Sue and I could be called old fashioned poets, well if it wasn't that these days free verse is just as old fashioned!
It is going on for 100 years since a writer (who I shall not name for two reasons, one because why give an idiot the credit of using his name and two I can't remember it) declared that rhyme and metre were dead. Since then we have had the great, truly great, poets of the First World War and a whole succession of others who wrote with perfect rhyme and flow.
Read Dylan Thomas's "Rage against the dying of the light" and you are reading a Villanelle, yet for many people the form and the rhyme simply go unnoticed, that is part of a great poem for me, the technique should be hidden and all that is left should be the sound and the sense of the poem.
To get back to directly what we are looking for, we want poems that rhyme and flow, where the structure of the poem adds to the contents, doesn't cut across it. We both at times admire clever shaped or form poetry but for us, particularly in these contests, that should be secondary, if you want to win pour your passion into the contents, then make sure that the rhyme is perfect and when you read it aloud (you do always read your poems aloud, don't you?) the flow is totally natural. The words stress where they need to to make the poem work and you haven't twisted English to fit the words in. "This is the sort of thing up with which we will not put."
Rhyme.
Especially for these contests we are very strict on what we mean by rhyme. For instance; rests and best do not rhyme, low and cow do not rhyme and me and dream do not rhyme.
Some rhymes only work in some accents, I was pulled up on hearth and path which rhyme perfectly in Southern England but not the North and on taught and sport which only rhyme in Old England not in New, if you think any of your rhymes need the right accent then let the reader know!
We also largely mean end of line rhyme. Nothing against good internal rhymes, I love them, but what we are looking for here is "old fashioned" end rhyme. Finally for rhyme to work well it needs a rhyming scheme. Random lines that happen to rhyme simply wont cut it.
Flow
You cannot judge flow as you read to yourself, or as you write. It is essentially aural.
Is your poem easy to read aloud? No traps for the tongue? No squeezing in of an extra beat? No sentences that run from one line to the next without a natural pause?
And finally the contents
Are YOU in the poem? Does it read as though you believe every syllable? Does it paint a delicious picture? Does any reader know exactly what the poet was thinking, or rather what the poet wanted the reader to think he was thinking. A love poem should make every reader melt, a poem about a mountain view should have you scared to step forward, about a tragedy should have you crying buckets.
Of course as well as all that, it has to at least try to fit the theme!
Also we do not like "nasty" poetry, don't give us poems about murder maiming or suicide, any of those things can be in your poem, but neither of us want to read a guide on the best place to stab someone, or how to get the most blood out of your own veins.
Get all three of those right and you will write what we consider a great poem. We aren't looking for clever or difficult poems, they can be wonderful but so can a perfect rhyming quatrain (just 4 lines of poetry) or even a limerick.
If you're writing a poem to win
Then think of a way to begin
Then make it all rhyme
And stick close to time
And try to give readers a grin!
or
Let us know the way that you feel
Let all your phrases fit the theme
Make all your images seem real
Flow like a dream
Make each stanza rhyme and scan
Make your lines stand on their own
Do the very best a writer can
And we won't moan
We are running a large series of contests for rhyming poetry. Since many of our entrants, and there have been a lot of entrants, have queried their placement and our choice of winners, I thought I would write about the poetry that we like, and so what is likely to win.
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Why didnt I read this earlier
Wow Jeff some how you have managed to teach me more in one column than my tutor has in five months of form torture. Just confirms my decision for a certain challenge I guess.
xxx Jem -
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Remember this is just how I like my poetry. But for me there are some essential truths in it. Always consider how you want you poetry to be read, if it is for whispering into a lover's (or pet's!) ear after dark then read it and listen to it as though that was how you were getting it. If to address a crowd of thousands then stand up and orate!
If I have helped anyone even the tiniest bit in their poetry then I feel about 2 feet taller than I look!
