And while we're on songwriters, please visit the thread on Tom Lehrer, a bit lower down on the board. His polysyllabic rhymes (cyanide/try and hide, plagiarize/shade your eyes) are a hoot, but so is everything about his work.

A favorite of mine:

"Love is like
a pineapple
sweet and
undefinable."

-piet hein

Also, since some have mentioned songwriters, the Magnetic Fields have vaguely Nash-like ones:

"I met Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this
On love, he said, I'm not so sure I even know what it is
No understanding, no closure, it is a nemesis
You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids, he said so...

and

I'm just a great composer and not a violent man
But I lost my composure and I shot Ferdinand
Crying, it's well and kosher to say you don't understand
But this is for Holland Dozier Holland, his last words were..."



[This message has been edited by Orwn Acra (edited January 12, 2008).]

For those who haven't enough time or curiosity to wonder what words might be found to rhyme with "behaviour" in the Gerald Manley Hopkins poem Hurrahing in Harvest, here's an encapsulation: Hopkins' poem can be found at the following URL:

http://www.bartleby.com/122/14.html


The poem by Bill Greenwell is from HOW TO BE WELL-VERSED IN POETRY, compiled and edited by E. O. Parrott.

I have no favorite rhymes, or poets because of their rhyming ability. Given two words used in a poem to mark the end of a line, there seem to be three possibilities: 1) the words rhyme (the good), 2) the words don't rhyme (the bad), or 3) the words just sorta rhyme but are passed off as a rhyme (the ugly). Some people, usually poets, think the ugly is OK when they do it. Others, often non-poet readers doubt the poet's creative ability to come up with something better.

Rather than striking rhymes, I would look for striking ideas in poems that are presented in a way that sound nice and which make me want to hear the poem again. The sounding nice is usually helped by the rhyme, alliteration and more importantly the meter.

I want the rhyme to be simple and able to be used internally as well. Sets of words rhyming with "day", "night", "you", "tell" are great rhyming sets of words. I don't want the reader to think I am pretentious and so avoid fancy rhyming constructions. The idea in the poem, not the rhyme is important.

Poems don't have to rhyme, but some aural repetition in meter or alliteration is useful so that what is written is not confused with micro-fiction with line breaks.

When I first posted on Eratosphere internal rhymes were heavily frowned on. I don't know the origin of that attitude but I was a little saddened by it.

Thank goodness we seem to have loosened up and can hear the internal action of poems better as a result. Good dancers have an electricity that runs through their entire body and I think good poets do much the same thing.
Janet

PS: That's a great poem of Alicia's.

And I forgot to say that Tim's is funny and neat.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 13, 2008).]

A couple more favorite Tom Lehrer rhymes:

Who needs a hobby, like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby, rereading Lady Chatterly!
--"Smut"

Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison...
--"Vatican Rag"

If you haven't already read this:

http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/...en_1.html#more

check it out. Thought provoking essay on "rhyme-driven" by AE.

I loved that Longfellow poem!

marybeth

Rhyme is a fascinating topic, to say nothing of being a huge help when it comes to memorizing poems!

The opening of Dante’s Inferno, canto 32, is a great little essay on rhyme:


S'io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,
come si converrebbe al tristo buco
sovra 'l qual pontan tutte l'altre rocce

io premerei di mio concetto il suco
più pienamente; ma perch'io non l'abbo,
non sanza tema a dicer mi conduco;

ché non è impresa da pigliare a gabbo
discriver fondo a tutto l'universo,
né da lingua che chiami mamma o babbo.

Ma quelle donne aiutino il mio verso
ch'aiutaro Anfione a chiuder Tebe,
sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso.

With harsh and clacking rhymes that could convey
the nature of that hole of misery
on which all other rocks converge and weigh,

I would press out the juice more thoroughly
from my conception. Lacking them, I fall
to the work at hand with some anxiety.

To try to describe the very floor of all
the universe is nothing to attract
an idle mind, no task for tongues that call

to mama and papa. May my attempts be backed
by those ladies that inspired Amphion when
he walled Thebes, that my words may hold the fact.

--trans. Michael Palma


Palma’s translation is good but misses the exact meaning of that last phrase—the saying of something has to match the experience, the rhymes have to be keyed to it. Dante is brilliant at matching rhyme to fit the scene. He uses those "aspre e chiocce" rhymes (which literally means harsh, and screeching like chickens!) in the Inferno whenever a scene is violent, obscene, grotesquely or diabolically funny, or just to express sheer numb-skull stupidity of certain mental states.

Rhyme can be very practical, too. When I was a kid and had fevers I often got delirious and had pretty wild hallucinations. What was the only thing my mother found could make me sane? Reciting Mother Goose.

Andrew

Thanks for the link, Marybeth. I hadn't seen that. The comment that interests me most is the notion that some readers really, truly dislike rhyme--dread it. I've read such a comment once before, at the Gaz. It may be a more common feeling that we realize, and I wish I knew more about it. In this age of niche marketing, does its existence argues for segregating rhyme in certain journals?

Andrew, I'm jealous; I wish I knew another language well enough to see why a word choice in it is truly excellent.

Maryann,
I feel sad for the people who hate rhyme. That cuts them off from enjoyment of many of the greatest works of English literature. Humans are pattern-loving creatures, so to reject rhyme entirely sounds like learned behavior to me. I wince at certain bad rhymes, but to consider all rhyme a distraction and focus only on WHAT is being said seems to ignore one of the basic qualities of poetry. It's their loss.

Susan