the chair slides down to the floor,
wick of past mornings in a floating shop,
the killing time of an unshared storyboard
craven need
white chaste face dipped in mud,
daily smokescreen
tongue's
lovetug
numb
the chair slides down to the floor,
white chaste face dipped in mud,
numb
ALL THAT WE DESPISE
Who waits to worship
At your shrine
All that we despise
Who calls your name
Evokes a prayer
Who are so inclined
Who knows, who dares
Your rotted lair
Who crosses you in rhyme
With their disgust
You win their lust
All that we despise
Two spoked wheels, blurry sped;
A road's sky-way on.
Now feather-light, now a-flutter
Sat of me upon.
All that's blowy to feel
Within as without
Is this its rush - Freedom's.
Through a joyous shout.
old anglesea rd.c. 2002
Snowy chilly;
But snowy fair.
The compensatory factor
Pluck out this air.
This scourge of life
As numb leaves us
Through what relieves, warm-hearted
Weeps, pitious
By that sort of
Soft, pure appeal
Woman, more than made up for!
For real; for real!
Bottom of the hill is a fast stream,
shallow current through rock careens,
never once gets past your knees,
under a bridge in a sylvan scene.
Most ignore it as they’re driving by,
young boys see it with prying eyes,
four down there, not even five,
building a dam, rocks piled up high.
Get a huge thrill when the waters rise,
packing mud in the gaps in the side,
to their minds a big flood tide,
their hands are small but their dreams wide.
A few feet away, one panning gold,
there’s a rich vein here, he’s told,
swirls like prospectors of old,
no luck yet, but he ain’t gonna fold.
Littlest one chases minnows fast,
tiny feet do nothing but splash,
runs a race, his mother laughs,
he ain’t gonna catch no dinner like that!
Sun’s coming down and it’s half past four,
they hate to leave, always want more,
have to hit the grocery store,
a tragedy when you’re only four.
One moment warmly expressed.
Next, coldly hushed up.
So does memory at last
That, Time-bound, pack in.
Pages of life having turned
As one book so lies.
A hard cover! Author's name
In gold lettering.
It seems obvious to me
That we’ve been here before
But don’t ask me if I see
Who we were so long ago
I think many feel the same
Though they make of it a joke
Once I had a different name
Different tongue I spoke
Once you came down, dressed in satin
We went walking in the park
You bombarded me with Latin
Quoting Horace and Plutarch
You were laughing your head off
In the pouring rain
We were happy, weren’t we, love?
Bring it back again…
Crawford boxes
Wearing white soxs
Cindy and Chase
Built their case
About the train
Transporting the financial grain
Seeking fortune with fame
Going through each state
Fishing tempting bait
Until hiding in a bush
The reality push
Stupid economy
Transitioning to Daddy and Mommy
Super modeling soda pop
Choo Choo would not stop
For the Crawford boxes
Wearing white soxs
Better one will survive
Others will say goodbye
Until banks stepped in
Deciding who would win
GQ pinstripes
With the Broadway lights
Ending championship fight
Turning off the lights
Saying everyone is all right
And good night
Putting the dolls back into the Crawford boxes
Still selling South Side White Soxs
Several male colleagues in a work meeting
Each competent and able
In walks the angry little boss man
Yelling at them “ today….you need to put your balls on the table”!!
Ewwww…..”what a thought”!
Kindness is creating a space
An absence of self , a welcoming face,
A hand extended to pull someone up
To share their pain , drink their cup,
Kindness is tearing the barriers down
A comforting smile, not judging frown.
An embrace of solidarity
For we are one humanity
What makes us rich is what we share
Our time, our presence , our love, our care.
Whether you're here, there, near, or afar
Like a cosmic comet, riding a shooting star
Over caravans, of sifting seas of sand
Love abounds, once found, sheds the bonds, once bound
Across the eternal, mystical, mist of night
Love's might bends, traveling at the speed of light
Time i see it not.' Yet its journey has yet not stopped' if two hundred years were
The span of your days.? You would read
Better, the woes of each age' failing this
Hit the history trail, if more did could have
Less seething, or tantying, or rails.? Look at 1853; 56.' You might get to learn of dark tricks, 1910 a time of Spanish flu, 1914 and a war just grew? Forty one years untill the second go.' To clear out
fachists is the way it did go.' 1965 we got
Into nam..' right after the Korean one if you were two hundeed now you would have lived through everyone..Maybe you can see a pattern now, old europe can be a greedy sow, many world leaders, on puppet strings, its not just a theroy, things
Turn to similar in our timeframe again, convid has been and gone' old europe eyes Crimea again..For you see a stratagist, once said who rules there, holds the world, in a pillory, Fred or Clcharlie or wally? Or who.? Can't you see
On which foot is the shoe.' I sugjest you find out really fast, or your jacksie, might
Get one up it way too hard' and, too fast.'
