Rhyme scheme

In practice

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming sounds at the ends of a poem's lines, written as letters. The first end sound is A, the next new sound is B, and each letter returns whenever its sound does. A stanza ending in light, rain, night and lane is ABAB: lines one and three rhyme, and so do lines two and four.

Rhyme is about sound, not spelling. Light and night rhyme; through and rough do not, though they look alike. Pronunciation matters too: again rhymes with rain for some speakers and with pen for others. When a scheme depends on an accent or on an older pronunciation, say which reading you are using.

A scheme is a tool for shaping expectation. Once the ear learns a pattern, it waits for each sound to come back, and the poet can reward that wait, delay it or break it to mark a turn. The same pattern can feel playful, solemn or ominous depending on the words and rhythm, so choose a scheme for the movement you want between lines, and listen for places where the rhyme starts choosing your meaning for you.

A rhyme scheme inside a screenplay

The lyric lines follow ABAB: burning and returning share the A sound, way and stay the B. Because the lyrics are sung, the screenplay sets them in its lyric format, one line per sung line, so a reader hears the scheme the way an audience will. June stopping after the fourth line tells us the song, and the waiting it describes, is not finished.

How to work out a rhyme scheme

Read the poem aloud and listen to the last stressed sound of each line. Give the first ending the letter A. If the second ending rhymes with it, it is also A; if not, it is B. Keep going, comparing each new ending with every sound you have already labeled, and assign the next unused letter to each new sound.

The same four words can make different patterns. Light, night, rain, lane is AABB. Light, rain, night, lane is ABAB. Light, rain, lane, night is ABBA. Rearranging the sounds changes which lines feel paired, alternating or enclosed, even before you change a single word.

For a poem with several stanzas, you can keep counting letters through the whole poem or restart at A in each stanza when describing a repeating form. Both are common; say which you are doing. An unrhymed line takes its own letter, and some analysts use X to make clear it has no partner, so ABCB can also be written XAXA.

Common rhyme schemes and forms

Couplets (AABB) pair neighboring lines and can sound decisive or playful. Alternate rhyme (ABAB) links lines across a gap and keeps a stanza moving. Enclosed rhyme (ABBA) wraps an inner pair inside an outer one. The ballad stanza (ABCB) rhymes only its second and fourth lines, which leaves room for storytelling. Monorhyme (AAAA) repeats one sound throughout.

Some forms are defined partly by their scheme. A Shakespearean sonnet runs ABAB CDCD EFEF GG: three quatrains and a closing couplet, as in Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" A Petrarchan sonnet opens with ABBAABBA. A limerick is AABBA. Terza rima, the chain Dante wrote his Commedia in, links its stanzas ABA BCB CDC, each middle sound starting the next stanza's rhyme.

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" uses AABA, with each stanza's unrhymed third line supplying the next stanza's rhyme, until the last stanza closes on DDDD. A villanelle, such as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," uses only two rhyme sounds across nineteen lines. The letters alone do not make any of these forms; line count, meter and the movement of the argument matter too.

Kinds of rhyme: perfect, slant, internal and more

Perfect rhyme matches the stressed vowel and every sound after it: night and light, returning and burning. Slant rhyme, also called near or half rhyme, matches only part of the sound, as in heart and hurt or soul and all. Emily Dickinson used slant rhyme so often that it became part of her voice. If you give slant rhymes the same letter in an analysis, say so.

Masculine rhyme falls on a single stressed final syllable (day, away). Feminine rhyme adds an unstressed syllable after the stress (burning, returning), which gives a softer, falling ending. Eye rhyme looks like a rhyme but does not sound like one (love and move). Internal rhyme happens inside a line, as in Poe's "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary," and is usually not counted in the end-rhyme scheme.

Rhyme works alongside other sound devices. Assonance repeats vowel sounds and consonance repeats consonants, and both can echo without forming a full rhyme. Meter is the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. Enjambment carries a sentence past the end of a line, so a poem can rhyme ABAB while its sentences run across the line breaks.

Rhyme scheme in songs and screenplays

Song lyrics use the same patterns as poems, often with more slant rhyme, because a melody can bend vowels to fit. Many verses rhyme only the second and fourth lines (ABCB), and choruses often lean on repeated words or monorhyme so they are easy to sing back. Hip-hop builds dense multisyllable and internal rhymes that a simple letter scheme only partly captures.

In a screenplay, sung lyrics are set apart from spoken dialogue, typically in italics or a dedicated lyric format, one sung line per line. That lets a reader hear the rhyme the way an audience will. Plot's lyric element does this formatting for you, so a musical number or a character's song keeps its line breaks, and its rhyme scheme, on the page.

Rhyme in spoken dialogue is rarer and usually deliberate: a villain who speaks in couplets, a children's story, a comic character who cannot stop rhyming. Shakespeare often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet to signal a close. A single unexpected rhyme in prose dialogue can sound like a joke, so use it only when you mean the audience to notice.

Write a stanza without forcing the rhyme

Describe a place in four plain sentences. Pick two pairs of end words from that scene and arrange them as ABAB. Write toward those endings, then check that every line says something you meant. If a line needs a filler phrase or twisted word order to land on its rhyme, change the end word instead.

Now rewrite the same scene as AABB, then as ABCB. Read all three versions aloud. Notice which ideas sound connected in each, and where the rhyme feels like a click or a cage. Keep the version whose sound supports the scene's meaning, and check each rhyme in your own accent.