“I have not hesitated to use a deficient rhyme when the choice seemed to lie between forcing an exact rhyme and keeping the language more natural.”
–Inferno translator John Ciardi
If you’ve been writing songs for a while, or if you’ve read a book about songwriting, you’ve likely heard this advice already: don’t force your rhymes! This holds true in both poetry and song lyrics—and apparently it also holds true for John Ciardi, who laboriously translated every line of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno from Italian to English.
After that very worthwhile tour of terza rima Hell, he probably knows what he’s doing.
A perfect rhyme is just one type of sonic connection that can exist between syllables. Here are the criteria for a perfect rhyme:
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the vowel sounds of these syllables will be exactly the same, and
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any consonant sounds after the vowel will also match.
Watch me ruin the following couplet by forcing an awkward perfect rhyme:
He fooled around, and he got caught
Another woman’s love he sought
It rhymes, but doesn’t it still sound strange?
You might plausibly say the first line in conversation, but the second one would earn you some funny looks. Even if you used the word “sought” for some reason, you wouldn’t reverse the order of a line that way.
This hearkens back to a previous songwriting tip: write conversationally. Even when it costs you a perfect rhyme (perfect rhymes are fine, by the way, as long as they don’t sound obviously forced, as in the example above with “caught” and “sought”).
Here’s an imperfect rhyme in a much more natural-sounding line. I think it’s an improvement–and when we sing, we exaggerate vowels, so many listeners don’t even notice when we use imperfect rhymes in lyrics:
He fooled around, and he got caught
It came to light and he took off…
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