With its loping equine cadence, amphibrachic tetrameter holds morbid fascination for the doggerel-besotted. No one knows what it is until they hear it. Then they go, “Oh yeah. There once was a girl from Nantucket.” But they’re wrong, that’s only trimeter. Keep up, people, we need four triplets.

Is there such a thing as front-rhyme? you ask. Should there be? What would it look like?

He grabs by the vitals whomever he chooses.
The slabs of endeavor are redolent ruses.

There you have it: an AB front-rhymed couplet. To your untested ear is rhyme even present? Not so much, right? That’s the genius. English has long since said eff it to Nantucket. But what’s to fill the empty bucket? Say hello to head rhyme.

I grant you, the couplet is flawed. The incidental rhyming at end-of-line — chooses/ruses — is unfortunate. It has no place in the model of a new paradigm. English, like Italian, is almost impossible to versify without rhyming. Let’s try to improve the couplet…

… first, by altering line 1:

He grabs by the vitals whomever he wishes.
The slabs of endeavor are redolent ruses.

Wishes and ruses are still too close to rhyming. Let’s try altering line 2:

He grabs by the vitals whomever he chooses.
The slabs of endeavor are redolent mimsies.

Close enough. Do not fret over the poetic license of line 2. A “slab of endeavor” explains itself in a manner of speaking. Mimsies, plural of mimsy, may be a recherché nonce word or not. Verse allows such ambiguities. Only poetry takes them seriously.

Embrace new vistas in versifying, messieurs-dames. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Dream hard, dream big, dream on. It’s the right thing to do.

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