Rhyme
Poetry & prosodyThe return of the same sound at line endings — classified by richness and by arrangement.
Example
Shakespeare's sonnets close on a couplet: "…so long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
Rhyme returns the same sound at the end of two or more lines. French tradition ranks it by richness — poor (one shared sound), sufficient (two), rich (three or more) — and by arrangement: couplets (AABB), alternate (ABAB), enclosed (ABBA); classical French adds the alternation of feminine rhymes (ending in mute e) and masculine ones.
Functionally, rhyme is a memory-and-expectation machine: the ear waits for the sound's return, and the poet plays on that wait — fulfilling, delaying, disappointing it. Modern verse often dropped or displaced it (assonance, internal rhyme, slant rhyme), but its closing power stays intact: a rhymed couplet ends a poem the way a perfect cadence ends a piece.
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