[Janice D. Soderling]

This is a long, long thread, and I have not carefully read every posting in it, so I hope I am not repeating what someone else has said. But...

My absolutely favorite rhyming romp in all climes and times are in Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Not because of the complexity, but because of the seeming simplicity and absolute rightness of every single one.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen
(Noel Coward)

In tropical climes there are certain times of day
When all the citizens retire,
to tear their clothes off and perspire.
It's one of those rules that the biggest fools obey,
Because the sun is much too sultry and one must avoid
its ultry-violet ray --
Papalaka-papalaka-papalaka-boo. (Repeat)
Digariga-digariga-digariga-doo. (Repeat)
The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts,
Because they're obviously, absolutely nuts --

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to, the Chinese wouldn't dare to,
Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta,
In the Philippines there are lovely screens,
to protect you from the glare,
In the Malay states there are hats like plates,
which the Britishers won't wear,
At twelve noon the natives swoon, and
no further work is done -
But Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see,
That though the British are effete,
they're quite impervious to heat,
When the white man rides, every native hides in glee,
Because the simple creatures hope he will
impale his solar topee on a tree.
Bolyboly-bolyboly-bolyboly-baa. (Repeat)
Habaninny-habaninny-habaninny-haa. (Repeat)
It seems such a shame that when the English claim the earth
That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth -

Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit can never understand it.
In Rangoon the heat of noon is just what the natives shun.
They put their scotch or rye down, and lie down.
In the jungle town where the sun beats down,
to the rage of man or beast,
The English garb of the English sahib merely gets a bit more creased.
In Bangkok, at twelve o'clock, they foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, go out in the midday sun.
The smallest Malay rabbit deplores this stupid habit.
In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a noonday gun.
To reprimand each inmate, who's in late.
In the mangrove swamps where the python romps
there is peace from twelve till two.
Even caribous lie down and snooze, for there's nothing else to do.
In Bengal, to move at all, is seldom if ever done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.




[This message has been edited by Janice D. Soderling (edited February 18, 2008).]

[Barbara Godwin]

Janice-

I'd heard of "Mad Dogs and Englishman" because Ralph sings it on the Muppet Show. You can see how deeply cultured I am.

Also, I wanted to share a poem by one of the worst poets of all time. Any rhyme she used is one to exercise extreme caution around.

Epitaph Suitable for a Critics's Tomb

My! What a bubbly, vapoury box of vanity!
A litter of worms, a relic of humanity,
Once a plaster-caste of mud, a puff of breath as well,
Before you chance to wander - remember there's a -----
So here lies an honest critic and I tell thee what,
'Tis a thing for all the world to stare and wonder at!

- From Fumes of Formation by Amanda McKittrick Ros

[Christy Reno]

I kinda like my rhymes of a sonnet I wrote about a month ago. The sestet is nothing though.

shampoo
Vietnam
Psalm
zoo
food
SSI
thigh
screwed

pray
replied
free
play
outside
TV

[Steve Bradbury]

The rhyme I'm proudest of was in the closing couplet of a translation I did of a quatrain in a version of The Prison Poems of Ho Chi Minh I published a few years ago.

HIGH CUISINE AT BAOXIANG PRISON

At Guode they relish a fish on a dish.
Here the guards are agog for saddle of dog.
This taste for the high life’s a little outré,
And I wonder just what would Escoffier say?

I should pount out that the source poem, which was composed in Chinese in the classical style, didn't contain the French word "outre" or any reference to Escoffier, but given that Ho worked under Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in London for awhile and spoke French fluently, I didn;t feel guilty about taking these particular liberties with the text.

[Lewis Turco]

In Cleveland in the early ‘60’s John Ciardi was giving a talk at John Carroll University. He was doing his famous discussion of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which he pointed out that the form of the poem was an interlocking rubaiyat which should have ended by circling back, in the last quatrain, to the first stanza to pick up the main rhyme again. Instead, Ciardi said, Frost broke the form, and in breaking it made the poem a hundredfold more effective than it would otherwise have been had he maintained the requirements of the rubaiyat.

The house was packed. One of those present was a woman named “Yetta Blank” (that was really her name). John recited the first two lines of the last stanza of Frost’s poem, then the third line, “And miles to go before I sleep.” He paused dramatically, looked at the audience and said rhetorically, “Now, how would you have ended that poem?”

Yetta Blank leapt to her feet and called out, “And now I lay me down to sleep?” In the hall, dead silence. Ciardi leaned across the podium, rested on his forearms, lanced her with his gaze and said, “You really think so, huh?”

[Quincy Lehr]

Just came back to this thread after a particularly long absence and was a bit distressed to see the Sadoff article attacked as being yet another instance of PC academic assaults on culture. The article really is far more subtle than that. Sadoff essentially argues that many of the reasons that New Formalist critics gave as arguments for returning to traditional metre and rhyme were misplaced, in that they posed prosodic solutions to thematic problems. I don't entirely subscribe to his argument, but I do to a large extent--particularly in that he does not consider New Formalism to be unique in that regard.

There is no doubt a serious discussion to be had on Sadoff's piece, but straw-manning his position is not the way to go about it.

Quincy

[Mark Allinson]

True, Quincy, there are a few important elements in this essay.

I do agree with his comments on the LANG-PO folk:


“Language poets demand that we interrupt the poetic process so, like good post-modernists, we can acknowledge the artifice of the work of art. We forget that Coleridge's distinction between word and thing accomplished their work almost two hundred years ago. We forget that Barth and Barthelme exhausted this device in American fiction some fifteen years ago. What is more narcissistic and repetitive than making the work of art, discourse itself, the subject of the art?”

In short – wankers one and all.

And his concluding paragraph is worth repeating, and worth taking note of.


“If we forget the primacy of the Romantics' understanding of vision (as Blake says, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite"), American poets risk contributing to the myopia, the diminishment of the art form. The mistake of the neo- formalists, then, is the mistake of all those who believe that form has a life of its own. We read Keats's poems not because they make lovely sounds, although they do, but because those sounds are connected to perception, and those perceptions dramatize intensely the relationship between the admittedly uncomfortable contingent self and a shifting world. A poetry of fixed forms can only console; it cannot transform. The neo-formalists miss the irony of the urn's statement, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." If we want our poems to live, in every sense of the word, we need to know and see much more and we need to know it soon.”

I agree.

[Anne Bryant-Hamon]

In Cleveland in the early ‘60’s John Ciardi was giving a talk at John Carroll University. He was doing his famous discussion of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which he pointed out that the form of the poem was an interlocking rubaiyat which should have ended by circling back, in the last quatrain, to the first stanza to pick up the main rhyme again. Instead, Ciardi said, Frost broke the form, and in breaking it made the poem a hundredfold more effective than it would otherwise have been had he maintained the requirements of the rubaiyat.

That's very interesting, Mr. Turco. I think it's good to appreciate form without letting it control us. Sometimes we just need to be bold enough to write outside the box (like coloring outside the lines). I once did that with a double sonnet. Too often, though, my coloring outside the lines is an accidental oversight that doesn't work out, especially with the little french forms.

A belated welcome to you -
Anne

[Christy Reno]

It would be cool if someone could make a poem and rhyme caesura, obscura, and appogiatura. I think there was one other word that rhymes with those, but I forgot it.

[Michael Cantor]

For me, appogiatura
implies there was bravura
first - I'll slip in a caesura,
and sip some angostura
as it all becomes obscura