Rhymes in Victor Hugo: Les Feuilles D'automne and Les Chansons Des Rues Et Des Bois

This article is a comparative description of rhyme used in two of Victor Hugo's collections of poems, Autumn Leaves (1831), an early collection, and Songs of the Streets and Woods (1865), one of the later ones. The most frequent rhymes are ranked and briefly studied in terms of their semantic content and the grammatical categories they belong to. The last stressed vowel of each rhyme word is also examined in order to establish the dominant phonetic patterns present at line ends. Finally, the striking asymmetry in the ordering of frequent rhymes (“sombre” [dark] then “ombre” [shadow] rather than the reverse) is examined and explained.