Not long ago I had reason to think, for purposes of critique, about rhyme words, about the way we choose them, and about why they work and why they sometimes don't. Once I started, I kept mulling.

I've come to rhyming very late and somewhat warily. I still get nervous about being cornered by rhyme into saying something I don't mean (though less so than two years ago when all I'd write was blank verse!). I haven't developed useful techniques like keeping lists of great rhymes I stumble on, and I'm probably less conscious than I should be of avoiding tired pairings.

So let's talk about rhymes. What's your all-time favorite great rhyme? Who's your favorite poet, or songwriter, where striking rhyming is concerned? What do you keep an eye out for in your choices of rhymes?

Let's have fun with this.

Maryann

For an example of some masterful rhyming, see the following URL where you'll find the 1936 (final) version of Robert Frost's <u>Design</u> as well as the same poem in a 1912 version, <u>In White</u>:

http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro...y/design2.html


Talk about challenges and work being play for mortal stakes! Notice how Frost succeeded in using four out of the five words** with -oth rhymes that had possibilities for use in his poem.

And . . . he made it look so effortless!

______________
**The fifth possible -oth rhyme: troth.

Hi Patricia,
Might as well go ahead and post Frost's poem here, eh?

Design (1936)

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

The three rhyming sounds he uses,
-oth, -ight, and -all
all sound soooo ..... ooooh and ahhhhhh.... I dunno how else to say it... delicate, maybe? Like a soft landing at the end of each line. Anyway perfectly suited for the content of this poem.

Here's one of my favorites, an old standby, but the soft sounding rhymes are here also:

There's a certain Slant of light (258)
by Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

annie

Thanks for posting the 1936 version, annie. You've made it easier for me to just go ahead and sorta interline the 1912 version.

Also: I, too, like Miss Emily's #258 . . . though, if she were posting it here for comment, I'd overlook her use of that breath/death rhyme but be tempted to tell here that, IMO, she said all that needed saying in her first and last quatrains. ;)

All best--
Patricia

"Also: I, too, like Miss Emily's #258 . . . though, if she were posting it here for comment, I'd overlook her use of that breath/death rhyme but be tempted to tell here that, IMO, she said all that needed saying in her first and last quatrains. ;)"

Ah, now I understand why she didn't look for comments very often.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/biggrin.gif

Hmmm.....Roger or Patricia....could you explain the objection (or possible objection) to E.D.'s breath/death rhyme? Is it the "r" in breath that makes them imperfect? I wouldn't have even questioned that one...thanks.

Marybeth

Marybeth--

No objection, Marybeth. Just a failed attempt at ticklin' a funny-bone, I suppose. Anyway . . .

Look for an olde Discerning Eye thread--Making Tired Rhymes Fresh Again--to see why I thought it humourous to mention the [uh] overused breath/death rhyme.

All best--
Patricia

Thanks, Patricia. I tend to think about sound first and not always about "freshness" when it comes to rhyme...but both are important. I'll check out that thread you reference.

Marybeth

Marybeth, I think the only objection is that the breath/death combination is so often used. It's seen as too expected, like moon/June/spoon and love/dove. Somewhere there's probably an official list of Rhymes One Should Use Only With Caution, but I haven't found it.

I recall finding an old thread (either on Mastery or Discerning Eye) that discussed Larkin's pairing of "coastal shelf/ self" in "This Be the Verse." Some thought shelf/self was bad per se; others thought it was redeemed by the offbeat mental image of "It deepens like a coastal shelf." They made the point that even a tired rhyme can be used well.

It's the pairs one rarely sees that make one sit up and take delighted notice. For example, I laughed our loud at virus/Osiris in Quincy's recent poem.

Feminine rhymes, it seems, are always funnier. Ogden Nash puts us in stitches with his penchant for violating all the rules of meter and then ending in a multisyllable rhyme that yokes violently different ideas--like "interpolate them/purple ate them" in "Very Like a Whale."

P.S.
There's a typo in my reply to annie . . . a typo I didn't correct . . . but Roger must have noticed.

Thanks, Maryann. I know -- if I hope to bring my poems up to the "next level" -- that I have to be less content with finding any old rhyme that fits the meter and context and doesn't feel forced/rhyme driven. You've also given me good examples to study. I admit I've never spent a lot of time with Ogden Nash.

Interesting topic, Maryann.

Some of my fav rhymes come from Byron’s Don Juan, are here are a few:


But – oh ye lords of ladies intellectual!
Inform us truly, have they not henpecked you all?

