"Rhyme not only makes things memorable; it seems to vouch for them. It confirms; it persuades; it is part of the rhetoric of belief, as advertisers know well. But it includes also its own improbability, its semantic vagrancy. It alerts the reader's scepticism. This combination of assertion and instability makes rhyme apt equally for comedy and for intense exploration."
"[Freud's] recognition that words are graphemes as well as phonemes releases insight into how rhyming may overlap with dreaming: in dream, seeing and hearing are balanced differently from in waking life. In rhyme, seeing and hearing oscillate oddly. One of the strange energies of rhyme is the tension so often experienced between the visualised form of the word on the page and its heard counterpart, a tension that allows further significations to creep in. Such suggestions may not only undermine the autonomy of the word as grapheme, but also expand its limits of reference."
"One difficulty in discussing the effects of rhyme is that these are manifold and diverse. It can make for resolution and interplay; equally it can act as interruption and disturbance. It can persuade us to believe, or half-believe, without reasoning. Take the advertisement for the chocolate bar Yorkie outside York station - "York: where the men are hunky and the chocolate's chunky"; the pleasure is the improbability, which melts into momentary accord. (But what would have been the effect if, instead of a feminine ending rhyme, the tag had read "the men are hunks and the chocolate's in chunks": less charm, more testosterone?) In the tussle between the semantic and referential on one side and unreasoned acoustic connections on the other, rhyme tips towards the acoustic. But its power lies in the sustained wrangle between these forces."
- Dame Gillian Beer in The Guardian.
