Today's blog poem by Amy Lowell, "A Little Song," uses end rhyme. When Lowell was writing, end rhyme was the norm. However, this was changing--free verse was starting to become the dominant form. (My end rhyme here was unintentional. I am leaving it in!) Lowell wrote in the old traditional way and the new (ish--this is post-Whitman, et al) unrhymed free verse. Her contemporaries tended to write in one way or the other, but she managed both.
If you want to read one of her free verse poems, look up "Patterns," which is my favorite Amy Lowell poem. In one class where I taught this poem, a student counted all of the patterns within the poem; I believe she counted 56.
Except when writing in certain forms (villanelle, sonnet, etc.), end rhyme has still not come back. It is clear why--much poetry written in rhyme tends to be sing-song-y. But there are other ways to add rhyme into your poem.
So this week's challenge is to write a poem that uses internal rhyme. But there's more!
Use the words for your internal rhyme that Lowell used for her end rhyme. Go read her poem to see how she used these words and then refer to the list below for your poem.
away, day
night, light
Moon, boon
sun, run
air, hair
down, town
Moon, noon
day, stay
song, long
lights, nights
Commentaires