I feel like I’m peripheral
In everybody’s life
Except, of course, my husband’s,
With my closeness as his wife.
I suppose that’s how it should be
Once the kids have up and flown
From the nest that you created,
With your grandkids almost grown.
Siblings also have their families,
As do all my dearest friends.
Where I once felt integral to some,
My mind now comprehends
That I’m stuck here on the outside
And my entry’s been denied.
Still, for now, I’m front and center
When my husband’s by my side.
Autumn's here, now to stay,
for winter, spring, and summer days each took their stage-
went away.
Since summer's end
most trees now paint their season's page
to blend
Green's flash
to red-orange
splash!
Autumn's here, now to stay;
most trees now paint their season's page-
splash!
THE GOD MAN
What lone heart beats with cunning skill,
stokes other men of hope.
Contentious now to seize with ease
From god, to cliche trope.
A man of men conquest again,
and noted through that door.
As if the others ever could,
they would forever more.
Tis the oppositions drum beat
to set the god man's pike.
As though the others might abide,
a trite preemptive strike.
Yet on the other side of coins
resistance pale and weak.
Envious lace bereft of grace
to turn the softer cheek.
Narry a tempt to wrong the right.
Embraced hypocricy
Selfish nature takes without
accountability.
Introduction
Rhyme puts a promise in the reader’s ear: once a striking sound lands, we begin listening for its return. The pleasure lies partly in fulfillment and partly in delay. A poet may answer the sound promptly, postpone it until tension gathers, soften it into a near match, or place the answering word where it surprises us. Reading rhyming poems side by side reveals how differently writers manage that expectation.
As you browse the community poems, you may encounter playful voices, grave meditations, compact lyrics, extended narratives, songs, comic portraits, and poems whose sound links are almost hidden inside conversational speech. Some writers make rhyme conspicuous and musical; others let it operate quietly beneath syntax and imagery. The same echo can create reassurance, irony, momentum, enchantment, unease, or a sense that events are closing in. Much depends on which words receive emphasis and what emotional relationship the paired words establish.
One isolated example can show a successful pattern, but a broad collection demonstrates rhyme as a field of artistic choices. Compare several poets’ approaches to pacing, diction, stanza movement, and closure. Notice when sound appears to lead the thought and when thought seems to discover its sound naturally. Read beyond the first example, including poems that interpret the form loosely, because contrast sharpens judgment: one poem may be memorable for fluent music, another for disruptive echoes, and another for a final rhyme that changes the meaning of everything before it.
Reading Guide
Read rhyme as a relationship between words, not merely as an audible ornament. An answering sound causes the mind to recall an earlier word, so the poet creates a temporary bridge between two meanings. That bridge may be harmonious, comic, argumentative, or unsettling. As you read the community poems, listen once for pleasure and then return to examine how the sound organizes attention. Comparing several poems will help you distinguish rhyme that simply completes an expectation from rhyme that adds emotional or intellectual pressure.
- Listen for distance and return. A quick echo can feel energetic or songlike, while a delayed answer may create suspense and test the reader’s memory. When comparing poems, ask: how long does each poet make me wait, and what accumulates during that interval?
- Examine the paired meanings. Sound makes words seem related even when their meanings conflict. A rhyme between tenderness and danger can complicate the poem more than a pairing of obvious synonyms. Ask: does the echo uncover a meaningful connection, an ironic clash, or only a convenient match?
- Follow syntax across the line. When every grammatical unit stops where an echo arrives, the poem may feel emphatic, orderly, or deliberately comic. Sentences that continue beyond those moments can make the music subtler. Ask: do sound and syntax cooperate, or does their tension create momentum?
- Notice the degree of sonic likeness. Crisp correspondences often produce confidence and closure; rougher echoes can suggest hesitation, fracture, or conversational ease. Ask: how would the poem’s emotional atmosphere change if its sound relationships were more exact or less exact?
- Track the surrounding texture. Repeated consonants, vowels, stresses, and internal echoes can prepare the ear before a prominent rhyme arrives. This prevents the major matches from sounding isolated. Ask: what quieter sounds bind the passage together between the most noticeable echoes?
- Test the voice. Rhyme may suit a speaker who is witty, ceremonial, childlike, obsessive, persuasive, or self-mocking, but the diction must still sound credible. Ask: does the music reveal the speaker’s character, or does the speaker seem to be serving the pattern?
- Study the final sound relationship. A concluding echo can seal an argument, deliver a punch line, intensify grief, or feel suspiciously neat. Ask: does the ending earn its sense of completion, resist it, or use apparent closure to leave a final ambiguity?
On a second reading, mark the words your ear remembers most strongly. Then consider whether their importance comes only from sound or from the combined force of sound, image, context, and placement. That comparison is often the clearest measure of craft.
