I remember a TV interview some decades back with a notable composer of atonal music. The relevant part went like this:

 (composer) Of course it's impossible to write tonal music these days.

 (interviewer) You really mean 'impossible'?

 (c) Well I can't anyway.

 (i) You really can't?

 (c, getting flustered) Of course I could if I wanted to – but I don't want to!

I suspect the same applies to the current widespread avoidance of rhyme in poetry. But rhyme has a long and honourable history.

The poetic forms preferred by the early non-literate tribes of what later became known as Britain are unknown to us, but the Romans came with metrical feet, the Norsemen with kennings, alliteration and declamatory form, and the the Norman French with rhyme. So rhyme had been acceptable to us as a legitimate poetic tool among others for some 900 years – before it was denigrated, demoted, and finally ousted from the approved tool kit some time around the 1920s. I guess that ousting's not surprising, given rhyme's excessive prevalence and clumsy application in the previous couple of centuries, when it so dominated that the demand for rhyme at the end of every line often made it excessively and obviously forced.

Of course it is possible to use rhyme to create the absolutely awful, as in:

I had a wheeze

To breeze with cheese

Across the seas.

But a disease

I caught from bees

Made me say 'please'

Instead to peas.

 but that's the fault of the workman,1 not the tool. As is the genuine (and supposedly Great):

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 2

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

 in which almost certainly the word 'stands' occurred to Tennyson first, forcing his 'hands'. But, as Robert Graves pointed out in the '60s,3 if the eagle stands on his hands, his wings must be feet, which is nonsense. But for the arbitrary demand for rhyme at every line, this muddle would not have occurred.

So yes – rhyme can be misused, and has been, widely, for a long time. But so have alcohol and money, and I don't hear many folk calling for either to be banned. Rhyme is a useful tool for providing emphasis , and emphasis must be used sparingly. But it has other functions too – it creates mental anchors for memory and understanding, and it can support rhythm or even assist in the creation of recognisable structure where rhythm or scansion don't provide it.

Everyone's all too familiar with the thumping AB AB and AA BB rhyme schemes that probably did as much as anything else to get rhyme discredited. But, as mentioned earlier, used sparingly it can be highly effective. It's also perfectly permissible to let rhyme occur by chance, for example in my poem:

Seven years on

The ancient ash tree fell

quietly: its hollow shell,

lately the home of bees,

bereft of its past might.

They, being wise,

a month before departed

knowing it had died.

Two centuries it stood

and now it rests

prone, year on year:

a lair for creeping things.

Reluctant to descend at last

into eternal night.

  the rhymes fell and shell and might and night are both fortuitous but do no harm. Seeking alternative words that didn't rhyme could easily have spoilt the rhythm, and quite possibly the meaning.

But one can also be adventurous. Some years ago I wrote a ten-line poem 4 without identifiable syllabic or rhythmic structure, the structure for which was provided instead by the rhyme scheme ABCDE EDCBA – a rhyme palindrome that paralleled the palindromic meaning of the text.

So rather than discarding rhyme as a tool out of hand, why not learn to use it to best advantage? Like all other tools, it can produce excellent results, but only in the hands of a practised and committed craftsperson.

 [1] In this case, to quote Edmund Blackadder : 'Me, really'.

 [2] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Eagle.

 [3] 'Technique in Poetry' in Robert Graves, Mammon and the Black Goddess, Cassell 1965.

 [4] unfortunately, lost.