Since in a way that’s rather of the oddest, he
Became divested of his native modesty.

Of beauties cool as an Italian convent,
Where all the passions have, alas! but one vent.

He loved his child and would have wept the loss of her,
But knew the cause no more than a philosopher.

However, the presence of unexpected and inventive rhymes is not in itself always the sign of great poetry, nor is the absence of such rhymes.

I have seen some readers mark otherwise good poems down in their estimation merely because the rhyme words – when isolated – are apparently quite dull and uninventive.

Here is a list of the rhyme words for one of my all-time favourite poems:

this,
is ;
thee,
be.
said
head ;
woo,
two ;
do.
spare,
are.
this
is.


How unexciting are these rhymes, from Donne’s “The Flea”.

Something painters discover early on is that there is no such thing as a bad colour. Just badly used colour. I think the same is true of rhyme. Context is all. Near rhyme, when used skilfully, greatly enlarges the available palette of rhyme and nuance available to the poet.
Playing with the mixture of sound and meaning is what gives so-called formal poetry its edge (in my view) over free verse.
Janet

John Whitworth takes a bit of beating in the rhyme game:
I Wish You Were a Wave of the Sea

Fretting my heart as you pedal your bicycle,
Perdita, once I called, Perdita, twice I called.
Pretty as paint and as cool as a icicle,
..... Perdita Simmons!

Shall I tell how we met under fortunate auspices?
Presuming a bottle of Spanish Don Horsepiss is
Fortunate... This is not one of my coarse pieces,
..... Perdita Simmons.

Syllables shimmy as sonnets assemble
Themselves in a shadowless summer a-tremble -
A ten-guinea ticket for Merton Commem Ball
..... With Perdita Simmons

Daddy's a saurian Cambridge historian.
Mummy's more chummy. She's tweedy and Tory and
Hunts and what-have-you. So very Victorian
..... Is Perdita Simmons.

Thus Mainwaring, tall dark and rich, with a glance as much
As to say, My dear boy, I don't fancy your chances much
I know Perdie of old, and she doesn't like dances much,
..... Doesn't Perdita Simmons.

Perdita's hair ruffles fairer and tanglier,
Perdita's grin makes my ganglia janglia,
Perdita's uncle owns half of East Anglia,
.....All for Perdita Simmons.

Mainwaring's plan is for getting a leg over;
Wait till she's plastered (the bastard!), then beg of her.
No go. (Ho-ho!) Now his face has got egg over.
..... From Perdita Simmons.

Oh, how spiffing! (She talks like a school-story serial,
While my lexical style is down-market and beery.) All
Love is insane and remote and ethereal
..... And Perdita Simmons.

As we're pounding the ground in a last hokey-cokey, dawn
Fingers two constables, hauling off chokey-borne
Mainwaring, pissed as a rat on the croquet lawn.
..... Sweet Perdita Simmons.

Half-asleep, climbing from Headington Hill, at the crest of it
Sickle moon, scatter of stars and the rest of it,
In my hand one small hand (and this is the best of it)
..... Of Perdita Simmons.

Perdita murmurs, You'll do for a poet.
And kisses me carefully twice, just to show it.
Nobody knows what love is. But I know it.
..... It's Perdita Simmons.

-- John Whitworth


And get a load of this
Here's a quote from a publishing note :Writing Poetry (A & C Black 2001 £9.99).

Does modern poetry have to be difficult? Can it rhyme? Do I need a degree in English Literature to write it and is it OK to be funny? John Whitworth answers these and a thousand other questions in this popular and much-praised how-to handbook now in its second (revised) edition.

AND MOST ESPECIALLY THIS INTERVIEW


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 10, 2008).]

I agree with Janet. It's almost silly to evaluate a pair of rhyme words without evaluating the words that come in between them, and, if they are part of a longer syntactical unit, the entire unit. I'm not willing to do the hard counting work involved, but I'll bet if you went through the work of the "top" twenty poets writing rhyming poems in English, you'd find that at least 80% of the rhymes were used by at least 50% of the poets.

The purpose of a rhyme is not always to surprise, per se, though we don't want the reader to be anticipating the word so far in advance that it chimes off in his head before he gets there. We've all seen poems get praised by people saying that "when I first read it, I didn't even realize it rhymed," which shows, in those instances, that surprise was the last thing the reader was looking for.

