what are imperfect rhymes?
In: Culture
ok what other flair do i put
A perfect rhyme has the same stressed vowel and the same sound ending the rhymed words after that vowel. Take the first two lines of “The Tyger” by William Blake
> Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
*Bright* and *night* are perfect rhymes – the stressed vowel is the same (the I), and they both end in the “ight” sound.
Imperfect rhymes are anything else – like words that sort of rhyme but have a slightly different sound like, say, *lean* and *gleam.* The sounds ending them are different (n vs. m), but similar enough that they sound pretty close to a rhyme, since they have the same vowels. Or they could be words that have to be fiddled with a bit to make them rhyme, like, say, “hammer” and “Alabama.” If I fiddled with the word a bit and said hammer like “hamma,” it would rhyme perfectly with “Alabama,” like the Red Hot Chili Peppers do in “Dani California.”
And then there are eye rhymes, which are words that look like they should rhyme when written, but don’t actually when spoken. Remember “The Tyger,” and its perfect rhyme from before? The next two lines are an imperfect rhyme – an eye rhyme:
> What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
You’re not supposed to pronounce it like “sym-met-trI,” or anything. *Eye* and *symmetry* don’t rhyme, but they look like they could, and historically, they might have rhymed back before English started shifting all of its vowels (well before this poem was written, by the way). But it still gives your brain a little bit of that rhyming pleasure when you read it, so it’s not uncommon to see poets use eye rhymes like that.
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