To Rhyme, or Not To Rhyme?
The Theme for this week is POETRY.
But, there’s a twist – or three.
This week’s challenge was inspired by a dilemma faced by our erstwhile singers at a recent choir practice, which involved people arguing over which verses of a (rather longish) song to do. The problem was, the lyrics were all rather horrible. The rhymes in particular were downright unethical – by which I mean, torture of the ears and tongue was involved merely in speaking them aloud. Which made me think about the fate of so many poor words, once full of grace and beauty, that have over the years been trammeled into the muck of hackneyed insipidness through misuse or overuse. And so, your task this week, brave writers, is to rescue those poor words from the depths of cliché hell, to bring them back from the brink of meaninglessness, to recapture the majesty and power these words might have once wielded. Actually, most of the words on their own aren’t in that bad shape, it’s when they’re combined in rhyming couplets and triplets that they meet their worst fate.
Your quest – should you choose to accept it – is to take three rhyming words (the cheezier the rhyme, the better), and use each of the words in a context that (a) doesn’t rhyme them with other words, and (b) tries to recapture some innate beatific quality of the word that may have been lost over time.
Now, this does not mean you can’t submit a rhyming poem – as usual, the form of your creative endeavour is completely up to you. The only rule is that you can’t rhyme the words to each other, or to other similar sounding words. You also don’t have to submit a poem – the theme of poetry can be interpreted however you see fit.
The following are examples only. You can pick one of these, or you can make up your own set of three rhyming words (just make sure if you choose the latter, that you list the three words somewhere at the beginning or end of your post, so people know what you were getting at).
Triad Examples:
Moon, June, croon
Rain, plain, Spain
Arise, lies, surmise
Bees, knees, please
…you get the idea.
As always – have fun! Be brave. Go where no writer has gone before.
And the usual reminders: Please remember to include the permalink to your post, and don’t panic if your comments don’t show up right away – they’ll all reappear in good time.
Saturday Scribes 