Rhyming On

If you write poetry and you like rhymes how do you employ them? Do you always finish every other line with a word that rhymes? How far do takes your rhymes are you always looking for an exact match? When I began writing poetry this was me and to be honest done properly there's nothing at all wrong with that. If you've read my blogs you will know that I have an issue with repetition and this led me to experiment with rhymes. First it was not having exact matches for rhymes, using words that sounded roughly similar but were spelt differently such as "sun" and "come". Then I tried moving the rhymes so that you had to go an extra line to get the rhyme. Care has to be taken here to keep the flow of the poem alive. I tinkered with alliteration and even wrote a whole piece utilising this technique with each line having a different defining letter and no rhyme at all. The key to this poem is it's rhythm; it's about Jesus in the boat on lake Galilee calming the storm ( see Luke in the New Testament chapter 8 verse 22) so there is an obvious crescendo to follow.
I tried repeating rhymes at the end of three line stanzas and using groups of words to make rhymes such as "load me" with "mould me". In the poem these two rhymes are all that appears on their lines so I'm trying to control the way you say the words to enhance the rhyming effect. What I have discovered is that there is an endless variation of ways to employ rhyme and that poems often benefit from this variation. At the end of the day poetry is a form of communication where words are sculpted to achieve a goal. Tinker, play and experiment and let me know how you get on.

Peace Dave.