No Rhyme or Reason

It interested me to note a curious detail of the rhyme scheme in the first section of Felicia Hemans' poem "Properizia Rossi": its subtlety and/or absence, depending on your perspective. Of course we are used to contemporary poetry that doesn't rhyme, but this may be the first instance of Romantic poetry that avoids the standard end rhyming that we've seen with poets like Percy Shelley. Rhyme isn't totally absent from the first part of the poem: certain phrases recall one another, as "resting-place" with "happiness" in lines 6 and 4 respectively, but the similarities are so subtle as to be nearly unnoticeable compared to the overt rhyming present in the rest of the poem: "more/pour," "enshrined/mind," and so on.
Perhaps because it does not strive to rhyme, the opening lines are my favorite part of the poem. While rhyming can certainly be a poetic strength, adding force and memorability as well as aesthetic beauty, it often seems to me that forced rhyming is the most common shortfall of the Romantic poets--perhaps because they felt they had no choice but to rhyme, they occasionally shoehorned words into somewhat awkward rhymes. It is refreshing, then, to see Hemans write a passage in which she pays seemingly no attention to end rhymes.
The difference in rhyme scheme from the rest of the poem (which is divided into sections and mostly rhymed in couplets, with a few exceptions) also serves to set the beginning apart as a sort of prologue. This is emphasized by the numbering scheme, which begins with numeral 1 at the second section. One final notable aspect of the rhyme scheme is that many of the sections end with "orphan" unrhymed lines, as with "If love be strong as death!" in line 58 following the "flow/know" rhymes of line 56-7. At the end, however, Hemans uses a couplet to conclude the poem; this shift lends the final lines an extra degree of finality.