How are the feminine rhymes?

Some of them are masculine ones in disguise, and some of them are...stretches at that. "goings" and "doings" is rough, how many times do you see those as a) nouns and b) plural nouns and c) attempting to rhyme? "offer"/"proffer" is also impressive seeing that "proffer" is...basically a fancy way of saying "offer."

I'm willing to overlook that, though, just for "calm all my terrors, blot out my errors." (Okay, they're plural, but the pluralization doesn't matter.) Not only is it a pretty impressive/uncommon true feminine rhyme, but it's a mini-prayer that sums up a whole lot. Forgiveness and relief from anxiety is basically what a whole lot of it boils down to!

Is there a consistent rhyme scheme?

Not really? There are a couple instances of "in some verses it seems like these two words make a feminine rhyme, in other cases they don't, in some it's a stretch (ever/other)."

Teehee, you said feminine rhyme scheme, and it's about marriage, get it?

Yeah, you're clever. The weird one is "Father/woman": they don't even come close to rhyming, we get the unnecessarily male interpretation of God, and the gender assumptions of the married couple! Not that the latter is too surprising, but definitely they could have done better on the rhyme front, you know? Priorities.

Are we really done with another section now?

Yes, and I think I mean it this time!

(Took yesterday off for RL travels, may be similarly absent on other days in the coming weeks)!

What is the rhyme scheme like?

Well there are a bunch of feminine rhymes but really most of them are just altered masculine ones...

Whoa, whoa, this sounds a little un-PC. Back it up?

Sure.

So most rhyming words in English are like, one matching syllable at a time. HAT and CAT.

Sometimes, there will be only one syllable that rhymes, even though one or both words has more than one syllable. Like SAY and toDAY. The "rule" for rhyming is "the last stressed syllables, and everything afterwards, should match." So in this case, even though "today" has multiple syllables, the last stressed one is also the last syllable in general. So we only need to worry about checking the last one.

Both of these cases are called "masculine" rhymes. Not sure why, guessing it was a convention from Italian or French or something. Maybe it has to do with masculine nouns?

A "feminine" rhyme, in contrast, is something that features more than one rhyming syllable (the stressed one and everything after). In English, something like BABY and MAYBE is feminine.

How do you find feminine rhymes? Well, I just gave you one. But there are fewer words that fit this pattern and rhyme with another word that does than there are masculine pairs. That's not really a problem, since you can write lots of good rhyming songs/lyrics by just using masculine rhymes and never worrying about the feminine ones.

However, maybe there's a specific melody in mind that sounds better with feminine rhymes. Or you're adapting something from another language where it's easier, and you're out of words. One thing you can do is start with two masculine words that already rhyme, and then add matching suffixes or words after. So LIVE/GIVE becomes LIVING/GIVING. SHROUD/CLOUD becomes SHROUDED/UNCLOUDED. HEAR/NEAR becomes "HEAR YOU/NEAR YOU."

There are a bunch of feminine rhymes in this hymn, and at first that sounds impressive because they're harder to come by! But the vast majority of them are like this, which is...not so impressive.