Writing Tips
Begin a rhyming draft with an emotional movement, scene, argument, or voice worth following; do not begin only with a set of matching words. Rhyme creates productive pressure because every prominent echo narrows some choices while opening unexpected associations. The workshop task is to use those discoveries without allowing convenience to dictate the poem’s thought. The most convincing draft makes its music feel inseparable from what the speaker needs to say.
- Choose material that benefits from recurrence. Songs, spells, comic narratives, persuasive addresses, memories, rituals, and obsessive thoughts can all gain force when sounds return. More restrained subjects may benefit from less conspicuous echoes. Ask what kind of recurrence the emotional situation naturally invites: reassurance, entrapment, celebration, mockery, or lament.
- Draft beyond the first available match. The earliest rhyme is often the most familiar and therefore the least revealing. Build a private bank of possible words, including different parts of speech and less predictable images. Select by meaning and tonal fitness rather than by sound alone; discard any choice that distorts the sentence merely to complete an echo.
- Let paired words converse. Place meaningful pressure on the words the ear will remember. A strong pair may establish contrast, cause and consequence, question and answer, appearance and reality, or desire and loss. If the paired words have no interesting semantic relationship, revise one of them or reduce their prominence.
- Protect natural syntax. Beginners sometimes invert ordinary word order, add filler, or use an unnatural synonym to reach a convenient sound. Such maneuvers can be purposeful in a comic or stylized voice, but accidental stiffness weakens authority. Rewrite the whole sentence rather than patching its final few words.
- Manage expectation instead of satisfying it automatically. Once readers recognize an audible pattern, they begin predicting. You can fulfill that prediction for pleasure, delay it for tension, soften the correspondence, or briefly interrupt the pattern at an emotionally important point. Variation works best when it reflects a change in thought rather than a random wish to avoid monotony.
- Use imagery to prevent abstraction. A sequence of polished echoes cannot substitute for a physical world. Give the speaker objects to handle, places to inhabit, weather to feel, or gestures to observe. Concrete images also enlarge the available sound field, leading away from overused pairings and toward language particular to the poem.
- Match musical brightness to voice. Dense, obvious rhyme can support exuberance, satire, performance, or incantation, but it may overwhelm a quiet confession. Subtler sound correspondences can preserve intimacy without abandoning recurrence. Read several community poems to compare how poets calibrate audibility for different speakers and subjects.
- Earn the ending. Do not let the final rhyme decide the conclusion merely because it is available. A neat match can falsely resolve grief, conflict, or uncertainty. Consider whether the last echo should close a circle, expose irony, alter the significance of an earlier word, or leave a slight sonic imperfection that keeps the poem emotionally open.
During revision, read the draft aloud at least twice: once slowly enough to hear every sound relationship and once at a natural speaking pace. Mark places where you anticipate the next word too easily, where syntax strains, or where an echo steals attention from the image. Then revise for meaning first, pacing second, and sonic precision third. Finally, ask another reader which words remain in memory; those answers reveal whether rhyme has concentrated the poem’s real pressure or merely decorated its surface.
Interesting Facts
- Rhyme changes memory as well as music. When one sound recalls another, the earlier word returns mentally and may acquire a new meaning. A later echo can therefore revise a reader’s understanding without explicitly explaining the connection.
- Predictability is not automatically a weakness. In humor, song, ritual, or dramatic performance, an obvious coming rhyme can invite anticipation and participation. The artistic question is whether fulfillment produces delight, emphasis, or irony rather than merely confirming the easiest available word.
- Imperfect correspondence can be emotionally exact. A slightly unsettled echo may suit estrangement, doubt, interrupted memory, or unresolved conflict better than polished symmetry. Experienced writers often judge sonic precision according to the poem’s emotional condition, not according to neatness alone.
- Silence participates in the pattern. Pauses, stanza breaks, and syntactic delays determine how long an earlier sound remains active in the ear. The space between related sounds can generate suspense, make the return feel inevitable, or allow an expected answer to disappear altogether.
- Highly audible rhyme can conceal tonal complexity. Buoyant music may carry grief, anger, or menace, creating a productive disagreement between manner and subject. Conversely, grave-sounding echoes can be used for parody. Tone emerges from the interaction of sound, diction, image, and context.
- Variety becomes clearer through comparison. As you browse the poems in this collection, notice that similar sonic resources can support storytelling, meditation, comedy, address, or lyric compression. Reading several interpretations prevents any single style from seeming like the only valid model.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and rhyme affect each other: repeated sounds can make an experience feel ordered, haunted, playful, inevitable, or ceremonially remembered. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not statistical rankings of the community collection. Each theme succeeds only when the music serves its particular emotional movement.
- Love and longing. Returning sounds can imitate recurring desire, while delayed echoes resemble waiting for an answer. A poet can use smooth correspondence for intimacy or rougher echoes to suggest distance, incompatibility, and affection that never fully resolves.