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I understand that these contests belong to you and Sue Cardwell. I'd just like to point out the presence of slant (imperfect/near/ almost exact rhymes), eye rhymes (look like they rhyme but don't) riche rhyme (spelled the same but sound different or spelled different but sound the same), assonant (vowel rhymes), consonant (ending consonant rhymes), macaronic (a word from one language rhymed with a word from another language) and mosaic rhymes (multiple words used to rhyme such as Lord Byron rhyming intellectual with hen pecked you all) in classical poetry.
From: La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by John Keats
I.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
2.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
From: The Lady of Shalott
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
example 1:
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Example 2 & 3
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly
Down to tower'd Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers ''Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.'
Example 4:
The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
Example 5&6:
From the bank and from the river
He flash'd into the crystal mirror,
'Tirra lirra,' by the river
Example 7:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
Example 8:
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly
Example 9:
Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high
Note: the rhyme scheme for The Lady of Shallot is: aabbcdddc, examples 2&3 is an entire stanza from the poem, the rest are partial stanzas grouped with their like schemed rhymes that are not all perfect rhymes but don't take away from this classical masterpiece.
From: The Law of the Jungle
by Rudyard Kipling
When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be diminished by war.
From: The Outlaws
by Rudyard Kipling
ALl that they drew from Heaven above
Or digged from earth beneath,
They laid into their treasure-trove
And arsenals of death:
They traded with the careless earth,
And good return it gave:
They plotted by their neighbour's hearth
The means to make him slave.
When all was ready to their hand
They loosed their hidden sword,
And utterly laid waste a land
Their oath was pledged to guard.
From: A Dream Within A Dream
by Edgar Allen Poe
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
Many more of the classical, rhyming poets used rhymes that are not exact/ perfect/ true rhymes, I would actually venture to say that most have used alternative rhymes that cannot be qualified as exact, perfect or true or even near for that matter. In fact, eye rhymes seem more than exceptable in limited qualtity to not only Shakespeare but just about every other classical poet I have read or studied. Some used them more often than others, what they have in common are that they used them wisely and not so much as to cripple the cadence that rhyme gives lines of verse.
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Oh indeed, I could have given a list of thousands of great poets with broken rhyming, some of them in excellent poems. However these contests are set up specifically for rhyming poetry. Many of the HMs and even a few of the silvers and bronzes have had half-rhymes (Amera's bronze winning sonnet in the Love round for instance has one) but we both dislike them and this is a column on how to impress us!
A couple of the examples are lessened when heard in the original accents, Kipling reading his own poetry had a tendency to bend his pronunciation to make it work.
Byron's multi word rhyming is rather different, there you are definitely intended to pronounce the words to rhyme and is a good comic technique, I have my own minor example in rhyming "fantasy" with "Santa's, see" in a limerick.
As for Shakespeare many of his apparent eye-rhymes are much more down to the change in the way the language is spoken than to poor rhyming. Given that essentially none of his intended audience would ever see the written words. He also invented a good percentage of them so probably dictated exactly how they should be used!
If these were any series of contests my order of preference would be reversed. A great poem needs great content. Would Wilfred Owen have been a great poet without suffering life in the trenches? I doubt it. Next for me is flow, I always want my poetry read aloud and awkward scansion or tricky to say words are death to the spoken poem. Also the flow should match the content, Auden's Night Mail is perhaps the best example here, although the Charge of The Light Brigade is close.
Rhyme is, save in comic verse (and I love that above all others) usually last of the three. If the poem sounds good with poor rhyming, there is no problem.
To illustrate that I pay little attention to my own strictures perhaps my two favourite poems at the moment are Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. which contains worse than a rich rhyme, it actually "rhymes" drowning with drowning and Auden's Night Mail which not only has half rhymes but also entirely unrhymed stanzas. Having mentioned Auden I cannot resist quoting his rhyming "has stamped on" with "Wolverhampton" in tribute to Byron.
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