Quotes about rhyme
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“The stately ship is seen no more,
The fragile skiff attains the shore;
And while the great and wise decay,
And all their trophies pass away,
Some sudden thought, some careless rhyme,
Still floats above the wrecks of Time.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) British politician

On an old Song. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Time

“You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i' sono.
Canzone 1, opening lines
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Youth, Error, Heart, Parting

“Listen to me, skull!
Under your thin brittle boneplates
what black memories haunt you?
What do you want? What do you dream of? …
Is it your soul you think of,
flickering through frightful nights? …
Skull, I must have been raving mad
to smash you with my bare fist.
Scarlet blood thickens on my fingers,
plagues me to spew these rhymes, and still
my teeth want to tear you to pieces!
Like a raven I'll swallow even the sucked-out bones
to get a fresh taste of the past,
a drop from the torrent of months and years.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"Skull", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), ISBN 978-0394494722, p. 166 Original in Vietnamese https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/vietnamese/, and an English translation by Hai-Dang Phan https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/, available at Asymptote.

Dreams, Soul, Thinking, Tear

“You a slave to a page in my rhyme book”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

Made You Look
On Albums, God's Son (2002)

Books

“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

27 June 1839
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Freedom

“There's really no rhyme or reason in our generation as to how things are supposed to work. I don't believe in the words supposed to. I believe in everybody having their own path and their own learning experience. To each his own.”

Jaime Pressly (1977) American actress, model, producer

Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

Learning

“Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry;
Blot out the epic’s stately rhyme,
But spare his "Highland Mary!"”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

Line on Burns, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Time

“Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Essays and Studies (1875), p. 162.

“Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Feeling, Horse

“He swore repeatedly, ever the more violently the unsteadier his legs became, but to steel his senses he kept his mind fixed persistently on the world-famous battles of the rhymes. He recited the most powerful passages one after another over and over again, dwelling especially on the devilish heroes, Grimur Ægir and Andri. It was Grimur he was fighting now, he thought... but now an end would be put to the deadly feud, for now the stage was set for the final struggle.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

World, Sense, Fight

“He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

Hope, Thinking

“Grip eloquence by the throat and squeeze
It to death. And while you're about it
You might corral that runaway, Rhyme,
Or you'll get Rhyme Without End, Amen.
Who will denounce that criminal, Rhyme?
Tone-deaf children or crazed foreigners
No doubt fashioned its paste jewellery,
Tinplate on top, hollow underneath.”

Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) French poet

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!
Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie,
Du rendre un peu la Rime assagie.
Si l'on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où?
Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime!
Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou
Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou
Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?
Source: "Art poétique", from Jadis et naguère (1884), Line 21; Sorrell p. 125

Death, Children, Fashion, Past

“Still haunted by Haiku, and tried my hand at it, but I fall pitifully short of the Wordsworthian touch. But failure in this realm turned my mind to an old enthusiasm of mine, the Welsh englyn. This verse form was derived by the Welsh from the inscriptions which their Roman conquerors put on tombs … A good englym must have four lines, of ten, then six, syllables, the last two lines having seven syllables each. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last two lines must rhyme with the first rhyme in the first line, but the third or fourth line must rhyme on a weak syllable. Got that?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Haiku and Englyn" in The Toronto Daily Star (4 April 1959), republished in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) edited by Judith Skelton Grant, p. 241.

