Why Rhyme Rates
Remember how nursery rhymes got your attention as a child because of their singsong tunes and repetitions of matching sounds? Not all poems rhyme, but the use of rhyme is a characteristic associated with poetry. Rhyme schemes help maintain the reader's attention.
As noted earlier in the lesson, rhyme scheme is the repeated pattern of end rhymes in the stanzas of a poem. In an analysis of poetry, the rhyme scheme of a poem is marked using letters. Lines that have the same end rhyme are marked with the same letter. Together, the letters indicate the rhyme scheme. Let's look at some examples of poems that follow particular rhyme schemes.
