Poetry insights:rhyme in poetry.

Introduction.

Rhyme refers to the similar sounding words,usually vowel sounds or rather assonance,at the end of verses in a poem.Rhyme in poetry can be studied,using this featured poem as a case study.Rhyme in poetry is very common,but there are rules for it as defined by rhyme schemes.

Poetry is still a novel subject in Kenya,considered the preserve of the cultured,and is in fact not very commonly understood.The most common type of poetry in Kenya is free verse,because it's the easiest to compose,having literally no rules about it.A growing number of poets are however exploring rhymed poetry and lyric poetry,but harder to compose types like black verse and sonnets have almost no representation.Kenya's premier poetry festival,CHEKI CHEKI,which is semi annual,is the best local initiative to improve poetry as an art form,by raising public awareness,and nuturing poets to get better at the art form.

Rhyme in poetry.

Poems are musical compositions,and infact were traditionally sung,not read.The use of rhyme in poetry is therefore as old as poetry itself.Usually the rhyme is in the sound of words,not the letters of the words,assonance,hinting at the original musical viewpoint of the origins of poetry.A stanza is to a poem what a paragraph is to prose,and rhyme can be uniform across all stanzas for a poem with several,or changing with each stanza.A common misconception is that a poem has to have rhyme for it to be musical,In truth,any right use of words in a poem will tend to be musical,whether there is rhyme or not,because of the tendency to have a flow of thought in poetry,on the message being passed across.This also is rhyme in poetry.

To have the different types of rhyme in a poem,you need to concentrate your message in a few choice words,as each word in a poetry line matters,and usually you will need to edit the first version of your new poem before you get the rhyming right.Study here the featured poem for this subject,and expect more material on the wide subject this week,as we continue with the CHEKI CHEKI poetry festival.

A rhyme scheme is the ordered pattern of rhymes at the end of line of a poem.There are different rhyme schemes in poetry,sometimes dependent on the type of poem,like the ABAB rhyme scheme of quatrains(stanzas of four lines),or it's variation ABCB rhyme scheme.There is also the AABBA rhyme scheme of poems of the type limmericks. Use of rhyme schemes in the proper way improves the readers  enjoyment of a poem by the reader,and does the poet credit.