If your rhyme is stuck and you can’t get by
then you may need the use of a hy-
phen implanted at the end of a line
and soon your poem will sound like a Stein-
way piano in a grand concert hall,
its notes floating in the air like a ball-
oon. So what if the words happen to spill
into two lines? Do not pity these syll-
ables, orphaned, adrift, left there to hang;
their beauty is in the way that they dang-
le.
Writing poems which rhyme can be tricky and tough
for words often look like they’re from the same bough,
yet the end of each line sounds quite different, though,
and best hidden behind a hiccough or cough.
I wonder, did this bother Byron or Yeats?
Or Larkin or Wordsworth, Auden or Keats?
Were opportunities presented or simply just threats?
Could they think up their rhymes without caveats?
But what should it matter when all’s said and done
if you should read this as scone when I meant scone?
It’s hardly a crime for which you need to atone;
it would all be baloney to an abalone.
So perhaps I should not be quite so afeard.
Some poems are best seen rather than heard.
Brian Bilston 