Rhyming is a gift like any other. Shakespeare was a great rhymer who only occasionally resorted to off-rhymes. John Claire was also a good rhymer. Bob Dylan too. As Johnny Cash once said, he can rhyme the tick of time. So could Emily Dickinson, but sometimes, out of perversity, she would rhyme tick with tock, which is cute, but no poem that has imperfect rhymes can be considered perfect. ED was not a perfectionist, but she often achieved perfection without even trying. Few stanzas written by anyone are as purely poetic as this, an ode to the Civil War dead:
They dropped like flakes,
They dropped like stars,
Like petals from a rose
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers goes.
Last edited by Tim McGrath; 05-25-2021 at 01:14 AM.
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