose to make use of the emphasis of rime, he may rime the less important words, and phrase the passage so that the rime is scarcely evident. In Keats's Endymion it has become an ornament only apparent to an ear very sensitive to rime. Many persons are quite familiar with Browning's My Last Duchess without realizing that it is written in rimed couplets:

That is my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive I call

That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolph's hands
Worked busily a day and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolph" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance...

...

Sometimes the useful functions of rime-its use in the architectonics of a poem-are subordinate to the desire for musical embellishment. Internal rime is a case of this. The use of an internal rime in the following selections is more for musical effect than for emphasis of the thought.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;-vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the fair and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
Nameless here for evermore.

(Poe: Raven.)

We stood there enchanted-and O the delight of
The sight of the stars and the moon and the sea
And the infinite skies of that opulent night of
Purple and gold and ivory.

(J. W. Riley: Moon Drowned.)

Beside discussing the uses and purpose of rime we may say something of its possible arrangements. Rimes are commonly arranged in pairs, or couplets (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.), or else alternately (abab). There may be variations and combinations of these two principles, such as, ababab; ababcc; aabcbc; abababcc, etc. In quatrains, alternate lines are sometimes left unrimed, thus, xaya. When the poet uses a rime scheme that is more complicated than those mentioned, he must remember that rimes cannot be easily recognized when more than three lines intervene, unless these lines should be couplets, or a quatrain.

The sestet of Rossetti's sonnet, House of Life, LXXI, The Choice, is an example. The rime scheme is abccba:

Now kiss and think that there are really those,
My own high-bosomed beauty, who increase

Vain gold, vain love, and yet might choose one way!
Through many years they toil; then on a day
They die not,-for their life was death,-but cease;
And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.

Other possible schemes would be abcbca and abbcca. The effect of this last may be heard in the following seven line stanza:

Let no man ask thee anything

Not year-born between Spring and Spring.
More of all worlds than he can know,

Each day the simple sun doth show:
O trustier gloss than thou canst give
From all wise scrolls demonstrative,
The sea doth sigh and the wind sing.

(Rossetti: Soothsay.)

This echoing of a rime already satisfied (anything: Spring: sing) is called tail rime. It is very common in stanzas of five or more lines.

For a study of exquisitely interwoven rimes the odes of Keats are admirable examples. The Ode on a Grecian Urn has for its rime scheme, ababcdedce:

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,