tWR Interviews: To Rhyme Or Not To Rhyme?

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another chapter of our "tWR Interviews", where we interview experienced writers of our community about the art of writing
If you're reading, please favourite+fav the article and share it so we can spread this amazing resource around!

First of all, let me say that the writers we are interviewing today, kiwi-damnation, williamszm and now Nichrysalis, are incredible. I have so much respect for their skills. :worship:

Secondly, one mysterious deviant is still missing from the interview, so stay tuned for when this will be updated because they're quite worth your while too. :heart:

And thirdly, we have a small appearance by the lovely Jade-Pandora. (:



Previous tWR Interviews:


Our third poetry lesson centers on rhyming versus non-rhyming poetry.


To rhyme or not to rhyme, is that the question? If it is the question, it is a very important one as it changes a poem's structure radically. What do you think is the biggest difference in a rhyming piece versus a non-rhyming one?

Nichrysalis, No, to rhyme or not is not a question that is central to any poem’s success. It is never important, but it is a nice touch to complement the words with euphonic cadence. This is where people get confused, rhyming words sound good and memorable when used correctly, and many beginning poets correlate that if their poetry rhymes it will help the poem sound better overall. Amazing rhymes with words that sound coherent and evoke the beauty that rhyme can create aesthetically are so few and far between that finding them is a major issue. When I wrote the first poem I wound up submitting to deviantART, Only as Old the end rhyme that finishes the poem was not just written in casually. The rhyme of the words ”younger” and “thunder” had been a pair of words I paired together about two years prior to this poem in a long-form narrative piece of poetry titled Twenty-four Forty-eights, which I never finished. However, when I decided to abandon the narrative project, I went through it and collected all the tidbits that I could see as reuseable. Those two words were a rhyme I began growing fond of, but it wasn’t really until I wrote Only as Old that they found their place in my writing and in relationship to each other. Including that rhyme in my poem never changed the structure of the poem either.

The biggest and most notable difference in a non-rhyming poem versus a rhyming poem is memorability. How many lines of poetry that rhymed can you remember word for word compared to how many lines of poetry you can recall that don’t rhyme? For me, the ratio of the former to the latter is staggeringly disproportionate. People forget that rhyme originated in poetry and verse because writing as an art was not very reliably written down and the need to rhyme was urgently important if a poet wanted someone or themselves to remember their work. Rhyme began as a tool for remembering lines of poetry and was more a utility than an aesthetic touch thousands of years ago. Rhyme began out of necessity, and this is why people use rhyme improperly is because the need to memorize lines is not a problem anymore.


kiwi-damnation, Rhyme can be a beautiful thing. It can make the poem catch hold of you and never let go. You can dance and lilt your way through without struggle. The question is not just whether to rhyme or not, but also whether to employ rhythm. Without rhythm, rhyme doesn’t have its power. You need a heartbeat for your poetry so it doesn’t feel like you’re wading through endless metaphors.
This heartbeat can be present for rhyming and non-rhyming pieces, although non-rhyming doesn’t compel you quite in the same way. I love rhyme and adore using it but it is a delicate tool to be used sparingly and carefully. Non-rhyming pieces have to work harder to create that rhythm but they are still beautiful. A great rhyming piece will seem effortless to the reader.

A piece of mine, Dear Brother, demonstrates how rhyme can be used to carry a reader through a piece like music.


williamszm, I think one of the main things rhyming adds to a poem is increasing its repetition. Many things, of course, can add repetition to poetry, but rhyming does so with very specific, usually very prominent, sounds. Perhaps because of this, rhymes tend to stick in our memories extremely well—which can be a good or bad thing, I suppose, depending on the quality of the rhyme!

Rhyming poetry also restrains your options in a way than non-rhyming poetry doesn’t. I think all poetry, and really all writing is constrained in at least some way, but rhyming creates a set of rules that are obvious not only to the poet, but also to the reader.


Jade-Pandora, If a poem has a rhyme theme in one of any traditional forms that dictates the distribution of rhyme between alternate line count and application (i.e. A/B/A/B for a quatrain stanza, for example), then it is important if a writer hopes to succeed in producing a positive impact.  As for poems without a rhyme theme; thoughtful, imaginative, and well-chosen line breaks, and phrasings, are very important and well worth the extra effort.  In fact, this is essential.

