Kim Roberts is the founding editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and author of two books of poems, The Kimnama and The Wishbone Galaxy. She has been featured in numerous anthologies. She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, Brazil, and New Zealand. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington. She was awarded a 2008 Independent Voice Award from the Capital BookFest.

Write a free verse poem with hidden rhyme.  A model for this exercise is W.H. Auden’s wonderful poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” reprinted below.  In this poem, the end word of every line but one rhymes with another end word somewhere else in the poem.  There is no pattern to the rhymes, it just appears to be an extra challenge the poet gave himself.

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS W.H. AUDEN

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy lives and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The rhyme here is:

a
b
c
a
d
e
d
b
f
g
f
g
e
h
h
i
j
k
k
i
j

The only word that doesn’t have a partner is “place” at the end of the third line.  What I love about this exercise is that it forces us to think about line breaks in a fresh way, and by working toward end rhymes, we must modify some of the habits we all naturally fall into.  The discipline of the rhyme makes us speak in new ways.