Tuesday, February 17, 2015

What is the rhyme scheme of "Laugh and Be Merry" by John Masefield?

When we have to work out the rhyme scheme of any given
poems, what we need to do is establish a set pattern of rhyme in each stanza and assign
a letter to each different rhyme. This therefore is used to yield a rhyme scheme that is
expressed in the form of letters which indicate how a given rhyme occurs. Let us look at
the first stanza of this poem as an example:


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Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world
with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a
wrong.
Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a
span.
Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of
man.



We can see that this
stanza contains two different rhymes. "Song" and "wrong" rhyme in lines 1 and 2, and
then "span" and "man" rhyme in lines 3 and 4. If we assign the letter A to the first
rhyme, and B to the second rhyme, we can express the rhyme scheme of this poem as AABB.
Quickly scanning down the rest of the poem reveals that this rhyme scheme is regular
throughout the poem.

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