Rhythm and rhyme

The rhythm is very important in “The River” by Bruce Springsteen. The song, which you can listen to on YouTube, begins with the sounds of a harmonica and a guitar, which help create the mood. Immediately after, Bruce Springsteen begins singing. The beginning of the song is intense and dramatic. Notice how the pace grows immediately after line 6, when the refrain appears. Then, the song becomes increasingly more alert, just as the life of the narrator.

When it comes to rhyme, you have probably noticed that there is no fixed rhyme scheme in the song. In the first stanza, the only lines that rhyme are 6 and 7:

When she was just seventeen
We'd ride out of this valley down to where the fields were green  (ll. 6-7)

In stanza 2, only lines 11 and 12 rhyme:

And man that was al...