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To rhyme or not to rhyme, that is the question!

ACTIVITY 1

Match each of the lyrics below with the relevant type of rhyme. Choose from:

  • absent: no rhyme.
  • assonant: rhyming vowel sounds.
  • rhyming couplet: a rhyming pair of successive lines.
  • triplet: three successive lines that follow the same rhyme.
  • slant: words that have similar, but not identical sounds. Most slant rhymes are formed by words with identical consonants.
  • internal: rhyme within the same line (as opposed to an end rhyme when the last syllables of the lines are the ones that match).
  • thorn lines: most lines follow some sort of rhyme but there is one line that does not.
  • perfect: when two words match exactly in sound.
  • imperfect: when words sound nearly alike, but not exactly. 

1. Proper, ‘Jean’

“And the last time we spoke I was chasing you down for money you owed
I don’t have a rhyme for this, I’m just ashamed“

2. The Cure, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’

“I would break down at your feet
And beg forgiveness, plead with you
But I know that it’s too late
And now there’s nothing I can do”

3. Taylor Swift, ‘willow’

“The more that you say
The less I know
Wherever you stray
I follow”

4. Proper, ‘Jean’

“You should’ve turned 30 this year
You should’ve been pursuing an art career
Would’ve made a great civil engineer”

5. Machine Gun Kelly, ‘Twin Flame’

“So take me anywhere outside
I cannot kiss you yet, you’re magic
So I’ll just stare at you instead
I get insecure and panic”

6. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘driver’s license’

“I got my driver’s license last week
Just like we always talked about
‘Cause you were so excited for me
To finally drive up to your house
But today I drove through the suburbs
Crying ’cause you weren’t around”

7. Kittie, ‘Spit’

“I think I’ll spit
For all those girls
Who speak contradiction
The guy who crept through the shadows every day”

8. Ava Max, ‘Kings & Queens’

“If all of the kings had their queens on the throne
We would pop champagne and raise a toast”

9. Taylor Swift, ‘dorothea’

“Ooh, you’re a queen selling dreams
selling make up and magazines”

10. LOLO & Maggie Lindemann, ‘Debbie Downer‘

“Drain a bottle straight to the face doing hot shit
She’s at the show front row throwing up in the moshpit”

11. HIM, ‘Salt In Our Wounds’

“Here we are
In the maelstrom of love
Waiting for the calm
To soothe our hearts”

ACTIVITY 2

Read the section from Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘poem’ below.

  1. Look at the rhyme: ‘magic’ and ‘panic’. Do these words feel like they belong together? Why? Why not?
  2. What about the ‘outside’/’instead’ pairing. Why don’t these words rhyme? What’s the effect of this kind of ABAC structure?
  3. Taking all the above into account, how is Machine Gun Kelly feeling and how does his use of rhyme emphasise those feelings?

After you’ve thought this through for yourself, you could check out my ideas at the bottom of this page.

Machine Gun Kelly: Twin Flame

So take me anywhere outside
I cannot kiss you yet, you’re magic
So I’ll just stare at you instead
I get insecure and panic

ACTIVITY 3

Sometimes, a poet will write a poem that doesn’t rhyme at all. The two lines from ‘Jean’ below, for example, do not rhyme. 

  1. Why does the poet – clearly deliberately – decide not to use rhyme?
  2. What kind of mood or feeling might a rhyme suggest that would not feel appropriate here?

After you’ve thought this through for yourself, you could check out my ideas at the bottom of this page.

Proper: jean

And the last time we spoke I was chasing you down for money you owed
I don’t have a rhyme for this, I’m just ashamed

Now, listen to what Erik had to say to Sound of Pen about his own use of rhyme.

ACTIVITY 4

Now, analyse lyrics 6-9 & 11 (Olivia Rodrigo, Kittie, Ava Max, Taylor Swift & HIM) from the list you explored during the first activity. What is the effect of the rhyme – or lack of rhyme? Write some notes or have a go at putting together whole paragraphs. There are some model paragraphs below to get a sense of what we’re trying to do with our rhyme analysis. Note how the paragraphs start with close analysis of the language, then links to the use of rhyme:

Compare and contrast the significance of female oppression in ‘Spit’ and ‘Kings and Queens’.

