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Rhyme lecture...

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Introduction to Poetry: Rhyme Introduction:  Model one of rhyme. Poems have to have rhymes; they’re a kind of boring duty to be fulfilled  Secondly, as a debt that gets repaid – or not – as in ‘Monna Innominata II’  Thirdly, as an explosion like in ‘Ample Make this Bed’, ‘I taste a Liquor’ and ‘I died for Beauty’ Key terms:  ECHO  TIME  MEMORY  RELATIONSHIP  LIMITS/STRUCTURE  ORNAMENT   

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Assonance – when words don’t rhyme exactly, but they have the same vowel sound. Like slow and road. Half rhyme/imperfect rhyme/off-rhyme – when the end consonants match, but the preceding vowel sounds don’t. Like rooms and names. Identical rhyme/perfect rhyme – when both the consonant and the vowel sounds match. Like tomb and room. I want to point out here that I may pronounce these words as a perfect rhyme – ‘tomb’ and ‘room’ – but other people might not. Other readers might pronounce it ‘room’, and that would make it a half rhyme. Be aware, as you work with rhyme, of critics’ assumptions around accent and pronunciation. Masculine rhyme – when the rhyming line ends on a stressed syllable. Like shoe and glue. Strong rhyme. Feminine rhyme – when the rhyming line ends on an unstressed syllable. Like rhyming numbers with slumbers. Weak rhyme. Eye rhyme – when two words are spelled similarl but pronounced differently. Like brood and blood. So it’s rhyme that only works on the page: it stops working when we read a poem aloud. Monorhyme – when a word is ‘rhymed’ with itself. See Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, for instance. Internal rhyme – when rhymes occur in the middle of lines, instead of solely at the ends. How do gendered assumptions affect the value-judgements we make about rhyme?

Section One: Rhyme as a Debt:  If we say the line, ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’, we get in a kind of debt.  Because the rhyme word ‘star’ makes a promise to the reader.  A debt that has to be repaid, with a rhyming word.  And accordingly, that debt is repaid, in the next line:  ‘How I wonder what you ARE’. With that ‘are’, the poet pays the bill of exchange, precisely and in full.  It’s a dull transaction, a kind of fulfilment of duty. Rhyme, in this model, is predictable and routine.

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If we hear the word ‘star’, we can make a good guess what the rhyme might be – ‘are’, or ‘car’ or ‘bar’.

Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  Barrett Browning’s work is diverse.  Rhyme scheme = ABBA. ABBA. CD(/A?)CDCD.  Possibly A because the vowel sound is the same but the consonants don’t match enough for it to count as a rhyme. This is assonance.  Shows it is a Petrarchan sonnet – Octet and Sestet. Usually Volta here.  Tries to make love a kind of tangible currency which she can give her lover. RHYME AS RESTRAINT/LIMIT:  There are lots of models of rhyme as a threatening trap. A rigid schema which dictates in advance what the poet can do or say.  Peter McDonald sums up these fears in his book Sound Intentions: ‘Rhyme may be heard as the sound of intention … it may also be heard as the inattentive, tinkling music of intention usurped, when form pushes aside authorial ambition, or rather dictates that ambition in advance.’ (5)  In other words, the author may have an intention – an ambition. But according to one model, rhyme limits that ambition.  People who think this way, says McDonald – and this isn’t what McDonald thinks; his book is about all the things rhyme can do rather than what it stops us doing – people who think that rhyme dictates or limits ambition may hear rhyme as ‘inattentive, tinkling music’.  Here, McDonald emphasises the risk that rhyme may be seen as trivial.  The stuff of the nursery or the playground, or maybe an advertising jingle. Something which goes on in the background, tinkling away, to which we can be inattentive. ORNAMENT:  There is an old idea that rhyme is just something decorative and pretty. That it’s not intrinsic to the sense, but something that the poet adds on just to make their poem attractive.  Thomas Sheridan called rhyme ‘a trifling and artificial ornament’ (Thomas Sheridan, British Education: Or, The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (London, 1756).  However, what’s wrong with ornament? If we criticise rhyme for being ornamental, what prejudices are we revealing about ornament?  Decoration tends to be connected to the feminine, and unfortunately, we have a long cultural history of devaluing things because they are feminine. TIME:  ‘Rhyme may be heard as the sound of intention’.  Intention = a mental state that involves a commitment to carrying out an action in the future. If we have an intention, we are directed towards the future. Towards something that has not yet happened, which we intend to make happen.  So when McDonald says that rhyme is the sound of intention, he’s suggesting that rhyme is directed towards the future.  In a rhyming poem, when we end a line with a word, we are making a promise to the reader that that word will be relevant in the future.  That as we read on, the sonic potential in that word will be fulfilled, later, by another word which rhymes with it.

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James Fenton hints at this in his remarks about couplets: ‘In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business.’ (72) Rhyme is a deeply temporal device. Rhymes are always separated in time. The first rhyme word points towards the future – subsequent words, which rhyme with it, point backwards to the first rhyme word, like a memory or an echo. McDonald goes on to explain this: ‘when a rhyme is recognized, (whether by the listening ear or the reading eye) the rhyming word is put into relation with its partner, a word which has been used some time (and some space) [29] beforehand. This recognition is, in its small way, an act of memory. In addition, it is a maker of sequence, or order, within the poem, establishing a simple, progressive movement from one thing to another, from one sound to its partner...rhyme therefore becomes a way of marking time within poems.’ For McDonald to say that rhyme might be the sound of intention is to say that rhyme can give shape to a poem as it moves forward in time.

