Rhymes On A Dime / Literature

I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I do not like them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

—The main character, Green Eggs and Ham

Examples to trample,
Of Rhymes on a Dime,
In Literature, which may be bitter or pure.

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• Dr. Seuss' books are mostly well known for rhymes. In fact, they are so well-known to him, that they can commonly be found in other related media, including film and television. The most notable out of all these books is Green Eggs and Ham, which provides the subpage's quote.
• The game version of this is apparently how Marco from Animorphs bonds with his father when they're alone.
• This was Vanessa Pike's oh-so-crazy quirk in The Baby-Sitters Club books.
• The denizens of the Land of Clever People from Book of Brownies have a rule where their citizens and visitors must speak in rhyme, all the time as evidence of their "cleverness". Failure to rhyme a sentence, and the offender will be punished by public spanking.
• 'The Prof' from the Burke novels by Andrew Vachss.
  "Prof is short for prophet, my man. I never fall because I see it all!"
• The Chronicles of Prydain: Gurgi often likes to speak with "rhymings and chimings".
• Natalia Line from Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! always speaks in rhyme when she's nervous.
• The defining trait of the Society of the Rhyming Dove, a "guild of eccentric poets", in The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, is that they constantly speak in rhyme. Indeed, they seem to perceive other people's dialogue in rhyme too, or else to have an irresistible compulsion to render it as such even if asked to write it down exactly as said. There is much in-universe speculation on whether they're just very good at improvising poetry, or if there's a genuine supernatural element to what they do.
• Heimskringla:
  • Ynglinga saga says about Odin (described as a powerful and sorcerous king of the ancient past) that, among many other extraordinary and supernatural talents, "everything he said was in rhyme, like the way what is now called poetry is composed".
  • Saga of St. Olaf says about Olaf's court poet Sigvatr Thordarson that he was so good at composing verse that "he spoke it extempore, just as if he was saying something in the ordinary way."
• The demon that gives the wizard Ebenezum his allergy to magic in A Malady of Magicks speaks in this manner, although his rhymes are pretty bad. A good thing, as if he could rhyme well (or had the self-control to ignore comments to the contrary) he'd be unbeatable; each rhyme he gets out acts as a combination generic counterspell and powerful self-buff, and they stack. In context he's a lot more frightening, up until the end of the third book when the collected wizards manage to spread the allergy to magic to him, forcing him to only declaim in (rather decent) blank verse.
  "Alas, you humans are out of luck,
  For now you face the demon Guxx!"
• While the main character of Inside Out by Terry Trueman doesn't rhyme his speech, the voices in his head speak almost entirely in gibberish rhymes. They only speak in a straightforward fashion when they're giving him instructions.
• The Kingdom Keepers: There's a scene in the first book where Finn's thoughts suddenly manifest themselves as such. Amanda tells him it's a sign of witches.
• In Scott Corbett's The Limerick Trick a formula produced by a mysterious boys' chemistry set with nearly-illegible labels made several of the main characters start talking like this.
• In The Fellowship of the Ring, Tom Bombadil speaks in rhyming verse so often that the index of poems in The Lord of the Rings doesn't bother to list his verses individually.
• The Madeline books are all written in rhyme, including character dialogue. The narrators of the cartoon and the movie also speak in rhyme, sometimes by directly quoting the books.
• In Robert Arthur's "Mr. Milton's Gift" one Homer Milton enters a mysterious curio shop in search of an anniversary present for his wife and, after making an offhand comment about the "gift of making money," is given it - along with the "gift of verse" as a bonus, because of his name. This results in exchanges like the following attempted explanation to his lawyer when he discovers that the "gift of making money" is more literal than he expected:
  "I tried to buy my wife a present, something she'd consider pleasant. I didn't want her to be vexed, so I wound up getting hexed. A gift this Clarence fellow sold me, but the thing he never told me was I'd be a counterfeiter-"
• Uyulala from The Never Ending Story. In fact, she can't speak without rhyming, and also cannot hear people if they do not talk to her in verse. (Atreyu manages to get a knack for it rather quickly.)
