Hidden Rhymes

"Rhymes may also occur within a line of poetry rather than at the end, as in this example from William Blake's 'The Garden of Love':

      And binding with briars my joys & desires.

In this case, the device is called internal rhyme."

-From Sharon Hamilton's Essential Literary Terms page 211

I really love internal rhyme in poems and sonnets, sometimes even more than end rhyme.  I think that rhyming internally is sometimes much harder, especially when you want to find significant words that rhyme.  They are also much more difficult to find when you are analyzing poetry. I also love alliteration, assonance, and consonance in poetry.  All of these devices add a more lyrical flow to poetry that is not always possible in prose.  I just wanted to present the entire Blake poem that Hamilton used in her book to describe internal rhyme because it is one that I discussed in my British Literature class and liked:

"The Garden of Love"

by William Blake

"I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys & desires."

-From The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

Blake also uses the other literary devices mentioned above.  Here are a few:

-the a's in "Garden" and "saw"

-the i's in "built" and "midst"

-the a's in "Chapel" and "shalt"

-the t's in "'shalt not' writ"

-the t's in "turn'd to"

-the s's in "so" and "Sweet"

-the i's in "it," "filled", and "with"

-the i's in "binding" and "briars" and "desires" 

Here is also another internal rhyme: "gowns" and "rounds"

Can you even imagine this poem without all of these rhymes and similar sounds?  They really make the poem as good as it is.