Rhyme Scheme: Definition, Examples and 14 Common Patterns

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the ends of the lines in a poem. You write it with letters: the end sound of the first line is A, every line that rhymes with it is also A, the next new sound is B, then C, and so on. A poem where lines 1 and 2 rhyme, then lines 3 and 4 rhyme, has the rhyme scheme AABB.

This guide covers 14 common rhyme schemes, line-by-line examples, the four types of rhyme, a 3-step method and a short quiz.

What is a rhyme scheme in poetry?

In literature, a rhyme scheme is the arrangement of end rhymes in a stanza or a whole poem. It answers one question: which lines rhyme with which? Here is a short poem written for this page, with its letters marked:

Snow Before Breakfast

The snow came down before the light. (A)
It filled the yard and hid the street. (B)
By breakfast all the world was white, (A)
And no one heard a sound of feet. (B)

"Light" and "white" share a sound, so both are A. "Street" is a new sound, B, and "feet" rhymes with it. The rhyme scheme is ABAB.

The rules for labeling are simple:

• Same sound, same letter. Go by sound, not spelling.
• New sound, next letter. Lines that rhyme with nothing still get a letter, like the A and C lines in ABCB.
• Keep counting across stanzas. New sounds in a second stanza carry on from the next free letter: ABAB CDCD, not ABAB ABAB. Reuse a letter only when an old sound comes back.
• Leave a space between stanzas so the groups are easy to see.

Reference books often use lowercase (abab) and many teachers use capitals (ABAB). Both mean the same thing.

A rhyme scheme is not meter, which is the beat inside each line (see our guide to iambic pentameter). Nor is it a stanza: a stanza is a group of lines, and the rhyme scheme is how those lines rhyme. Our page on what a stanza is names stanzas of every length.

Types of rhyme scheme: 14 common patterns

These are the rhyme schemes you will meet most often. Spaces in the letters show stanza breaks.

Rhyme scheme	Name	Lines	Where you find it
AABB	Rhyming couplets	4	Nursery rhymes, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Bed in Summer"
ABAB	Alternate rhyme	4	Ballads, Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life", the quatrains of a Shakespearean sonnet
ABBA	Enclosed rhyme	4	Tennyson's In Memoriam, the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet
ABCB	Ballad stanza	4	Folk ballads, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
AAAA	Monorhyme	4 or more	The last stanza of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (deep, keep, sleep, sleep)
AABA	Rubai (Persian quatrain)	4	Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859); "Stopping by Woods" chains it: AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD
AABBA	Limerick	5	Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense (1846)
ABABCC	Quatrain plus couplet	6	Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
ABA BCB CDC ...	Terza rima	3-line chain	Dante's Divine Comedy, Frost's "Acquainted with the Night"
ABABBCC	Rhyme royal	7	Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
ABABABCC	Ottava rima	8	Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Byron's Don Juan
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG	Shakespearean (English) sonnet	14	Shakespeare's 154 sonnets
ABBAABBA CDECDE or CDCDCD	Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet	14	Petrarch, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus"
ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA	Villanelle	19	Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night"

In terza rima, the middle line of each stanza sets the rhyme for the next, so the poem moves forward like a chain. A villanelle uses only two rhyme sounds, and two lines of its first stanza come back as refrains, marked A1 and A2. Our villanelle structure guide maps all 19 lines.

Rhyme scheme examples, line by line

Each example has its letters next to the lines and the rhyme words in bold. The real poems are all in the public domain.

AABB rhyme scheme: "Bed in Summer" by Robert Louis Stevenson

In an AABB rhyme scheme, lines rhyme in pairs: 1 with 2, then 3 with 4. Each pair is a rhyming couplet. This poem is from A Child's Garden of Verses (1885).

In winter I get up at night (A)
And dress by yellow candle-light. (A)
In summer, quite the other way, (B)
I have to go to bed by day. (B)

I have to go to bed and see (C)
The birds still hopping on the tree, (C)
Or hear the grown-up people's feet (D)
Still going past me in the street. (D)

And does it not seem hard to you, (E)
When all the sky is clear and blue, (E)
And I should like so much to play, (B)
To have to go to bed by day? (B)

"Play" and "day" rhyme with "way" and "day" in the first stanza, so they get B again: AABB CCDD EEBB. Most people would simply call it a poem in AABB couplets.

