Rhyming schemes?

Question

what are some of your favorite rhyming schemes. im attempting to write lyrics for a song again and my head doesnt want to rhyme it in a conventional way...not like abab, abcb, aabb, or anything like that...i kinda wanna mess around with what lines rhyme and stuff. do you think that would sound cool or what?

Answer 1

John Dryden uses a very interesting scheme of rhyme and line lengths in his ode, Alexander's Feast.  It is very musical and rather complicated, but it may not be appropriate to your song: aabbacccdddeFF(Fe) where F is a refrain and the extended line (Fe) begins with the refrain but adds words to rhyme with e.  The syllable counts are: 10-6-6-6-6-8-10-8-8-8-8-5-4-4-8.  I think the syllable lengths might be from Pindar.

abba, or `envelope stanzas' is a common one you did not mention.  Rime royal is a favourite of mine: ababbcc; it might be appropriate for a song with 8 syllable lines, or perhaps 8-6-8-6-6-8-8.  If that is too long a stanza, Shakespeare's Venus & Adonis stanza is more musical: ababcc.

In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats uses variants on the quatrain-sestet: ababcdecde, but mixes up the sestet quite a bit.  Unless you use shorter lines than he does, this won't be very musical.

Wordsworth's Intimations Ode is interesting and musical, like a hollowed out Spenserian stanza; the first stanza is: ababacddc, but the line lengths are: 10-8-4-8-10-(10)-6-4-12.

I hope this is what you were looking for.  For the crazy odes you'll have to read a stanza or two from the originals, if you're not familiar with them already, to see if they have a sound like what you want.