انگریزی
What Is a Rhyme Scheme?
The pattern of end rhymes written as letters. Labelled on a real Gray stanza, with the common patterns from couplet to sonnet and how to mark a half rhyme.
Rhyme scheme
A rhyme scheme is the pattern made by the rhyming words at the ends of lines, recorded by giving each new rhyme sound the next letter of the alphabet.
- دیگر نام
- Rhyme pattern
- طلبہ کہاں پڑھتے ہیں
- Grade 6 English, the first time a poem is examined as a made object rather than as a message, and again at GCSE and IGCSE, where a comparison question can turn on why one poet keeps a scheme and another abandons it.
مختصر جواب
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes in a poem, written as letters: the first line's rhyme sound is A, the next new sound is B, and any line rhyming with an earlier one repeats that line's letter. A stanza rhyming day, lea, way, me is ABAB.
ایک مثال
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, A The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, B The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, A And leaves the world to darkness and to me. B
Thomas Gray's opening stanza is labelled by ear, not by spelling. Day is the first sound heard, so it takes A. Lea is a new sound, so it takes B. Way rhymes with day, so it takes the letter already given to that sound. Me rhymes with lea, so it takes B. The scheme is ABAB, and the labelling required four decisions, one per line, each of them nothing more than: is this sound new, or have I heard it already?
Labelling by ear, one line at a time
The letters carry no meaning of their own. A is simply the first sound, not a grand or important sound, and a poem's scheme is written out fresh for each stanza rather than continued across the whole poem unless the rhymes genuinely continue.
The single most common error is labelling by spelling. Love and move look like a rhyme and are not one; cough and bough look unlike and are not one either. Say the line endings aloud, or under your breath in an exam hall, and label what you hear. A poet who wrote for the ear expects to be read by it.
The patterns worth recognising on sight
A handful of schemes account for most of what a student meets, and recognising them saves time in a closed-book exam, where the useful observation is rarely the letters themselves but what the poet does with or against them.
It is equally worth being able to say that a poem has no scheme. Blank verse is unrhymed lines in a regular metre, most familiarly the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's plays. Free verse abandons both rhyme and fixed metre. Neither is a failure to rhyme, and writing about either as though the poet forgot is a costly misreading.
- AA — a rhyming couplet
- AABB — successive couplets, as in Blake's 'The Tyger'
- ABAB — alternate rhyme, as in Gray's 'Elegy'
- ABCB — the ballad stanza, where only the second and fourth lines rhyme
- ABBA — enclosed rhyme
- ABAB CDCD EFEF GG — the Shakespearean sonnet, ending on a couplet
- ABBAABBA, then CDECDE or CDCDCD — the Petrarchan sonnet, with the turn at line nine
- AABBA — the limerick
- ABA BCB CDC — terza rima, each stanza handing a rhyme to the next
Half rhymes, eye rhymes, and what letter to give them
Rhymes are not all complete, and the imperfect ones are usually the interesting ones. Blake ends the first stanza of 'The Tyger' with eye and symmetry, which look like a pair on the page and do not quite sound like one. Wilfred Owen built 'Strange Meeting' almost entirely from pararhyme — escaped with scooped, groined with groaned — where the consonants match and the vowel refuses to, so every couplet closes slightly wrong on purpose.
There is no single agreed notation for these. Some editors use the same letter, some add a mark or a lower-case letter to signal that the rhyme is imperfect. In an exam the safe course is to use the same letter, because the line is occupying that position in the pattern, and then say in words that the rhyme is a half rhyme and what the imperfection does. The observation earns the mark; the notation never does.
عام سوالات
How do you write out a rhyme scheme?
Read the last word of each line in order. Give the first sound the letter A. For every line after it, ask whether the sound has already appeared: if it has, reuse that letter; if it has not, take the next unused letter. Four lines produce four decisions and the pattern falls out.
What is the rhyme scheme of a sonnet?
It depends which sonnet. The Shakespearean form runs ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, three quatrains and a closing couplet. The Petrarchan runs ABBAABBA in the octave, then CDECDE or CDCDCD in the sestet, with the turn arriving at line nine. Both are fourteen lines, and identifying which one you have is usually worth saying.
What if a line does not rhyme with anything?
It is commonly marked X to show it stands alone, though conventions vary and some marking schemes simply give it the next unused letter. Either way, an unrhymed line inside an otherwise rhyming poem is worth a sentence in an answer: it is almost always deliberate and almost always placed where the poem changes.
What is the difference between blank verse and free verse?
Blank verse has a strict metre and no rhyme — unrhymed iambic pentameter, the form most of Shakespeare's dialogue is written in. Free verse has neither a fixed metre nor a rhyme scheme. Blank verse is a discipline without rhyme; free verse is a poem that has set both aside.
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لفظ جاننا اور اسے استعمال کرنا الگ بات ہے
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