In honor of YeahWrite’s seventh birthday this month, our poetry slam’s focused on sevens too: the seven lines of a rime royal. Or rhyme royal. Rhyme royale. Look, spelling wasn’t standardized yet when this form was developed. In fact, it’s a form so old that it had already started to go out of fashion by the time Shakespeare used it.
Rime royal is a rule for a verse, not a poem. A poem can consist of as many verses as you like, so long as each one follows the rime royal format. Ready to dive in? Let’s take a closer look.
Three rules
There are only three rules for writing a rime royal verse.
- The verse has seven lines.
- The lines have the rhyme scheme ABABBCC.
- The lines scan. The default scansion pattern is iambic pentameter but anything is acceptable as long as it matches.
That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Seven lines
Look, this is only getting its own heading because it’s one of the rules. If you can’t count to seven on your own, you need more help than the YeahWrite poetry slam for April 2018 is prepared to offer.
Rhyme
Do you remember how to annotate rhyme? Here’s a quick refresher:
- Assign each line-ending sound a letter, in the order they appear
- Write that letter at the end of each line
So if we were to annotate the poem In Flanders Fields, the annotation would look like this:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow (A)
Between the crosses, row on row, (A) (because it’s the same sound)
That mark our place, and in the sky, (B) (a new sound)
The larks, still bravely singing, fly, (B) (the same sound as the first B sound)
Scarce heard amid the guns below. (A) (the same sound as the first A sound)
So that poem’s verse rhymes AABBA. If we were to reverse-engineer that, and come up with another AABBA verse, what could it be?
A: I cannot go to work today (“ay” is my A sound.)
A: I’d rather stay at home and play (“ay”)
B: I do not want to put on pants (“ants” is a new line-ending sound, so it’s my B)
B: and listen to my boss’ rants (“ants”)
A: Why can’t it just be Saturday? (“ay”)
See? Both those verses have the same rhyme scheme, but they’re very different.
For a rime royal, you’ll need seven lines, not five, and they’ll rhyme with the pattern ABABBCC. That means you’ll need three ending sounds. If you decide to write more than one verse, you don’t need to use the same A/B/C rhymes throughout. Your second verse could be DEDEEFF or BABAADD or… you get the point. The verses need to be consistent with themselves, but not with each other.
Scansion
If you didn’t read that whole post on sonnets when I asked if you remembered how to rhyme, you might want to visit it to brush up on your scansion.
There’s no mandatory scansion pattern for a rime royal, although most are written in iambic pentameter. That’s the Shakespeare pattern, five paired unstressed-stressed syllables per line. If you’re a musician, count it out and-ONE and-TWO and-THREE and-FOUR and-FIVE. Or read the sonnet-ballad, by Gwendolyn Brooks. But read it aloud- reading aloud will tell you if you’re off a syllable or two faster than just counting on your fingers will.
If you don’t care for iambic pentameter, go wild. Use iambic tetrameter, throw in trisyllabic measures with non-ictic syllables. Be Longfellow. No, don’t be Longfellow, be more accurate and less weirdly fetishistically colonial than Longfellow, but you get my point. The only real rule here is that you need to establish and follow a consistent scansion pattern. Like
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
See? Anything goes, as long as it goes together.
Putting it together
So what does a rime royal look like, when you’ve got it all put together? Here’s one poet’s take on a well-known Christmas carol. See how the poet isn’t limited to one verse? But all the lines scan and the rhyme pattern follows the prescribed order? I think you’re ready to write your own rime royal!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
