Sunday Mini-Challenge: Chained Rhyme, Part One

Chained, by smoorenburg ,flick'r Creative Commons License

Greetings and salutations, fellow toads, toadettes and toadlings, and all who follow the goings on at the pond. This is hedgewitch here. Since I abstained from our annual collaborative poetry endeavor, I felt the least I could do was to make a post or two of some kind to contribute to the fun; Kerry graciously suggested that I might want to try my hand at a form prompt for the Sunday Mini-Challenge. 

As those who follow this Sunday feature know, Kerry's are some large poetic form shoes to fill. (I mean that in the best possible way, Kerry, definitely not Crocs or anything!) While I love the stuff--the more complex and tortuous the better--I knew I would never be able to be as lucid as Kerry always is in laying out complicated form structures. So I immediately started looking for a compromise. I believe I've found one which I will present in two posts, of which this is the first. 

Chained, or linked rhyme is the play-pretty we're going to explore, and it has several definitions and many permutations. The concept of chaining a rhyme, or a chain rhyme scheme is very basic in poetry, and is used in many traditional poetic forms, such as the terza rima, and the Rubaiyat, and that type is defined by wikipedia simply as "the linking together of stanzas by carrying a rhyme over from one stanza to the next." We'll be dealing with that in the next chain rhyme prompt. For now let's explore the simpler and to me, more unusual type, also known as 'interlocking rhyme.'

In his classic Book of Forms, Lewis Turco defines it thus: 

"Linked rhyme (or chained rhyme) chimes the last syllable or syllables of a line with the first syllable or syllables of the next line…"

Here's an excerpt from an example Turco gives of a medieval Irish poem, The Charm of Eire, which shows how it goes:

" Charmed be this, the land of Eire

Fair isle of the fruitful sea

Trees be laden on the green hill

Filled with fruit be the rainy wood;

Moody with rain be the cascade

Made of falls be the lake of tarns…"

[above quoted material appears in The Book of Forms, by Lewis Turco, © 2000 by University Press of New England]

See?  Very simple and open-ended. No counting, no real stipulated meter (though this example has a definite four-beat cadence) and very easy to adapt to a more 'free verse' flow. Really, besides that linking rhyme of last word to first of next, the structure and direction of the form is loose and completely open-ended. 

Here are two short examples I scratched up that show two different styles (of many) that the form can take. 

First, merely rhyming the last syllable of one line to the first syllable of the next:

Love in a teapot
Hot and sweet
Beaten to gold light
Night poured away
Daylong through your fingers.

©joyannjones

©joyannjones

Then, you could also shake it up by working with end and/or internal, even indirect rhyme:

Open your eyes of umber
slumbering in my yesterday's head
Ready as always to go; stay instead
till after the threaded thunder.

©joyannjones

©joyannjones

 

(For a longer example, see the poem I've linked for this prompt.)

So the challenge, Toads, should you choose to accept it, is to write a poem using interlocking rhyme, where the last syllable or syllables on one line rhyme with the first syllable or syllables of the next. It can be short or long, formal or informal, on any topic and in any arrangement you fancy. As in the Irish verse above, and my examples, it can be one syllable only that rhymes(cascade/made), or it can be any form of the rhyming element (hills/filled, umber/slumbering) rather than an exact duplication. I hope you'll play around with various ways of using the repetition, get crazy and have some fun with it. Rules are made to be broken, or at least bent in a good cause, I always say.

Finally, I hope no one will find this form too tangled up, but rather as challenging and enjoyable as I did.  For those who like a visual starting point, I've included a few of my amateur photos. Please feel free to use them, with attribution.

If the form just doesn't appeal to you, you can write at will to any of these pics, or to the theme of the one below, 'Tangle.'  Remember to provide a link to the Garden with your post.

©joyannjones

The Sunday Challenge is posted on Saturday at noon CST to allow extra time for the creative process, so please link something new not an unrelated or previously written piece.  This is in the spirit of our Real Toads project to create opportunities for poets to be newly inspired.  Management reserves the right to remove unrelated links but invites you to share a poem of your choice on Open Link Monday.