Aphrodite is an example from my gallery, observing a rhyme theme: a poem in the Italian poetic form of Ottava Rima (in this case, observing 11 syllables per line).

And always from my gallery, Snowies shows an example of a poem without a rhyme theme


Do you think rhyming needs a fixed structure, or can it just appear in a piece now and then, and still be appreciated?

Nichrysalis, Structured, fixed rhyming from line to line is one extreme while casually throwing in a rhyme is the other end of that extreme. I don’t like Shakespeare, but when reading his many plays I caught on to a technique that no one has really matched since. At the dawn of a time when literature was becoming easier to print and write down, Shakespeare went without rhyme in his verse, unless he wanted to make a point and have it stick in the reader’s mind. Many monologues of his play use rhyme as a tool, rhyming when the character is saying something important, so as to emphasize that point. This is a good midpoint and what I think is an excellent example I continue to use as a model for my own poetry. Going back to the Only as Old, which was written a year or so after I made the observation on Shakespeare’s verse, I was determined to try to do the same, and I believe it worked out very well because rhyme is a good tool for memory.

kiwi-damnation, It depends on the message of the piece and the way the writer employs the rhyme. If you are looking to create something disarming, you can add assonance (vowel rhyme) into the sentences which can carry things along and then chop and change things. It’s not necessarily recommended for a novice poet as it isn’t an easy technique and difficult to pull off.
I do believe, however, that an exquisite structure can be the foundation for some of the best poetry one can ever write or read and it is these structures (forms) that I love to play with. The more restricted the form, the more a person has to stretch themselves as a writer and you almost create someone beautiful despite those limits. A billion writers may use the same form but they will all approach it differently and create something entirely unique. I find it fascinating.

Repair, from my gallery, demonstrates how fixed form can really restrict you, and how it allows you to create something utterly unique.


williamszm, Rhyming is a tool, so like all the other poetic tools, it can be used however much or sparingly as one chooses. Something to keep in mind is that rhymes come in many more forms than just a true end rhyme. Just because that doesn’t fit into a non-rhyming poem doesn’t mean a slant, internal rhyme wouldn’t either.

Jade-Pandora, It has been my experience consistently through the years that many poems I have composed turn out with what is termed as random rhyme. When this happens I have never gone out of my way to change to a fixed structure.  I let things flow as stanza and verse are stacked and what rhyme shows up seems to literally wrap around the piece as it goes.  I thought up my own term until I knew otherwise: “wrap-around rhyme”.  So my answer would be yes, a writer can have rhyme appear now and then and still have it appreciated, as long as he or she remembers to observe all of the points mentioned in answer #1, that make a poem cohesive, with flow, good meter, and the rest.

Insomnia is one of my poems that utilizes random rhyme.


What are some of your 'best practices' when it comes to rhyme (either in reading it, or writing it)? How do you go about incorporating it into your writing if/when you do?

Nichrysalis, The only two things I would say I consistently do is I avoid “perfect” rhymes, which are too easily predictable to see coming by the reader and that I like to compose my rhymes of two syllables or more. My favorite rhyme to this day remains to be the final lines in a Buck 65 song, Wicked and Weird:

"I figure when I make it to the heavenly gates
They'll be working on my car and playing seventy-eights."


It’s my favorite rhyme because it not only encapsulates the message of the song, but at the very least, it’s a four syllable rhyme where “hea-ven-ly gates” and “se-ven-ty eights” couldn’t line up more perfectly.


kiwi-damnation, When writing rhyme, I like to use words I haven’t used before or rhymes that seem atypical. I like to experiment with different rhythms, assonance and onomatopoeia. Poetry is music to me, it plays in my head. I like to make it sound interesting and melodic and tell a story that wraps you in a cocoon of sounds.
Reading rhyme, I personally find that I turn off all music and just listen to what is being said. I can hear the poet’s voice better then and I can feel the messages much clearer.
Sometimes i get out a rhyming dictionary, but that’s mostly when I am stuck on something like that Chant Royal with a very strict rhyme scheme.