But even predictable rhymes are not always a problem. A famous example concludes Frost's "Reluctance:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

As Frost himself has pointed out, after "reason" there was only one possible rhyme left in the English language. The astute and verbal reader/poet would have sensed this fact and known that "season" was about to conclude the poem, but, I think, this fact does not dull the impact of the conclusion. What counts is how the rhymes are woven together, the thoughts and rhythms and associations that bind the rhyme in a way that goes beyond the fact that they have a certain sonic quality that we call "rhyme."

What's bad is not a familiar rhyme, per se, but familiar rhymes that are symptoms of familiar lines, familiar stanzas, familiar thoughts, and familiar poetry. You can blame the rhyme when you don't like the poem, but it's usually something that goes beyond the rhyme. To use Janet's painting analogy, don't blame the color red if someone uses it to do a bad painting of a rose.




[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited January 11, 2008).]

Janet, the linked poem and article are gold, or dynamite, or both if such a thing is possible! Thank you for them. I must come back and read the article more carefully; there's too much there to absorb at once. Whitworth is a colossal discovery.

Maryann

With apologies, I think this (lines 2 and 4) is the most brilliant rhyme in English poetry, from a poem by X. J. Kennedy:

Who will ride with Fergus now?
You lazy cocks and cunts,
I thought I'd ask you anyhow.
Well, don't all talk at once.

David, no apologies needed! It does have quite an impact. The force is partly from the grossness of the word, and partly because the words don't look like a rhyme.

And Roger, I think we cross-posted, as I just now saw your post. Those are good arguments and demonstrations. I like, and think I will be able to remember, the notion that what's bad is the rhyme that is a symptom of a too-familiar idea.

Editing back: I think I've neglected to say thanks to Patricia, Annie, and Mark. Patricia and Annie, I noticed another admirable Frost rhyme this morning, the "spaces/human race is" pairing in the last S of "Desert Places." Mark, that's a great insight about "The Flea."

What Bob said. Of course comic or satiric poetry lends itself much more readily to less familiar and even outrageous rhymes than does more “earnest” poetry, where surprise or laughter can work against what the poem is doing. And yes, I know that comic verse can be and often is serious, and that laughter is a powerful disarming strategy.

One of my longtime favorites is Guy Wetmore Carryl [1873-1904; died at 31], who recast many a legend, fable, fairy tale, and Mother Goose rhyme into rollicking and pun-punched verse. Here are the opening two stanzas (of ten + a moral) of one of his typical pieces:

How the Helpmate of Blue-Beard Made Free with a Door

A maiden from the Bosphorus,
With eyes as bright as phosphorus,
……Once wed the wealthy bailiff
………………Of the caliph
……………………Of Kelat.
Though diligent and zealous, he
Became a slave to jealousy.
……(Considering her beauty,
………………'T was his duty
……………………To be that!)

When business would necessitate
A journey, he would hesitate,
……But, fearing to disgust her,
………………He would trust her
……………………With his keys,
Remarking to her prayerfully:
"I beg you'll use them carefully.
……Don't look what I deposit
………………In that closet,
……………………If you please." . . .

And here is the conclusion of his take on "Little Red Riding Hood":

……If a swallow cannot make a summer
……It can bring on a summary fall!

I'll add another dimension to this, not off subject. Here are my favorite rhymes from my poems. I really don't admire myself a lot, but about these I feel rather smug:

from "Three Poems by Lady Night" (appeared in premier issue of Measure):

The bare tree branches tremble in the breeze,
So sharp and sudden as twilight descends.
And over me my lover softly bends.
And I am young and proud of my beauties.

"breeze/beauties" is one I am quite proud of. And the courtesan (high-class call girl) in this is not just proud of her "beauty" but of her "beauties"--her eyes, hair, breasts, legs, etc.

Another from a poem by Chinese poet Li Po (appeared in Hellas):

I lift the cup aloft and I invite
The Moon to drink with me. To my delight,
She joins me—then my shadow makes us three!
Together we indulge in revelry.
The Moon drinks, and my shadow—what a laugh!—
Now imitates me down the moonlit path!

I like the "laugh/path" one too. Slant rhymes are good.

Both of these are translations. Perhaps translations bring out our resourcefulness more.

Your own favorite rhymes from your own poems?

But does "breeze" rhyme with "beauties"? I guess if you say it very carefully, in a way that gives both syllables of "beauties" an almost equal stress, you can almost consider it a rhyme, but, even though it sounds fine, I'm not sure it's actually a rhyme if you want to get technical about it.

