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Each stanza in “Lenore” consists of rhyming couplets and concludes with a tercet. All but one of the stanzas has the following rhyme scheme: AABBCCC. (The one exception is the slightly shorter second stanza, which has an abbreviated scheme: AABBB). Within this basic scheme, Poe also uses a lot of internal rhyme. Because the lines of “Lenore” are quite long, the use of internal rhyme sometimes obscures the basic couplet-and-tercet structure and gives the sonic impression of other poetic forms. Consider the first two lines of the poem:

     Ah broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
     Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river. 

When read aloud, this couplet sounds curiously like a verse form known as a limerick. Limericks are short poems consisting of five lines, rhyming AABBA. The third and fourth lines of a limerick are shorter than the other three, creating a unique rhythm. See what happens when the opening couplet of “Lenore” is reformatted based on both its internal and end rhymes:

   Ah broken is the golden bowl!
   The spirit flown forever!
       Let the bell toll!—
       A saintly soul
   Floats on the Stygian river.

Though the first two lines of this altered version don’t rhyme, the rest of the lines sound strangely limerick-like in both rhythm and rhyme. Elsewhere in the poem, Poe uses the counterpoint between internal and end rhyme to generate a similar sonic complexity that the poem’s basic end-rhyme scheme otherwise conceals.

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