ABAB rhyme scheme: "A Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In an ABAB rhyme scheme, the rhymes take turns: line 1 rhymes with line 3, and line 2 with line 4. These stanzas were first published in 1838. The second brings new sounds, so it carries on with C and D.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, (A)
Life is but an empty dream!— (B)
For the soul is dead that slumbers, (A)
And things are not what they seem. (B)

Life is real! Life is earnest! (C)
And the grave is not its goal; (D)
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, (C)
Was not spoken of the soul. (D)

"Numbers" and "slumbers" rhyme on two syllables, NUM-bers and SLUM-bers. That is a feminine rhyme. A one-syllable rhyme, like "dream" and "seem", is a masculine rhyme.

ABBA rhyme scheme: "Ring out wild bells" by Alfred Tennyson

In an ABBA rhyme scheme, the outside lines rhyme and the two inside lines make a pair. Tennyson used it for every stanza of In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), so it is also called the In Memoriam stanza. This New Year section is CVI in the final version and CIV in the first edition, which the text follows.

Ring out wild bells to the wild sky, (A)
The flying cloud, the frosty light: (B)
The year is dying in the night; (B)
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. (A)

ABCB rhyme scheme: "Who Has Seen the Wind?" by Christina Rossetti

In an ABCB rhyme scheme, only lines 2 and 4 rhyme. This is the classic ballad stanza, and it needs only one rhyme pair per stanza. The poem is from Sing-Song (1872), in the text of the 1893 edition.

Who has seen the wind? (A)
Neither I nor you: (B)
But when the leaves hang trembling (C)
The wind is passing thro'. (B)

"Thro'" is an old spelling of "through", so it rhymes with "you".

AABBA rhyme scheme: "Sue's Rhyme Scheme" (a limerick)

In a limerick, lines 1, 2 and 5 share one rhyme and the two short middle lines share another. This one was written for this page:

There once was a poet named Sue (A)
Whose poems all ended in "blue." (A)
Her teacher said, "Hey, (B)
That's a scheme of just A!" (B)
So she rhymed the next forty with "two." (A)

Our limerick guide shows how to fit the bouncy beat to this pattern.

Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme: Sonnet 73

The Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG: three quatrains with alternating rhymes, then a couplet that sums up or turns the argument. Sonnet 73 was first published with the rest of Shakespeare's sonnets in 1609. Each quatrain is a picture of growing old: late autumn, twilight, a fire burning down.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold (A)
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang (B)
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, (A)
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. (B)
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day (C)
As after sunset fadeth in the west; (D)
Which by and by black night doth take away, (C)
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. (D)
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, (E)
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, (F)
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire, (E)
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. (F)
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, (G)
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. (G)

Our guide to the types of sonnet compares this with the Petrarchan, Spenserian and other forms.

Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet rhyme scheme: "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

The Petrarchan sonnet rhyme scheme has an octave of eight lines rhymed ABBAABBA and a sestet of six, usually CDECDE or CDCDCD. The turn comes at line 9. Lazarus wrote this sonnet in 1883 to help pay for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. At line 9, the statue starts to speak.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, (A)
With conquering limbs astride from land to land; (B)
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand (B)
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame (A)
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name (A)
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand (B)
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command (B)
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. (A)
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she (C)
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, (D)
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, (C)
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. (D)
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, (C)
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (D)

That gives ABBAABBA CDCDCD. The octave uses only two sounds, four times each, which is far harder in English than in rhyme-rich Italian.

Want to write inside a fixed scheme? The free sonnet generator drafts 14 lines you can label and then rework in your own words.

Write a sonnet with the free generator

Types of rhyme

Not every rhyme is an exact match. These are the four types you need for labeling.

