Words That Don’t Rhyme

The rhyme is the line’s birthday, as you know,
and there are certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.

– Vladimir Nabokov

These are really brilliant observations. I wish I were as attentive to any of my languages to notice these things. It wouldn’t work with Spanish, though, because the existence of the assonant rhyme where only the vowels need to match means pretty much anything has a rhyme.

Here is the entire text of the poem.