Hey! I'm delighted that my fellow moderators are weighing in and so enlivening this exchange. I'm just blasting off to Minneapolis. See y'all soon. Off, slant and para- rhyme "slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision."

I recall from undergraduate days the term "bracket rhyme" being used for this, as in Auden's:

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's leveled gun. . . .

Anyone recognize this term? Was it a suggestion that didn't catch on? Do I misremember? Did I just imagine it out of desperation?

Jan

Thanks (I think) for the doggy treat, Michael.
I was going by how I would say 'collision' and 'division', not by rhyming history (which I don't really know all that well). Of course the sound is really a schwa, but if I had to choose a full vowel to represent how I say the third syllable of 'collision', it would be 'cullizhun' rather than 'cullizhin' -- which is not to disagree with how you say it, just to say that I was being true to my own idiolect at least.

Jan:
Can't answer your question about Bracket rhyme, but want to say I like it much better than 'pararhyme'.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 20, 2001).]

Jan-- your teachers may have been referring to the stanza:

A
B
B
A

... the A-rhymes "bracket" the B-rhymes.

"I wouldn't ordinarily know that "ion" has historically been considered an "un" rhyme, so I would rhyme to the contemporary American ear, which hears it as an "in" rhyme. Say "division" out loud. Say "transportation"."

Say out loud,

confusion
transfusion
nation
allusion.

There's something more subtle working here than the American ear. The "ion" sounds at least two ways. I definitely hear "un" in your "transportation."

I haven't examined it, but it might have something to do with the specific preceding vowel or the length of the vowel.

I'm with Gary Duehr: "If Mick Jagger makes it a rhyme, I do."

Bob

So how about a little Jagger iambic pentameter from the classic piece "Honky Tonk Woman"? Flawless metrically, and though promising in its imagery in line 3, a disaster of parallelism in line 4. Awful rhymes, too...


I met a ginsoaked barroom queen in Memphis.
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride.
The lady said she'd comfort me in roses.
She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.


Kids, please don't try this at home!!!

Then there's this from Sam Gwynn whose ear is ever attuned to great pentameter. Merle Haggard was having an affair with Buck Owens' wife Bonnie. After a furious spat, they made up and he took her in his arms and said "Last night I started luvin' you agin." She said "Merle, do you know what you've got there?" The rest is history writ in platinum.

That last line is worthy of Benny Hill! Very British, very innuendo. Finbar Saunders (and his Double Entendre's) to the British readers.



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Steve Waling

I hope it isn't rude to jump in here on the Poet Lariat's thread...

I would say that most "ion" endings are really "schwas"--indeterminate "reduced vowels." Reduced vowels (the last syllable of beautiful is a case in point) traditionally can be rimed with a variety of vowel sounds.

AES

Some poets write with such AUTHORITY that they turn off rhymes which would disfigure lesser writers' efforts into adornments. The greatest examples that spring to mind are the big Yeats ottava rimas, Among School Children, Prayer for my Daughter, Sailing to Byzantium, etc. Let me point out though that Yeats makes that work by tripling his slants through line six, then giving the ear its couplet. An emerging poet of whose off rhymes the same may someday be said is our own Alicia,who should try her hand the eight line stanza.