Rhyming a stressed with an unstressed syllable was, once upon a time, something I objected to as "not a rhyme." Now I do it once in a while, as a source of variety, but only in poems built mainly with off-rhymes; for example, I've rhymed "lies" and "blowflies". I don't expect readers to alter stress from their normal pronunciations; I just ask them to accept an unusual pairing.

Roger--

I think the beauty of some rhymes is that they don't rhyme perfectly--or that the inflection makes the rhyme seem a little "off." That is precisely what I like bout "breeze" and "beauties" and "laugh" and "path." To me, when poets started to play creatively with rhyme, that's where it gets fun and becomes more delightful to read.

Here's a stanza from a sonnet by Irish poet John O'Donahue:

The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young woman with distance in her gaze,
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.

He often uses really far-out rhymes, and I like this sort of thing. I don't think conventional, exact rhyme is bad, but I love it when poets push the limits of rhyme.

So yes: what is rhyme?

Since David has sinned first by posting one of his own, here's an old poem of mine that I've always liked because of its rhymes. (I know it's bad form to admit to liking one of one's own poems.) I suspect it's too British for American readers:

MISS POSTLETHWAITE’S DOWNFALL

Water colours and reading
were Miss Postlethwaite’s passion
and in her own fashion
she had taste and breeding

“My dear father always”
her usual beginning
“Advised against sinning”
and lowered her gaze.

She cycled each morning
to open her shop
a convenient stop
for needs without warning.

Milk, eggs, stamps and pencils
and biscuits of all sorts
equipment for ball sports
and cardboard utensils.

The cad you expected
in the form of a vicar
managed to trick her
then promptly defected

Her shop gone and maybe
a worse fate in store
she courageously bore
a fatherless baby.

“My dear father always”
she said to her lawyer
“was a trusty employer
of the suitable phrase”

“And had Papa lasted
despite his bad stutter
I’m sure he would utter
the epithet bastard.”




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 11, 2008).]

Janet--if posting your own poems is a sin, I will say about the one you posted, O felix culpa! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

I've never seen the early "Design," and it's encouraging to see Frost go from a blue-haired lady of 38 to the great master of 62, at least for one who hopes to hit his stride in his seventh decade! I had a poem take 24 years from the time I heard its concluding couplet in a bar. The quadruple rhyme was difficult in the extreme, and I had to gain some painful personal experience with aphids and custom combiners to bring it off.

The Honey Wagon

Some say the custom cutters wheeled
and dealed at his expense.
Some say the aphids ate his yield
and call it negligence.
Some of the neighbors’ lips are sealed,
the folks with common sense
say you can’t fertilize a field
by farting through the fence.

Now THAT was funny!

Here is a good rhymer I stumbled upon today. It may seem familiar.

Cassandra, by A.E. Stallings

If I may have failed to follow
Your instructions, lord Apollo,
So all my harping lies unstrung,
I blame it on the human tongue.

Our speech ever was at odds
With the utterance of gods:
Tenses have no paradigm
For those translated out of time.

Perhaps mortals should rejoice
To conjugate in passive voice—
The alphabet to which I go
Is suffering, and ends in O.

Paraphrase can only worsen:
For you, there is no second person,
“I want” the same verb as “must be,”
“Love,” construed as “yield to me,”

The homonym of “curse” and “give,”
No mood but the infinitive.
.........................................

Lots of the unexpected there in her rhymes.

annie

For sheer cleverness in rhyme one must turn to polysyllabic and mosaic rhyme. My favorites are Byron's use of ineffectual/hen pecked you all in "Don Juan" and Joanna Newsom's low-flying turkey/Texan drying jerky in her song, "Cassiopeia."

Joanna Newsom is my favorite singer/songwriter when it comes to clever rhymes. Read the lyrics to her album, "The Milk Eyed Mender" with attention to her rhymes: http://www.bentclouds.com/music/newsomlyrics.html

Watch this http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=Vc...eature=related as well as some of her other perfomances on You Tube.

She's delightful.

James

I heard a radio announcer say that he thought the most eloquent rhyme in Rock and Roll was this one (lines 3 and 4) from the song "Sweet City Woman" by the Canadian group Stampeders:

A country morning, all smothered in dew
Has got a way to make a man feel shiny and new
And she'll sing in the evening some familiar tunes
And she feeds me love and tenderness and maccaroons

Pretty good, eh?

dwl

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