The contrast between the poets’ attitudes towards the men responsible for female oppression and the women who have suffered that oppression is marked. These men lurk in the ‘shadows’ – once again highlighting the oppression they have enforced upon women as a product of darkness and evil. Forces for good don’t typically live in the shadows, they are out in the light, sitting up on Ava Max’s ‘thrones’. The absence of rhyme within ‘Spit’ really illustrates Kittie’s contempt for those responsible for female oppression. On one hand, it represents Kittie’s extreme anger. Their emotions are raging so of course there is no regular rhyme scheme; the way the world works is beyond reason and to try to suggest that anything rhymes – that anything ‘fits’ – would be ridiculous. Ava Max’s assonant rhyme feels just as purposeful, though. It’s as if she can see the potential for a world that ‘fits’. There’s a rhyme hidden in there somewhere. It’s not perfect yet, but we’re closer in 2020 (when ‘Kings and Queens’ was written) than we were in 2000 (when ‘Spit’ was written). That assonant sound feels too like a cry from the darkness, a woman shouting from those shadows the men have tried to drape them in. The more women that shout – and the more of us that hear and understand what the shouts mean – the closer we’ll be to ending the female oppression that both of these poems want to consign to the past.

Read below to see what the incredibly talented Daisy wrote. Take special note of her last few sentences because it’s in that section that she starts to weave her thoughts on rhyme into the argument. You can either dive straight into the rhyme analysis or build up to it as Daisy does.

ACTIVITY 5

Sometimes a rhyme just sounds great because it’s fun, original and takes you by surprise. This LOLO/Lindemann poem makes use of exactly that kind of rhyme. What other comments could you make about the type of rhyme used in ‘debbie downer’?

After you’ve thought this through for yourself, you could check out my ideas at the bottom of this page.

LOLO & Maggie Lindemann: Debbie Downer

Drain a bottle straight to the face doing hot shit
She’s at the show front row throwing up in the moshpit

ACTIVITY 6

Now, write your own poem!

Write about what you want – or choose from the below:

  1. A poem about the female position.
  2. A poem about something you regret.
  3. A poem about having a good time / doing something you enjoy.
  4. A poem about someone you would like to have a relationship with – or someone you have just started a relationship with.
  5. A poem about male stereotypes.

When planning, make a list of some words you love – maybe they’ll be words specific to an activity you get up to in your own time (e.g. I cycle every weekend to the museum on my BMX / ‘Cause I love dinosaurs especially the T-Rex). Try coming up with a selection of rhyming couplets. You could even challenge yourself to throw in an extra internal rhyme (like ‘show’ and ‘row’) to keep things sounding especially bubbly!

Notes

Before moving onto the final poetry writing exercise, you might want to scan through some of the ideas we had regarding some the poems we’ve explored over the course of this lesson. Do they match with yours? Maybe not. But perhaps they’ll be useful.

  1. Perhaps Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘magic’ / ‘panic’ rhyme hints at the direct relationship between those two things. Maybe it’s the ‘magic’ he feels that causes him to ‘panic’ – he is terrified by the thought of losing that ‘magic’. Without the ‘magic’, there would be no ‘panic’ – and the rhyme cements the link between those two words. Often, then, when you look at rhyming words you will notice that they reflect a cause/effect relationship between the words being rhymed.
  2. A rhyme can offer a sense of things fitting together and feeling complete. Listening to the Proper track, it’s clear that the speaker feels a great sense of guilt and loss. He does not feel that things fit together. He let his friend down and that makes him feel uncomfortable. Using rhyme could make things feel too comfortable. When they things don’t rhyme, they can feel more awkward and less ‘bouncy’.
  3. Sometimes the main effect of a good rhyme is simply to make a poem feel fun and bouncy. When things rhyme, it feels like things ‘fit’. Perhaps for Maggie Lindemann and LOLO there’s a feeling of happiness in the moment because things ‘match’ – they make sense and, as a result, life feels awesome. (In contrast, when things don’t rhyme – or only sometimes rhyme – perhaps it hints at a loss of control, or a feeling of things not ‘fitting’ or making complete sense).

If you’re studying for A-Level exams, Taylor Swift can help you with your unseen poetry!

If you’re studying for GCSE exams, Against The Current can help you with your unseen poetry!