Toe in the Water

Rhyme Time

Rhyme Time

In all my time before joining WDC, I think I wrote only one poem that contained rhyme. For me, rhyme had degenerated into the stuff of advertising ditties, nursery rhymes, and bawdy, badly written doggerel. It had been overused to the point of uselessness, in my opinion.

But then WDC dragged me into areas and genres that I wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole (whatever that is) in my younger days. And one thing I found was that rhyme was useful when you wanted to write a comic poem. It was great for the task and, besides, it came so easily!

Rhyme began to appear in more of my poems, especially the short ones that I had to produce daily. And living with the thing brought familiarity, so that I began to see other possibilities in it. I couldn’t resist and began to experiment.

I found that it’s more than good at comedic stuff; it can hide a deeper meaning in an apparently harmless little ditty. And there came times when it was just more appropriate than my elephant gun, good old free verse (I know it’s really blank verse but habit insists). Sometimes I went really weird with it, using it in unexpected ways like jostling with prose to make it perform like poetry and internal rhymes and such.

So this is my apology to the past and a brief tipping of the forelock to rhyme. It ain’t so bad after all.


Word count: 243