‘Does it Have to Rhyme?’ by educationalist, Sandy Brownjohn is a book of ideas to support primary school teachers who teach poetry. It was written in 1980, and as a primary school teacher myself at that time, I used the book extensively.  

The basic premise of the book was that when children write in rhyme, their desire to select rhyming words can often be more important than their use of language to convey meaning. As someone who is regularly asked to judge children’s poetry competitions, I can confirm that this is still a problem for many young writers.

However the basic issue in my article is that there should be no one definition of what a poem actually is. I looked up the word poem in the Oxford Dictionary. It says a poem is ‘a piece of writing in which the words are chosen for their sound and the images they suggest, not just for their obvious meanings. The words are arranged in separate lines, usually with a repeated rhythm, and often the lines rhyme at the end’. This definition, though helpful, is also enormously unclear. Would you for example describe ‘The Gruffalo’ (written in rhyming couplets) as a poem or a story? Does it actually matter how we describe it?

To add to the confusion the Oxford Dictionary defines ‘free verse’ as ‘many forms of irregular, syllabic, or unrhymed verse, freed from the demands of metre.’ There is, I believe, an implication here that rhyming and metre can place restrictive demands upon our desire to communicate meaning.

So why am I choosing to discuss this topic in a blog which is largely aimed at readers in mid-life and beyond? The reason is this…that poetic traditions have changed enormously over time, and over the past century, writers of rhyming poetry have often been unkindly labelled as ‘lightweight’. Pam Ayres, now aged 77 has suffered longstanding snobbery from critics who claimed that she didn’t write ‘proper poetry’. Nevertheless her best selling books and performances have been enjoyed by vast audiences. Sir John Betjeman CBE who was poet Laureate from 1972 until his death, was initially overlooked for the post, because, according to now published archives, he was considered to be ‘a lightweight versifier who lacked serious merit’.

Fortunately this ‘anti-rhyme’  attitude has experienced a serious set-back in the last 50 years with the increasing popularity of the ‘Liverpool Poets’, popular rappers, and performance poetry in general which relies heavily on rhyme and metre to engage its audience.

I am in no way opposed to free verse, or poetry without rhyme, but as a poetry writer who enjoys playing with both rhyme and structure, I am opposed to literary snobbery which asserts or implies that one form of writing is always superior to another. Joy in the written word takes many different forms and operates on many levels. There is room for us all.    

So I will finish with an intentionally lightweight poem which I wrote specifically for an open mic evening at Coghurst Hall Caravan Park and fishing lake, where I own a static caravan. The purpose of this poem was to make fun of some of the rules which are imposed on owners, but also to  communicate real joy in rhyme to a very varied audience. The audience laughter was unstoppable, but so was the fun I had in pulling the rhymes together for the occasion.

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Does it have to rhyme? No, of course not, but sometimes it helps.  

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