- Loss, death, and remembrance. Rhyme recalls what has already passed, making it especially apt for memory. The return of a sound can feel like a name, image, or grief coming back, although overly tidy closure may need to be resisted when the loss remains unsettled.
- Humor and satire. Anticipated words create timing. A poet can encourage the reader to predict one conclusion, then substitute another, or use an emphatic pairing to expose absurdity. The pleasure depends on control of pacing and on diction that preserves the speaker’s wit.
- Childhood, school, and family. Memorable sound can evoke games, sayings, teasing, instruction, and domestic rituals. Writers may embrace that familiarity or complicate it by placing adult knowledge beneath an apparently simple musical surface.
- Nature and the seasons. Recurrence suits cycles of weather, growth, migration, fading, and renewal. Sound links can connect separate images across a landscape, but precise sensory detail keeps seasonal poems from relying on familiar language alone.
- War and conflict. Insistent echoes may resemble marching, argument, propaganda, or thoughts that a speaker cannot escape. A disrupted pattern can register shock or fracture, while polished music may create disturbing irony when set against violence.
- Animals, play, and imaginative tales. Energetic sound supports movement, characterization, exaggeration, and invented worlds. Unexpected rhymes can expand a poem’s vocabulary and comic logic, provided the narrative remains more than a vehicle for verbal display.
- Music, ritual, and celebration. Repeated sonic returns can strengthen communal feeling and make lines inviting to perform. Changes in audibility or pace can mark shifts from public festivity to private reflection, giving celebration an emotional arc.
Compare several community poets working with similar subjects. One love poem may use recurrence as reassurance, while another turns it into obsession; one nature poem may create harmony, while another emphasizes instability. Such contrasts show how form transforms theme rather than merely containing it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension in rhyming poetry is between inevitability and discovery. Once the ear senses recurrence, it starts projecting possible words and outcomes. A technically recognizable poem may fulfill those expectations consistently, yet consistency alone can leave the language feeling predetermined. A memorable poem makes each return seem both prepared and newly meaningful: the sound satisfies the ear while the chosen word redirects thought. The reader experiences not just correspondence but consequence.
Structure feels necessary when the poem’s subject has its own reason for echoing. A grieving speaker may circle an absence; a comic speaker may exploit anticipation; a persuasive voice may use recurrence to build authority; an anxious voice may sound trapped inside repeated associations. In such cases, rhyme becomes dramatic behavior. Editors notice whether prominent words bear enough semantic weight to deserve emphasis, whether images deepen between returns, and whether shifts in sound coincide with shifts in perception. They also notice restraint: a poet need not display every available match when silence, delay, or a less exact answer better serves the moment.
Weak drafts often reveal the search process too plainly. Predictable pairings arrive before the thought has earned them; filler expands a sentence; inverted syntax makes the speaker sound unlike any plausible person; mechanical patterning flattens changes in mood. Another common problem is over-explanation. Because the sound has already linked two words, an added sentence explaining that relationship may reduce resonance. At the opposite extreme, dazzling sonic activity can mask insufficient development: the poem moves rapidly from match to match without building a scene, argument, emotional turn, or memorable image. Revision should therefore test what the poem would still have to offer if its most conspicuous echoes were temporarily removed.
Individuality remains visible through selection and pressure. Poets differ in what their speakers notice, which words they permit to resonate, how openly they invite prediction, and whether an echo comforts or destabilizes. Even familiar sound pairings can gain freshness from a precise setting, an unusual moral conflict, or a voice with unmistakable habits of thought. Compare multiple community poems rather than treating one polished example as a universal standard. Side-by-side reading develops a finer sense of proportion: when music leads, when it supports, when it productively resists the subject, and when it has become an end in itself. Quality emerges from this coordination of sound, meaning, movement, and necessity.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an impression of what rhyme can accomplish. Compare how different writers handle anticipation, voice, imagery, tonal contrast, and the final return of sound. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific echo, turn, image, or moment of surprise; precise responses help sustain meaningful literary conversation.
Then try your own interpretation. Let the subject determine whether the music should be bright, restrained, comic, haunting, or unsettled, revise it aloud, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup so other readers can encounter and discuss your approach.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 100445 poems, offering a wide field for reading sound, meaning, voice, and closure in comparison rather than isolation. Across a collection of this size, visitors can explore multiple interpretations and consider how individual poets follow familiar conventions, adapt them to a particular subject, or challenge expectations while retaining an audible sense of relationship and return.
Rhyme Categories
Read wonderful rhyme poetry on the following sub-topics:
animals, christmas, death, dog, family, flowers, food, friends, funny, halloween, kids, life, love, music, nature, nursery, parents, school, spring, sports, war, winter
and more.
Definition | What is Rhyme in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.