For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which like ships they steer their courses.

-Butler, Samuel
  Hudibras, pt.1, canto1, l.457^8.

   Leonora, Leonora, How the word rollsöLeonoraö Lion-like, in full-mouthed sound, Marching o'er the metric ground With a tawny tread sublime; So your name moves, Leonora, Down my desert rhyme.

-Craik, Dinah Maria ne¤  e Mulock
Collected Poems,'Leonora'.

   Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.

-Dryden,John
Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.2, l.486.

  the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

-Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
  'A Coney Island of the Mind', section15.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a muse'  d rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!

-Keats,John
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode to a Nightingale', stanza 6.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme ö whyare they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

-Lowell, RobertTraill Spence,Jr
  Day by Day,'Epilogue'.

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.15.

I will sing no more songs: the pride of my country I sang Through forty long years of good rhyme, without any avail; And no one cared even as much as the half of a hang For the song or the singer, so here is an end of the tale.

-OŁ    Bruadair, Da¤ i bh|¤  dh
Adapted from the Irish by James Stephens. Irish   playwright.   His   early   plays,   including   Juno   and   the Paycock  (1924),  deal  with  Dublin  working-class  life  and  were written  for  the Abbey  Theatre.  His  later,  more  experimental, plays include Cockadoodle Dandy (1949).

But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.

-Pope, Alexander
  Imitations of Horace, bk.2, epistle1, l.187^8.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

-Sandburg, Carl
Quoted inTheComplete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1986),'Notes for a Preface'.

I was promised on a time, To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason.

-Spenser, Edmund
'Lines on his Pension.'Attributed.

But here I am in Kent and Christendom, Among the Muses, where I read and rhyme.

-Wyatt, SirThomas (the Elder)
  'Mine Own John Poins'.