a
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
b
From death, your numberless infinities
b
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
a
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
a
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
b
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
b
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
a
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
c
For if, above all these, my sins abound,
d
’Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
c
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
d
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
e
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood.
eJOHN DONNE: Sonnet: ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’
This particular abba abba cdcd ee9 arrangement is a hybrid of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets’ rhyme-schemes, of which more in Chapter Three.
As to the descriptions of these layouts, well, that is simple enough. There are four very common forms. There is the COUPLET…So long as men can breathe and eyes can seeSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
…and the TRIPLET:
In the poetry of the Augustan period (Dryden, Johnson, Swift, Pope etc.) you will often find triplets braced in one of these long curly brackets, as in the example above from the Prologue to Dryden’s tragedy, All For Love. Such braced triplets will usually hold a single thought and conclude with a full stop.
Next is CROSS-RHYMING, which rhymes alternating lines, abab
etc:I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;
Finally there is ENVELOPE RHYME, where a couplet is ‘enveloped’ by an outer rhyming pair: abba, as in the first eight lines of the Donne poem, or this stanza from Tennyson’s In Memoriam.The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,No wing of wind the region swept,But over all things brooding sleptThe quiet sense of something lost.
You might have noticed that in the cross-rhyme and envelope-rhyme examples above, Wordsworth and Tennyson indent rhyming pairs, as it were pressing the tab key to shift them to the right: this is by no means obligatory. Larkin does indent with ‘Toads’, perhaps gently to nudge our attention to the subtle consonance rhyming:Lots of folk live up lanesWith fires in a bucket,Eat windfalls and tinned sardines–They seem to like it.
While in his ‘truly rhymed’ poem ‘The Trees’ he presents the envelope-rhymed stanzas without indentation:The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said.The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Naturally, there are variations on these schemes: Wordsworth ends each cross-rhymed stanza of ‘Daffodils’ with a couplet, for example (abbacc). The world of formal rhyme-schemes awaits our excited inspection in the next chapter, but without delving into neurolinguistics and the deeper waters of academic prosody I really do not believe there is much more we need to know about rhyming in the technical sense. We have
