Weekly Prompt Five: Nesting Rhyme

EMOTION/MOTION/OCEAN/SHUN

(taken from Susan Mitchell)

Weekly Prompt 5

ENGL 3150: Molberg

If you read the title of this exercise aloud, you will hear a quadruple rhyme. But if you examine the words themselves, you will notice that there is something special about this rhyme scheme. The sound of the word shun is contained in ocean, the sounds of both shun and ocean in motion, and shun, ocean and motion can all be folded into emotion. Such a rhyme scheme, which incidentally was favored by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, is called diminishing rhyme because the rhyming words get smaller as you move from emotion to shun. But I prefer the term nesting rhymes because the words nest one inside the other like Russian wooden dolls.

Write an eighteen-line poem that uses diminishing, or nesting rhyme. Order your eighteen lines into six three-line stanzas. Each stanza will take its end rhymes from a single word. Say, for example, the first line of the first stanza ends with the word manifold. Then the second line would end with the word fold, the third line with the word old. For the second stanza, choose a different word that introduces a new rhyme sound—say stumble, tumble, bull. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to the same rhyme sounds for all eighteen lines as long as you use six different words to produce those rhymes—e.g., emotion supplying the rhymes for stanza one, attention supplying the rhymes tension and shun for stanza two. But realize if you do that, you will make writing the poem more difficult.

   Paradise.

By George Herbert

I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW Among  thy  trees, which in a ROW To thee  both  fruit  and order  OW. What  open  force,  or  hidden  CHARM Can blast my fruit, or  bring me HARM, While   the   inclosure  is   thine   ARM. Inclose   me   still  for  fear  I   START. Be   to  me  rather   sharp  and  TART, Then let me want thy hand and ART. When thou dost greater judgments SPARE, And with thy  knife  but  prune  and PARE, Ev’n   fruitfull   trees   more   fruitful  ARE. Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND: Such   cuttings    rather   heal  then   REND: And  such   beginnings   touch  their  END.