Rhyme is one of the things that gives words the most sound, and since ancient times it has been used to sing and recite poetry and write songs and plays, just like now. The latest version or application of the rhyme is rap and hip-hop, in a protest style, in which some part of the lyrics that seeks the rhyme is recited quickly and sung to have a more forceful and catchy effect.
In addition, the rhyme helps a lot to remember a song lyrics, a poem or a theatrical text -where it has also had a great tradition-. Obviously, rhyming is not simply joining words that end the same, that is, it is not about sticking “tenderness” with “vegetable”, or joining words by their sound even though the meaning does not exist.
The rhyme can be simple or more complex, that is why there is metrics, the study that addresses the way of rhyming with more complexity and the different structures that already exist and that we must not invent to rhyme verses, according to the phonetic forms of how the phrases sound in a language like Spanish, forms that are different in each language, when taking into account the different sounds of each language.
So that you have some basic but sufficient notions about how to rhyme your own songs, lyrics or poems, we give you some important information below.
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Verse categories
The word verse comes from the Latin versus, which simply means line, and it is each independent line of a poem or the lyrics of a song, after which there is a pause and is subject to some kind of measure or rule, or at least, at a certain cadence or rhythm, which is the essence for a verse to sound “good”. The rules of the verse are not a harness nor do they have to make the verse seem stiff, but are the result of the experience of the best ways to combine the rhymes and rhythm from the endings of the words, but also the number of words. syllables and the place where they are stressed, which produces the musicality that is sought.
In each language there are measurement rules when building a verse to combine rhyme with length, and in Spanish the basic rule says that the measure is the grave or flat word, that is, the one that has the accent on the penultimate syllable, such as “lata”, “violeta” or “trancado”. This is accompanied by other very simple complementary rules: if a verse ends in an acute word -the one in which the accent is on the last syllable, such as “nailed”, then when counting the syllables in the verse, one more syllable must be added and if the last word of the verse is esdrújula, that is, the accent is on the penultimate syllable of that word, one syllable is subtracted.
An example of the number of syllables that must be counted with verses that end in an acute word is this poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:
“Foolish men who accuse
women without reason
without seeing that you are the occasion
of the same thing you blame.”
All the verses have 7 natural syllables, but when it comes to rhyming they all have 8 syllables. Keep that in mind if you want to write quality rhymes.
Then there are several rules that can lengthen or shorten the count of syllables, the most important is the sinalefa, in which if a word ends in a vowel and the next one begins with another vowel, those last and first syllables are joined. For example: “Where I was embarked”, Don-dees-tu-veem bar-ca-do, 7 syllables.
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Consonant and assonance rhyme
There are two kinds of rhyme, the consonant and the assonance. The consonant or imperfect occurs when the rhyme is exact between the end of one verse and another, coinciding all the sounds at the end of the word, starting from the last accented vowel.
The assonance or imperfect rhyme occurs when what matches are no longer all the sounds -more than letters, since, for example, c and z can sound the same, as in “quote” and “zigzag”- but only the vowels. Of course, also, from the last accented vowel of the final word of the verse.
An example of a consonant rhyme, from a famous poem by Rubén Darío, “Sonatina”:
The princess is sad… what will the princess have?
Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth from
her who has lost her laugh, who has lost her color.
The princess is pale in her golden chair,
the keyboard of her sonorous harpsichord is mute;
and a forgotten glass faints a flower.
And an example of assonance rhyme, from another well-known poem, by César Vallejo, “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca”:
I will die in Paris with a downpour,
a day of which I already have the memory.
I’ll die in Paris, and I won’t run,
maybe on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
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The stanzas
The verses are named according to the number of syllables they have: pentasyllables, five, hendecasyllables, eleven, although those with fourteen verses are called alejandrinos. Later you can form paragraphs with the verses, called stanzas, and each one has its own structure. There are many, and some have been cultivated more in some periods than in others, combining the number of syllables with the number of verses, and they can even be built taking into account the place of the accents.
Some of the best known are the couplet or couplet, the tercet, the redondilla, the cuaderna vía -with alejandrinos-, the copla -with four assonant octosyllables-, the seguidilla, the quintet, the eighth real, the tenth, and perhaps the most famous, the sonnet, of two quatrains plus two tercets, with all the verses hendecasyllabic.
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Start with the couplet
The simplest way to start rhyming is to write a couplet, two verses that will rhyme with each other, and to make it even easier, try to do it in assonance rhyme, that is, two verses whose final words will only rhyme in the vowels; remember, from the last stressed vowel. As the first verse, don’t think about the syllables of each verse either, something you can fine-tune later. Think of a topic that inspires and motivates you. For example: “Without any inscription / there will be my grave”, by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.
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Advance to larger stanzas
Knowing the different verses with measured rhyme will help you a lot when it comes to rhyming, because it is like drawing a sketch and outlining it on top of it next, or it can also be similar to filling in a crossword puzzle. You can draw a grid, for example, of a triplet. You know that there are three verses of major art, that is, of more than eight syllables, in which the first rhymes consonantly with the third, leaving the second free. Therefore, you have three lines or verses to write, which can be eleven syllables long, and two words at the end of the first and last verse have to rhyme. Play to find those two rhyming words first. For example, “season” and “emotion”. Now you have to look for words that contain a total of seven syllables in both verses, since the words chosen to rhyme are acute, therefore, add one more syllable, and thus you will obtain two hendecasyllables. Think of the images that both words evoke in you and try several sentences about what they suggest to you. Make all the tests you need, concentrating on what you want to express, using the final words as threads to pull the ball of the poem. Here’s an example:
“When I arrived at the remote station,
I was overwhelmed with emotion.”
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Rhyming dictionaries
Among other tools that you can use to unleash yourself in the old art of rhyming, you have rhyming dictionaries, both on paper and on the internet, where you will find a wide assortment of words that rhyme with each other, with which you can start writing verses. rhymed. You can write verses of any length that are coordinated in their final sounds, but keep in mind the familiar verses cited above, which will serve as templates for building strong rhymes with a musicality and rhythm beyond simple rubbish.