• Onimi from New Jedi Order speaks constantly in rhymes specifically to annoy whoever he's talking to (and thereby amuse his boss). As most of Onimi's dialogue, however, is in the Yuuzhan Vong language, he's probably really using some other form of poetic meter that is simply rendered as rhymes in English. When he reveals his true nature, he stops doing this.
• LaBerge, one of the announcers of The Quillan Games (The Pendragon Adventure book 8), likes to speak in this whenever he's on air.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: "Curse me, eh, I'll make you pay/ I don't want to rhyme all day!"
• Pumuckl, the kobold protagonist of a German children's series. "Oh, das reimt sich! Und was sich reimt, ist gut, haha!" (Oh, that rhymes! And anything that rhymes is good, haha!)
• Sir Harry the Muse, an Owl from ''Mattimeo'', who always talks in rhyme except when conducting business.
• Tertius Fume does this in Septimus Heap to the point of being called out for this by Merrin Meredith.
• In both the book and movie versions of The Spiderwick Chronicles, Thimbletack the brownie rhymes at almost all times.
• In the Star Trek Expanded Universe, there's a race called the Lonat who speak in rhyme, and it's explicitly made Translation Convention. Skilled poetic speaking akin to Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter is mutilated into nursery rhyme style verse by the Universal Translator doing the best it can to keep up. We don't know what the Lonat trader Square-Deal Djonreel is hearing when the DS9 crew talk to him, but he is pleased when they respond to him in rhyme just for fun. Kira tries to get them to cut it out, but accidentally ends her order with a word that rhymes with what O'Brien had just said.
• In David Brin's Uplift series the dolphin language Trinary is expressed in (often rather snarky) limericks. Though later generations of "fin" can speak Anglic and usually don't bother rhyming when they do so.
• In The Viscount of Adrilankha Ibronka and Röaana do this as a game.
  -Is it something living?
  -The answer no I am giving, and it is not the sky.
  -I have to wonder why. Can I hold it in my hand?
  -You can hold it while you stand. (And so on.)
• In The Wise Man's Fear, two of the characters have an entire unscripted rhyming conversation, and in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe does a Badass Boast like this. It's actually good poetry. Justified Trope, He's a musician. Further justified due to use of the Translation Convention.
• The children's book The Wonderful O is full of this, since the premise is that the villains ban one rather vital letter of the English language. So, naturally, they must demonstrate the difficulties this creates in poetry and verse.
• In The Scarlet Sails, the sailor Letika often speaks in rhymes, to the delight of the rest of the crew.
  Letika (in the 1961 film's English subtitles): With a string and a pole of wood I have made myself a whip / And now I tie a hook on it and, whistling, make it flip.
• The 13 Clocks slips in and out of rhyme, but manages to make it work even at the most dramatic moments:
  "I have no tears," said Hagga. "Once I wept when ships were overdue, or brooks ran dry, or tangerines were overripe, or sheep got something in their eye. I weep no more," said Hagga. Her eyes were dry as desert and her mouth seemed made of stone. "I have turned a thousand persons gemless from my door. Come in," she said. "I weep no more."
• Many fae type creatures in fairytales and literature speak in rhyme, including, but not limited to:
  • The faeries in Heroes Of Middlecenter (who explode if they fail to rhyme)
  • Puck and some of the other lesser Fairies in A Midsummer Nights Dream speak entirely or almost entirely in rhyme, while Titania and Oberon mostly don't bother. This may or may not be intentional.
• the secret lives of Princesses: Princess Paige is an expert in rhyme, and speaks only in verse.
• In The Last Dogs, the main characters meet a huge gang of rats in the subway, led by a rat named Longtooth who always speaks in rhyme. But it's eventually subverted, for when he dismisses his rats, Longtooth admits that he's run out of rhymes and speaks normally to the dogs.
• The children's book Nuddy Ned and its sequel Nuddy Ned's Christmas are both rhyming stories.
• From Wolfman Confidential: Black of heart, the goblins three/As muscle, serve a mighty sidhe/Murder, theft, even extortion/They ensure the Gobfather gets his portion.
• The Wonderful School: All of Miss Tillie O'Toole's lessons are in riddles and rhymes according to the book.
• In Theodore Isaac Rubin's story Lisa And David, the two title characters are mentally-ill teenagers in a treatment program who develop a relationship with each other. Lisa, who may be autistic, speaks in rhymes most of the time. This causes David to say to her at one point, "Lisa, Lisa, why must we rhyme? It's so hard to do, and it takes so much time!"
• In The Golden Hamster Saga, the guinea pigs Enrico and Caruso often speak in rhyme or improvise poems.