Question

Identify the rhyme scheme of the following verses:
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

A) abba cddc
B) abcd abcd
C) abab cdcd
D) abab cddc

Answer 1

Hint: The above lines of a poem is from the poem ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’ by Andrew Marvell. This poem of Andrew Marvell is one of the little jewels in the crown of seventeenth-century poetry. Marvell was said to be one of the Metaphysical Poets and ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’ is one of his finest poems. He starts the poem by invoking the glowworms as “living lamps” who provide light to the nightingale while she sings.

Complete answer:
As the title of the poem suggests, ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’ is spoken by a ‘mower’, the one who cuts the grass with a scythe and addresses the glow-worms lighting the mower’s way through the field. He praises them for providing light in the darkness, but laments the fact that their light is wasted because the speaker’s mind is not on the task of mowing the grass as he is distracted or by thoughts of Juliana, his lover.

The arrangement of rhymes in a poem is written with the letters a, b, c, d, etc. The first set of lines that rhyme at the end are marked with a. The second set is marked with b. Thus, in a poem with the rhyme scheme abab, the first line rhymes with the third line, and the second line rhymes with the fourth line.

Option ‘C’ is the correct answer as a rhyming scheme is the pattern of sounds that repeats at the end of a line or stanza and in the given lines, the final word of each line: light-night (a), late-meditate (b), portend-end (c) and funeral-fall (d) forms the rhyming scheme abab abcd. Thus, the rhyming scheme used is abab abcd.

Therefore the correct answer is option ‘C’.

Note: Through the poem we can infer that Juliana does not return mower’s love. In the given lines, ‘light’ turns into ‘night’ in the first pair of rhyming words but it does so via ‘late’ – a twisting of ‘light’ which ushers in the dusk that heralds the coming of night. Similarly, look how ‘Nightingales’ in the second line similarly prepare us for ‘night’ in the next line. The accumulation of ‘ing’ words near the beginnings of the first three lines creates a sense of moving towards something, that is, darkness. We don’t know whether ‘come’ and ‘home’ which is the final rhyming pair of the poem would have rhymed in Marvell’s time, but if they are off-rhymes,( that is, they look as if they rhyme but don’t sound like it when you say the words), they are oddly fitting anyway, given the fact that the mower’s mind is distracted.