Rhyme, or, more properly, RIME (the former spelling being merely due to a confusion with the Greek rhythm), is itself a native Teutonic word; A.S. rīm, Icel. rīma, Ger. reim, and O.H. Ger. rīm (whence Fr. rime, Ital. rīma); probably cognate with Gr. ἀριθμός, 'number.' In early English rime (and the same is true of Ger. reim and the other forms of the word in other northern tongues as well as in the Romanic) meant simply a poem, a numbered or versified piece (compare Lat. numeri, 'numbers' = verses, versification); but it has now come to signify what is the most prominent mark of versification in all these tongues—viz. the recurrence of similar sounds at certain intervals. As there may be various degrees and kinds of resemblance between two syllables, there are different kinds of rime. When words begin with the same consonant we have Alliteration (q.v.), which was the prevalent form of rime in the earlier Teutonic poetry, as in Anglo-Saxon. In Spanish and Portuguese we find employed a peculiar kind of rime called Assonance, consisting in the coincidence of the vowels of the corresponding syllables, without regard to the consonants; this accords well with the character of these languages, which abound in full-toned vowels, but is ineffective in English and other languages in which consonants predominate. In its more usual sense, however, rime denotes correspondence in the final syllables of words, and is chiefly used to mark the ends of the lines or verses in poetry. Complete identity in all the parts of the syllables beginning with the same consonants constitutes what the French call rich rime, as in modèle, fidèle; beauté, santé. They designate as poor rimes most of such rimes as English verse allows—collocations of similar syllables beginning with different consonants, as page and rage, nuit and instruct. 'This difference of taste,' says Mr F. W. H. Myers, 'seems partly to depend on the more intimate liaison existing in French pronunciation between the consonant and the syllable which follows it—which syllable will often consist of a vowel sound very rapidly pronounced, like the terminations in the accented é, or very indeterminately pronounced, like the nasal terminations in m and n. If the consonant which gives the whole character to terminations like these differs in the two rhyming lines, there seems to be hardly enough substance left in the rhyme to satisfy the ear's desire for a recurring sound. This view is illustrated by such English rhymes as alone and flown, where an additional richness seems sometimes gained from the presence of the l in both the rhyming syllables.' Undoubtedly one of the delights of rime is expectance, but that of uniformity in variety, rather than of monotonous and absolute uniformity. Although such rimes are not only allowed but sought after in French, in English they are deservedly considered faulty, or rather as not true rimes at all. No one thinks of making deplore rime with explore. Rhyming syllables in English must agree in so far, and differ in so far: the vowel and what follows it—if anything follow it—must be the same in both; the articulation before the vowel must be different. Thus, mark rimes with lark, bark, ark, but not with remark. In the case of mark and ark the absence of any initial articulation in the latter of the two makes the necessary difference. As an example of rime where nothing follows the vowel we may take be-love, which rimes with fore-go, or with O! but not with lo. To make a perfect rime it is necessary, besides, that the syllables be both accented; free and merrily can hardly be said to rime. It is almost needless to remark that rime depends on the sound, and not on the spelling. Plough and enough do not make a rime, nor case and decease.
Such words as roaring, de-ploring, form double rimes; and un-fortunate, im-portunate, triple rimes. In double or triple rimes the first syllable must be accented, and the others ought to be unaccented, and to be completely identical. In the sacred Latin hymns of the middle ages the rimes are all double or triple. This was a necessity of the Latin language, in which the inflectional terminations are without accent, which throws the accent in most cases on the syllable next the last—do-lorum, vicorum; sup-plicia, con-vicia. Although rimes occur chiefly between the end-syllables of different lines, they are not unfrequently used within the same line, especially in popular poetry:
And then to see how ye're negleekit,
How huff'd, and cuff'd, and disrespeekit.
And ice mast-high came floating by.
