I'm laying here tonight
In the bed we used to share
Looking at your side hurts
Without you it's so bare
I pull your pillow close to me
But you scent is gone too
As tears roll down my face
My heart breaks again missing you
It hurts a little extra knowing
You leaving is because of me
This burden I'll carry forever
I deserve all this misery
I don't deserve happiness
That fact should be known
I deserve this life of regret
That I'll forever spend alone
We here at the goat farm
will never do you any harm.
We just want a chance
to eat your shirt and pants.
At first, I was all about the blue
Age slowly turned me to the red
For a while, black was all that would do
And that coloured everything I said
The lines washed away in the sand
With a little bit of this and that
This prince's rain fell with even hand
Cut greener grasses, rendered matte
In the shadow of the colossal sphere, where ancient echoes sleep,
Vaeloria fades into the dark, a secret it must keep.
The watchers put their scopes away, the screens fade out to grey,
As morning calls the busy streets to meet another day.
No scholar marks the turning tide, no profit in the view,
For men forget the distant stars to chase what is brand new.
They walk through cities built of glass, untroubled, blind, and proud,
Unknowing that the selfsame veil is gathering like a cloud.
The rot that choked the Aethel Sea now crawls along their strand,
An unremembered resonance that slips across the land.
As silent as the giant orb that hid the world before,
The shadow comes to take their home, and lock them in its lore.
Through lenses cold and ground from mountain glass,
We watched the dying worlds of iron pass.
For generations, every spark we found
Was tethered to a bleeding, broken ground—
The sudden flash of silo doors undone,
The brief, horrific birthing of a sun,
Then ash that drifted like a heavy shroud
To lock a planet in a toxic cloud.
We turned our mirrors to the northern sky,
Expecting just another world to die,
To see Vaeloria’s final signature
Be etched in fire, black and premature.
We braced for the familiar, sudden glare
Of empires burning down their final air.
But what we found across the cosmic deep
Was not the final, static-riddled sleep.
The planet did not burn; it started glowing,
A quiet, silver respiration growing,
As if a willow made of starlight grew
And drank the poison till the sky turned blue.
No high radiation tore the night,
But pulses of a deep, organic light.
A lonely mind had stitched the broken spheres,
And washed away a century of fears.
We leaned into our sights, amazed to see
A world redeemed by a single tree.
Oh man alive, at sixty five
I’ve something to confess:
I never thought I’d find myself
such a befuddled mess.
It started out so innocent
inviting her to lunch;
the convo stayed mostly on track,
but then it swerved a bunch.
See, feeling coy, this stupid boy
thought he’d get cute and flirt.
From winsome one to two left feet,
a face plant in the dirt.
As I hit send, the doubt set in:
were those the proper words?
Whoever thought I’d be like this?
A grown man, how absurd!
The seconds pass like hours
as frets bloom full regret;
she’ll likely think the worst of me,
what do you want to bet?
And so, confused, I sit and stew,
increasingly perplexed.
But wait! I hear a joyful noise:
in came another text!
It doesn’t matter what it says;
she ended with a smile!
Thank goodness, I‘m still in the clear,
‘least for a little while!
Humility is so very hard to find
man is themselves have this great lack
for most of us think we're so great
the very opposite of a humble knack
Looking far and near to find one
many think they are humility-full
but the one who does proves they're not
for they smack of the opposite, so uncool
Learn from those who are meek of heart
thinking they are the least of all
not putting themselves out to the front
instead content being last no matter who calls
They are also those who speak seldom
using only words to encourage and lift up
not seeking to be critically rude
only happy to say little about your cup
Well, how does one sum this up?
be humble, keep yourself idol-free
think not great of your very self
walk the humble road with integrity
A class on Zoom, as you’d assume,
Attracts its share of crazies,
But in your room, no need to fume;
Just rearrange your daisies
Or fill a grid your camera hid,
Completing Sunday’s puzzle,
If the teacher did not place a lid
On some who need a muzzle.
With mic sound shut, if every nut
Must jabber with a story,
You tune out, but, your tsk and tut
Won’t dampen someone’s glory.
The time will pass and soon your class
Will come to its conclusion
And then, en masse, you leave; the brass
Believing the illusion.
Why is my heart always full of chaos?
As if it meant to stay in a cage,
Thinking it will come to pass
And filling my mind with a unwritten page.
A rush of sweet dizziness conquer my heart,
It always makes me to run away
Like trying to make a piece of art
But it seems my love wants to fade away.
The day and years are my witness,
As if asking the Lord who I am
I don't know how my feelings need your warmness
Hoping you see just as I am.
The autumn moon at Halloween,
the teacher’s greatest fear.
Kids go crazy, we all know,
a full moon will soon appear.
Add in candy, costumes too,
the kids try to act a fool.
The kids’ minds are somewhere else
instead of here at school.
There’s poetry
in everything
the essence
and the form
As words set free
what time deceives
and hides within
the norm
A verse unsaid
awaits intent
to fill
the idle hours
Where hope endows
the moment proud
to dance
— among the flowers
(The New Room: September, 2026)
What a picturesque panorama this is.
My eyes peer into the beautiful landscape
Of my vast, vivid imagination...
It is such a wondrous escape!
Funny, serendipitously finding you here
In this Shangri-La, patiently waiting for me.
Believe me, there is no place
On this earth I'd rather be!
Here we are, blissfully walking among
A serene golden field without a fuss,
As the unstable world crumbles
Like Gibraltar all around us.
What an adventure! It's a sheer thrill
Getting away from it all with you
We'll chase butterflies to our heart's content,
Misspend our time taking in the view.
In this haven of peace and tranquility,
We'll repeatedly sojourn; it's our royal domain,
A welcoming, breathtaking getaway
To come back to again and again.
No longer do i seek
divination through
antiquated sorcery,
Nor supplicate to nebulous
spirits in clandestine
reverie.
I renounce the esoteric, the
obfuscatory, the occulted
night,
For I have found an
effulgent, benedictory,
convenantal light.
My soul rejects
thaumaturgical illusions and
superstitious chains,
And clings to the
transcendent, the
veracious, where true
freedom reigns.
No hex, no sigil, no arcane
nomenclature can compare,
To the omnipotent grace
that answers every
whispered prayer.
Let the ephemeral
glamorous of witchcraft
dissipate,
I walk now in sanctification-
redeemed, restored, and
consecrate.
In labyrinthine longing,
where my weary spirit
roams,
I seek an effervescent
haven to call my home.
A luminescent refuge where
the anxious heart finds rest,
Where benediction
whisper and the soul is truly
blessed.
Amidst the cacophonous
clamor of this transient
world,
Your peace, oh Lord, is an
opalescent banner unfurled.
A paradisiacal sanctuary,
inviolable and true,
Where tribulations dissipate
in the cerulean blue.
So let me be transfigured in
this hallowed, holy place,
A resplendent
convalescence wrapped in,
Your abounding grace.
She greets us with a smile,
won't hesitate to go the extra mile.
She always has a kind word,
as genuine as a songbird.
No one would ever know
she lost her son two weeks ago.
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.