My poem Tempest demonstrates how internal rhyme, onomatopoeia and rhythm can be used to compound the effect.


williamszm, Well, if you’re familiar with my writing, it should be pretty obvious that I almost always go for rhymes. I think the key to using them is remembering that rhyming should accomplish something—if you find yourself changing the meaning of your poem or a line because you need it to rhyme, something has gone wrong. Of course I realize that this can be a really hard thing to do, especially when you first start trying to include rhymes in your poetry.

Another really important thing to remember is that rhymes, especially true end rhymes, are one of a writer’s most powerful tools. I like to think of poetry in musical terms, so I apologize if the following metaphor doesn’t make sense to anyone else. For me, a rhyme is like a strong return to the tonic. And if your theme uses only tonic chords, it will be stagnant. It needs interesting things happening between each tonic chord, and your poetry does too. A good rhyme feels like a moment of relief, or a return, or sometimes even a continuation—and that moment can’t happen if nothing happens between one rhyme and the next.


About fixed forms with a rhyme scheme, do you think the scheme could make the poem repetitive?

Nichrysalis, That was the entire point of the creation of rhyming and fixed forms, and not in a bad way, but it’s much less needed in modern times.

Though, there is another rule I follow, and that there are always three possible places to rhyme in a line of poetry, the beginning, middle and end of any line of poetry are optimal places to use a rhyme. Using rhymes between these places usually creates a telltale awkward phrasing when reading. Knowing this, writers can make their own structures for rhyming in poetry.


kiwi-damnation, It can seem repetitive if you don’t allow the poem to have its own voice. If the rhyme is blatant, it can feel forced and the poem becomes less about the meaning and all about the structure. You shouldn’t ever see or feel the structure; the structure should allow you to carry a different message across.

williamszm, Absolutely, but I’ll quibble just a bit with the question. See, I very much disagree with the idea that repetition is entirely bad. Repetition can be beautiful, fascinating, soothing, and just generally enjoyable. We use repetition all the time in our writing.

Back to music (sorry again!), some of my favorite works are dance suites from the mid-late Baroque period, especially the heavily ornamented ones popular among French composers. I assure you, these works are incredibly repetitive. You might repeat the short first section twice, do the same with the second section, and then repeat the whole piece (original repeats included) a second or even third time. I’m not trying to pretend that these pieces are as complex as a Beethoven symphony, for example, but I think they do provide a really great example of formal rhyme scheme level extreme repetition (because of course, even Beethoven’s symphonies use at least some repetition) that doesn’t detract from a piece, but rather adds to its meaning.

So long music interlude aside, I think the same applies to poetry. Yes, a formal rhyme scheme will make your poetry repetitive. Acknowledge that, and then use that repetition to add some kind of meaning.


Is there a type of rhyme you haven't mastered yet, but would like to?

Nichrysalis, There is a type of rhyme really hard to write for, called mind rhyme, which is where a word is implied because it rhymes with the previous line, but the word is never written or said. This is unnaturally hard to do with more complex rhymes but can be done.

kiwi-damnation, Not really. I have been playing with rhyme for a long time. There are forms that exist in this world that I haven’t tried, but that’s part of the adventure.

williamszm, I’m not sure I can claim to have mastered any type of rhyme, but I do think that I particularly struggle with internal rhymes. I would love to be able to use them as easily and elegantly as some poets I’ve read had.


Some questions for our readers!



  • Did any of the answers catch you off guard?
  • Did any of the answers particularly connect with you?
  • Are there any questions that you would have answered differently?


And this concludes our interview for today. I hope you could get some insight especially on the beauty and power of rhyming through this: it is a subject very dear to poets, in one sense or the other, and since it is not as common to find writers on dA that are really good at rhyming and fixed form poetry as it is to find good free verse ones, the idea was to spotlight rhyming poets and their process while at the same time highlighting the differences between their work and free verse poetry to help you draw a comparison. (:

Just a reminder: all of the deviants interviewed are so worth watching. :heart:


>>All hail GinkgoWerkstatt for this beautiful skin.
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JulieDraws05's avatar
Hi I was going through my journal and you were recommended so I clicked on it and read it! Maybe any of you could come to my account and check out what I wrote and draw!