Type of rhyme	What it means	Example
Perfect rhyme (full or true rhyme)	The last stressed vowel and every sound after it match.	bright / flight; "hang" and "sang" in Sonnet 73
Slant rhyme (near or half rhyme)	The words sound alike but don't fully match.	young / long; "soul" and "all" in Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers"
Internal rhyme	Two words rhyme inside the same line.	"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary," from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" (1845)
Eye rhyme	The words look alike but sound different.	bough / though; "love" and "remove" in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

If a poet clearly pairs two words in the pattern, give them the same letter even when the rhyme is slant or eye, and say so. Dickinson's first stanza, as first printed in 1891, is ABCB with a slant rhyme on the B lines:

Hope is the thing with feathers (A)
That perches in the soul, (B)
And sings the tune without the words, (C)
And never stops at all, (B)

Some eye rhymes were once true rhymes, before pronunciation changed (Britannica calls these historical rhymes).

How to find the rhyme scheme of a poem in 3 steps

1. Read the last word of each line out loud. Listen to the last stressed vowel and everything after it. "Bough" and "though" look alike but don't rhyme; "you" and "through" look different but do.
2. Give each new sound the next letter. The first line is A. A line that rhymes with it is A too; a new sound is B. Write a letter after every line, even lines that rhyme with nothing.
3. Group the letters by stanza and name the pattern. Leave a space at each stanza break and compare your letters with the table above.

Worked example: "The Kite"

We took the kite up Parker Hill.
It tugged the string inside my hand.
Then all at once the wind went still,
And down it drifted, slow and grand.
Dad laughed. We'll try when winds are right,
And this time I will hold on tight.

Step 1: hill, hand, still, grand, right, tight. Step 2: hill A, hand B, still A, grand B, right C, tight C. Step 3: ABABCC, a quatrain plus a couplet, the same pattern as Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (Cloud, Hills, crowd, Daffodils, trees, breeze).

Common rhyme scheme mistakes

• Going by spelling. "Love" and "move" look like a rhyme but sound different. Trust your ears.
• Starting again at A in every stanza. New sounds get new letters. Some teachers do describe each stanza on its own ("every stanza is ABCB"), which is fine if you say so.
• Skipping lines that don't rhyme. Every line gets a letter. Some books mark unrhymed lines with an x.
• Giving a repeated word a new letter. Frost's "sleep, sleep" is the same sound twice, so it keeps one letter.
• Mixing up rhyme scheme and meter. ABAB says which lines rhyme, not how many beats they have.

Practice: find the rhyme scheme

Label each line of these three poems, written for this page. Say the last words out loud, then write the letters. Answers are below.

1. Lunch Box Mystery

My lunch box has a secret.
It rattles when I walk.
I think there is a cookie,
Or maybe just some chalk.

2. Page by Page

My dog sat waiting by my chair
And ate my homework, page by page.
I meant to fly into a rage,
And yet he looked so pleased down there.

3. Pancake Morning

The pancakes stack up high and round.
The syrup pours without a sound.
My brother reaches for the jam
And drops a spoonful on the ground.

Answers: 1 is ABCB, the ballad stanza: only "walk" and "chalk" rhyme. 2 is ABBA: "chair" and "there" wrap around "page" and "rage". 3 is AABA, the rubai: "round", "sound" and "ground" rhyme, and "jam" stands alone.

Your turn: write four lines about your morning in ABAB. Then rewrite them as AABB and listen to how the sound changes.

Try a rhyming poem in the free generator

Rhyme scheme FAQ

What is the AABB rhyme scheme called?

Rhyming couplets. Lines rhyme in pairs, 1 with 2 and 3 with 4. It is a favorite in nursery rhymes and picture books because the rhyme comes back quickly.

What is the rhyme scheme of a sonnet?

It depends on the type. A Shakespearean sonnet rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. A Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet rhymes ABBAABBA, then CDECDE or CDCDCD. A Spenserian sonnet rhymes ABAB BCBC CDCD EE.

Does every poem have a rhyme scheme?

No. Free verse has no regular rhyme or meter, and blank verse has meter but no rhyme. You can name a rhyme scheme only when the rhymes repeat in a regular pattern.

What is another word for rhyme scheme?

"Rhyme pattern" means the same thing. Names like "couplets", "ballad stanza" and "terza rima" each stand for one particular rhyme scheme.