Failure

“There is only one art of writing, and that is the art of poetry.. whether it is in the form of prose or in rhyme and meter or in rhymed cadence.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

Art

“Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today (2012)

Children, Memory, Time, Drawing

“I thought that was going to be a good song, too, and then they went and rhymed “time” and “Rhine,” and spoiled everything. p. 24”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 1: 1918

Time

“Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"A Humble Protest," Harvard Monthly, 1916

Men, Optimism

“I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 1

Sense

“I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Oxford Anthology of American Literature 1938
Prose

Music

“These elements — rhythm, rhyme, harmony and concinnity — can inevitably be identified within whatever is proclaimed 'poetry.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Fatigued", Sonnets and Verse (1923)

Love, Money, Pleasure, Time

“All the morn a spirit gay
Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
'Tis but hide and seek we play
In and out the courts of Time.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Time, Heart

“There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208

Thinking, Singing, Dependency

“I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

On her opinion of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro; it has sometimes been reported that she had said "It rhymes with "witch". The New York Times (15 October 1984)

“At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Men, Hope, Nature, Singing

“We may say that a poem in the first place should offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the medium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him to the discovery of values which he never would have found without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act, conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the perfection of a cadence with disturbance to the remainder of the poem.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

Universe, Perfection, Training

“Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves... He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood... His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118-119

Men, Beauty, Star, Mood

“What is new poetry? The difference is not mere details of form, measure rhyme schemes or diction, but a return to contemporary speech, thought, imagination and spiritual life, coupled with oriental (Japan & China) and cosmopolitan influences, and a direction of vision, with perfection of form and delicacy of feeling.”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

The New Poetry -An anthology ed Monroe & Henderson Macmillan 1918
The New Poetry (1918)

Life, Feeling, Imagination, Perfection

“I wrote a little song for you
With a melody I'd borrowed put to words that didn't rhyme
To repeat what you already knew;
As the stones thrown at your window tapped in syncopation,
You kept a distance out of fear you'd break,
But what good's a single windchime, hanging quiet all alone?”

Aaron Weiss

In a Market Dimly Lit.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Fear

“You know the world delights in lovely things,
for men have hearts sweet poetry will win,
and when the truth is seasoned in soft rhyme
it lures and leads the most reluctant in.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Là corre il mondo, ove più versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso;
E che 'l vero condito in molli versi,
I più schivi allettando ha persuaso.
Canto I, stanza 3 (tr. Anthony Esolen)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Love, Men, Truth, World

“Prologues like compliments are loss of time;
’T is penning bows and making legs in rhyme.”

David Garrick (1717–1779) English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer

Prologue to Crisp’s Tragedy of Virginia.

Loss, Time

“Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

"Iron"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Faith, Error, Idea, Understanding

“And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme…”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Mr. Tambourine Man

“Their only labour was to kill the time;
And labour dire it is, and weary woe,
They sit, they loll, turn o'er some idle rhyme,
Then, rising sudden, to the glass they go,
Or saunter forth, with tottering steps and slow.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto I, Stanza 72.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Time

“With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"On Donne's Poetry" (c. 1818)

Love

“The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.”

John Wain (1925–1994) British writer

Poem Don't let's spoil it all, I thought that we were going to be such good friends.

Men

“If you open up your eyes and imagine. Expand your horizon with rhyming and rapping.
Quit rapping and rhyming bout cocaine supplying. And clapping is anyone out there or are yall all absent?”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Make Sure U Getta Shirt"
Mixtapes, Fahrenheit 1/15 Part III: A Rhyming Ape (2006)

Imagination

“One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/02/comment.music (June 1, 2007)

People, Learning

“There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Life, World

“Though fancy and the might of rhyme,
That turneth like the tide,
Have borne me many a musing time,
Beloved, from thy side

Ah yet, I pray thee, deem not Sweet,
Those hours were given in vain;
Within these covers to thy feet
I bring them back again”

Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) Canadian poet

Dedication to His Wife, Among the Millet and Other Poems (J. Duire & Son Ottawa 1888).

Time

“As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.”

