Rhyme Scheme- Cassie Adams

To My Wife

By J. V. Cunningham

And does the heart grow old? You know

In the indiscriminate green

Of summer or in earliest snow

A landscape is another scene,

Inchoate and anonymous,

And every rock and bush and drift

As our affections alter us

Will alter with the season’s shift.

So love by love we come at last,

As through the exclusions of a rhyme,

Or the exactions of a past,

To the simplicity of time,

 

The antiquity of grace, where yet

We live in terror and delight

With love as quiet as regret

And love like anger in the night.

 

Cunningham, J. V. "To My Wife." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 09 Oct. 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171423.

 

 

This poem employs end rhyme, in which the final syllables of a line share the same sound. For example, in the first stanza of the poem, the first and third lines end with the rhyming words "know" and "snow", while the second and fourth lines end in "green" and "scene".  This pattern is characteristic of an alternating rhyme, with an ABAB CDCD EFEF... rhyme scheme. Each line also ends with a stressed syllable, making the poem representative of masculine rhyme as well. In the poem, Cunningham comments on the fluid and ever-changing nature of relationships. Like nature alters "with the seasons shift," relationships also change through time and experience. In my opinion the use of such a formulaic structure and perfect rhyme is representative of the love that remains in the speaker's realtionship both in times of "delight" and in times of "terror."