When two successive lines rime they form a couplet; three form a triplet. Often the lines rime alternately or at greater intervals, forming groups of four (quatrains) or more. A group of lines embracing all the varieties of metre and combinations of rime that occur in the piece forms a section called a stave, sometimes a stanza, often, but improperly, a verse. In the days of elaborate Acrostics (q.v.), verses constructed in shapes, and other conceits, it was the fashion to interlace rimes in highly artificial systems; almost the only complex arrangements now eurrent in English are the various forms of the sonnet, and the Spenserian stanza. Tennyson has accustomed the English ear to a quatrain in which, instead of alternate rimes, the first line rimes with the fourth, and the second with the third.
It is a mistake to suppose that rime is a mere ornament to versification. Besides being in itself a pleasing musical accord, it serves to mark the endings of the lines and other sections of the metre, and thus renders the rhythm more distinct and appreciable than the accents alone can do. So much is this the case that in French, in which the accents are but feeble, metre without rime is so undistinguishable from prose that blank verse has never obtained a footing, notwithstanding the war once waged by French scholars against rimed versification. 'The advantages of rime,' says Guest, 'have been felt so strongly that no people have ever adopted an accentual rhythm without also adopting rime.' The Greek and Latin metres of the classic period, depending upon time or quantity, and not upon accent, were able to dispense with the accessory of rime; but, as has been well observed by Trench (Introduction to Sacred Latin Poetry), even 'the prosodic poetry of Greece and Rome was equally obliged to mark this (the division into sections or verses), though it did it in another way. Thus, had dactyls and spondees been allowed to be promiscuously used throughout the hexameter line, no satisfying token would have reached the ear to indicate the close of the verse; and if the hearer had once missed the termination of the line it would have been almost impossible for him to recover it. But the fixed dactyl and spondee at the end of the line answer the same purpose of strongly marking the close as does the rime in the accentuated verse; and in other metres, in like manner, licenses permitted in the beginning of the line are excluded at its close, the motives for this greater strictness being the same,' It is chiefly, perhaps, from failing to satisfy this necessary condition that modern unrimed verse is found unsatisfactory, at least for popular poetry; and it may be doubted whether it is not owing to the classical prejudices of scholars that our common English blank verse got or maintained the hold it has.
The objection that rime was 'the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre,' rests mainly on ignorance of its real history. It cannot be considered as the exclusive invention of any particular people or age. It is something human, and universal as poetry or music—the result of the instinctive craving for well-marked recurrence and accord. The oldest poems of the Chinese, Indians, and Arabs are rimed; so are those of the Irish and Welsh. In the few fragments of the earliest Latin poetry that are extant, in which the metre was of an accentual, not quantitative kind, there is a manifest tendency to terminations of similar sound. This native tendency was overlaid for a time by the importation from Greece of the quantitative metres; yet even under the dominance of this exotic system riming verses were not altogether unknown; Ovid especially shows a liking for them:
Quot cælumellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas; and in the decline of classicality they become more common. At last, when learning began to decay under the interruptions of the northern nations, and a knowledge of the quantity of words—a thing in a great measure arbitrary, and requiring to be learned—to be lost, the native and more natural property of accent gradually reappeared as the ruling principle of Latin rhythm, and along with it the tendency to rime. It was in this new vehicle that the early Christian poets sought to convey their new ideas and aspirations. The rimes were at first often rude, and not sustained throughout, as if lighted upon by chance. Distinct traces of the adoption of rime are to be seen as early as the hymns of Hilary (died 368), and the system attained its greatest perfection in the 12th and 13th centuries. In refutation of the common opinion that the Latin hymnologists of the middle ages borrowed the art of rime from the Teutonic nations, Dr Guest brings the conclusive fact that no poem exists written in a Teutonic dialect with final rime before Otfrid's Evangel, which was written in Frankish about 870. Alliteration had previously been the guiding principle of Teutonic rhythms; but after a struggle, longer protracted in England than on the Continent, it was superseded by end-rimes.
See the articles ALLITERATION, BLANK VERSE, HEXAMETER, METRE, ODE, POETRY, and SONNET; also Guest's History of English Rhythms (ed. by Professor Skeat, 1882), where the whole subject is learnedly and elaborately treated; Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry (1864); F. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, Sequenzen, und Leiche (Heid. 1841); and Schipper's Englische Metrik (Bonn, 1881-89).