Jean Giraudoux The Trojan War Will Not Take Place

Tiger at the Gates (1935)

War

“Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant. "Dédicace, À Arsène Houssaye" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose Le spleen de Paris (1862)

Dreams, Music, Soul, Birth

“The history of English poetry in verse in the story of the exhaustion of the effects to be obtained from rhyme and meter of the exploitation of a mine in which the most lodes have at last given out.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

History

“What hours I spent of precious time,
What pints of ink I used to waste,
Attempting to secure a rhyme
To suit the public taste,
Until I found a simple plan
Which makes the lamest lyric scan!When I’ve a syllable de trop,
I cut it off, without apol.:
This verbal sacrifice, I know,
May irritate the schol.;
But all must praise my dev’lish cunn.
Who realise that Time is Mon.”

Harry Graham (1874–1936) British writer

Source: Other verse, Poetical economy, Lines 1-12

Time

“I spoke in debates arranged by the Indian students in London and once V. K. Krishna Menon opposed me. The debate concerned the role of Asia in world affairs and I used the word Asiatic. Menon raised a laugh against me by saying that he did not like the word because it rhymed with ‘lunatic’ although I should consider myself free to use it. He advised me to use the word ‘Asian’ instead. When my turn came for reply, I thanked him for his advice but preferred to stick to the Asiatics adding that he had no objection of Menon calling an Asian although the word rhymed with ‘Simian’. This brought the house down and even Menon joined in the laughter and clapping.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

Source: Law in the Scientific Era, P.48.

World, Laughter, Housing

“I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

dustedmagazine.com, 19 April 2004

“Alliances are political certainties and there is rhyme and reason to that. The polls may be already next year but personally I think it’s not yet the right time to be busy about political shopping.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/headlines/795825/bets-running-2013-polls-may-file-cocs-starting-oct-1 2012

Business, Thinking, Time, Personality

“So I told them in rhyme,
For of rhymes I had store.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 1. The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

“Our host received a piece of paper from my familiar spirit. I asked if he were giving him a check or note to pay the bill. He answered no, that he had settled the account with a poem.
"What? A poem?" I asked. "Are innkeepers curious about rhymes?"
"It's the local currency," he answered. "The sextain I've just given him will cover our expenses. I wasn't afraid of coming up short. Even if we'd spent a week in luxury, it wouldn't have cost a sonnet, and I have four on me. Along with two epigrams, two odes and an eclogue."”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

“We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness.So we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale.How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Nanny Nation

Love, Children, People, Art

“Rhyme, the rack of finest wits,
That expresseth but by fits,
True conceit,
Spoiling senses of their treasure,
Cozening judgement with a measure,
But false weight.
Wresting words from their true calling;
Propping verse, for fear of falling
To the ground.
Jointing syllables, drowning letters,
Fastening vowels, as with fetters
They were bound!”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

XXIX, A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme, lines 1-12
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Underwoods

Fear, Sense, Falseness

“I want to tell you, companions and union leaders, to all of you, if you are not with the official party (MAS) at this time, you are the opposition. If you are opposition, then you are right wing, of the racist-fascists, of the neo-liberals…it is time for definition either you are with the MAS or you are a fascist (this rhymes in Spanish: Sos MASista o sos facista). There is no middle ground. Define yourselves.”

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

Translated from a video reported in all Bolivia's major written press. A video of the speech can be found here: http://www.ahorabolivia.com/2009/04/08/debate-%C2%BFsos-masista-o-fascista/

Time

“Eight out of twenty?!? That's only a third, and third rhymes with Turd! That's bad.”

Mr. T (1952) American actor and retired professional wrestler

Quotes from acting

“Then the song! Ah, then the sabre
Flashing up the walls of night!
Hate of wrong and love of neighbor
Rhymes of battle for the Right!”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

"Juanita".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)
Context: p>O, the sea of lights for streaming
When the thousand flags are furled—
When the gleaming bay lies dreaming
As it duplicates the world!You will come my dearest, truest!
Come my sovereign queen often;
My blue skies will then be bluest;
My white rose be whitest then:Then the song! Ah, then the sabre
Flashing up the walls of night!
Hate of wrong and love of neighbor
Rhymes of battle for the Right!</p

Love, Hate, Night

“Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)
Context: Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.

