“Autumn Day,” by Rainer Maria Rilke has a rhyme scheme that is very inconsistent. In the first verse, there is this one rhyme and what follows it is very fluid to say.
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
In the second verse, the ending of the first and last lines rhyme but the two middle lines are written very awkwardly and I find that the third and fourth lines don’t flow well.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
The last verse has repetition and the endings of the last word in lines three and five ends with an -ing.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
I find that the erratic rhyming and structure very interesting, it’s like how feelings are in oneself. It feels like a very sad poem and it talks about loneliness. It feels like someone is talking about how life won’t change even if the seasons do and how some days are nice, but life is generally not changing. The repetition of Whoever is like the monotony of the description of life.
“The Portrait,” by Stanley Kunitz, also feels very erratic and sharp, but it also feels fluid in both the story and the structure. It has a straightforward timeline/series of events, but each line had a scene that began and ended in that line. This is what makes it feel almost erratic in it’s finality in each line.