“You shall not know her — she who sat
Unconscious in my heart all time
I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme,
And loved and did not blush thereat.”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

IV, p. 25.
The Ship in the Desert (1875)
Context: I only saw her as she pass'd —
A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes
Lay all the loves of Paradise....
You shall not know her — she who sat
Unconscious in my heart all time
I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme,
And loved and did not blush thereat.

Love, Time, Heart

“Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)
Context: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Literature

“Poetry, with the breath of the poet, the heart of her life, joined by millions, pushes forth with the creative forces bestowed upon us. A wall is a plaything before the positive. It will take time. Change comes — rumbling with letters and caesuras, chants, odd-angled rhymes and earthy people power.”

Juan Felipe Herrera (1948) American writer

On the U.S.-Mexican border wall issue in “Poetry is Built for Compassion: An Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera” https://thi.ucsc.edu/poetry-built-compassion-interview-juan-felipe-herrera/ (Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz; 2019 Feb 27)

Time, People, Heart, Life

“Shall they make rhymes upon us that we of Demonland, whom men repute and hold the mightiest lords in all the world, hung sheepishly back from this high needful enterprise lest, our greatest captains being abroad, our enemies might haply take us at home a disadvantage? It shall not be said of the women of Demonland that they upheld such counsels.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Mevrian, in Chapter 8, "The First Expedition to Impland"
The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Home, World, Making love, Women

“Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Old Deuteronomy
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Cats, Time, Success

“If I was a junkman selling you cars,
Washing your windows and shining your stars,
Thinking your mind was my own in a dream
What would you wonder and how would it seem?
Living in castles a bit at a time
The King started laughing and talking in rhyme.
Singing words, words between the lines of age.
Words, words between the lines of age.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Words (between the lines of age)
Song lyrics, Harvest (1972)

Singing, Time, Star, Dreams

“I have nothing to say for rhyme, but that I doubt whether a poem can support itself without it, in our language; unless it be stiffened with such strange words, as are likely to destroy our language itself.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Remark (1738?) quoted in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [published from the original papers; with notes, and a life of the author, by Samuel Weller Singer]; "Spence's Anecdotes", Section IV. 1737...39. p. 200

Support

“God has no rhyme or reason to who he gives a sense of humor to.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012 — Present), Season 2 (2013)

God, Sense

“Social justice warriors who are fond of governing by hashtag like to say that silence is violence. And we know that because it rhymes.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: Sen. Chris Coons and Caitlin Flanagan, Natural Immunity, (2021)

Justice, Silence

“When I'm drinking my Bonaparte shandy
eating more than enough apple pies
will I glance at my screen
and see real human beings
starve to death right in front of my eyes?
Nothing old, nothing new, nothing ventured,
nothing gained, nothing stillborn or lost,
nothing further than proof, nothing wilder than youth,
nothing older than time, nothing sweeter than wine,
nothing physically recklessly hopelessly blind,
nothing I couldn't say
Nothing. Why? 'Cos today nothing rhymed”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"Nothing Rhymed" (song) Gilbert O'Sullivan. A live performance. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtoefxZGR6U Gilbert O'Sullivan. A performance with orchestra, c.2017. On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SWTPDPriA Gilbert O'Sullivan. Observations about "Nothing Rhymed", fifty years on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BlxtcH39Q (On YouTube) (+ A cover version by Franklin Brown on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6kuZyk5WJ8 (+ A cover version by Colleen Coughlan on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcqndbjOPTs (+ A cover version by Conor McCauley on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nAb0-7J9d4 (+ A cover version by The Ocelots on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCDFiRaRA0 (+ Guitar instrumental by Phil McGarrick) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmzFaUC1rDI Song lyrics Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Nothing Rhymed" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGE6gzkMAfw (song on YouTube)

Youth, Wine, Drink, Time

Quotes about rhyme page 2

Quotes about rhyme
page 2