RHYME SCHEME – HISTORY:  What does rhyme enable for Elizabeth Barrett Browning in this sonnet?  Petrarch’s sonnets are about love. By writing a sonnet with a Petrarchan rhyme scheme, Barrett Browning is placing herself within this particular tradition of love poetry.  The speaker begins with a question – ‘How do I love thee?’. And the rest of the poem is an attempt to answer that question. Sometimes it’s playful, sometimes deadly serious.  Speaker knows asking to measure the bounds of her love is impossible but asks how to do it anyway. MEASURING/LIMITS: Idea one…  There are two distinct but connected impulses in this poem. The first is the idea of measuring love by reaching as far as you possibly can.  This is shown in ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach’.  She feels ‘out of sight’ for the edges of the grace and being she associates with this love.  Here, there is the sense of stretching, striving beyond one’s limitations, to express the boundlessness of this love. Idea two…  This is a poem ABOUT measurement, about limits.  In that second line, Barrett Browning uses a very physical spatial image – ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height’.  We measure physical objects like this, in three dimensions.  Measuring is a way of finding and establishing the limits of an object: where it begins and ends in space.  So Barrett Browning conceives of her soul as something physical, something that has limits.

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She uses her soul to measure her love, she can only measure as far as that soul can reach. By measuring her love, she is finding the limits of her own soul. Testing them and ultimately just reaching them.

THEREFORE:  This is a poem about excess and overflow of a boundless love – but equally it’s about restraint and precision.  About finding the edges and borders of emotion.  Those limits may be frustrating. But they may also help contain. They may help provide orientation: to tell us where we are in space.  In their very failure to accommodate an infinite love, they may indicate the huge size of that love.  This sonnet is seen as playing with limits – testing them, inhabiting them securely. And the established rhyme scheme is part of that.  Though Browning is being true and obedient to the rhyme scheme, we never feel rigidly bound by this structure. It’s not monotonous. PUNCTUATION:  There’s also a particularly close relationship between the BB and AA lines, because they are so close together: they act like a couplet, two adjacent rhyming lines.  But further, Barrett Browning’s use of punctuation can break up these unit or suggest other relationships yet.  In the first line, it is ended with a full stop. The full stop cuts the line off, slightly, from the rest of the quatrain.  Again, when she puts a full stop after ‘light’; that falls in the middle of the quatrain and makes the next rhyme in the couplet – ‘right’ – feel like a new beginning.  It troubles our sense that the second rhyme word should fulfil the promise made by the first.  Here, a full stop divides a unit in the middle, cutting lines apart even as rhyme binds them together.  Rhyme creates, and complicates, relationship.  Rhyme creates relationships in all sorts of ways: between lines, between words, between poems. It’s all about relationships and connection. CONNECTION:  Assonance of ‘faith’ – acts as a kind of bridge between the octet and sestet.  By offering assonance with A, and half-rhyme with D, the word ‘faith’ maintains a connection between the poem’s beginning and its end.  It’s no coincidence that faith is the word on which this hinges.  Faith is about maintaining connections. Keeping allegiances even when they are tested by space and time.  This is a poem about faithful love – deep connection over time, mapped from loveexperiences in the past, and projecting forward past death.  Barrett Browning’s use of the rhyme scheme explores and embodies faith  By adhering to the rhyme scheme (and in the one moment she diverges from it), she sets up new faith/relationships across spaces which might have seemed unbridgeable  Rhyme allows Barrett Browning to reinvent relationship. Monna Innominata II, by Christina Rossetti.

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Rossetti’s sonnet is influenced by Barrett Browning’s; in fact, Rossetti mentions ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ in the introduction to her poem. Rossetti uses rhyme to establish her poem’s relationship to her predecessor – but also to complicate it. Rhyme scheme is ABBAABBAACADCD. There are similarities to Barrett Browning’s Petrarchan model – most obviously the double ABBA with which the poem starts. And yet, where Barrett Browning shifts into a new set of rhymes in the sestet, the final six lines – in Rossetti’s poem, in contrast, we see that the A rhyme comes back. It lasts on. And it’s no coincidence that the first A rhyme word is ‘you’.

THE LOVERS:  This is a sonnet about how love might be remembered, memorialised and known.  This is a love predicated, as we see in lines 6 and 7, on parting: “Of love and parting in exceeding pain, Of parting hopeless here to meet again”. This is a relationship defined by painful departure.  Not until Judgement Day will they meet again – only after death will their love come into its fullest form.  The speaker must ‘forego’ her lover but can ‘claim’ them ‘anew’ at the gate of death.  So, I think that the recurrence of the A-rhyme – you, do, knew, view, and you again – is important.  Since the A rhyme lasts into the sestet, we have the sense that something keeps coming back.  The lovers cannot be together in life – but rhyme, in this poem, acts as a kind of substitute or stand-in for return, for meeting, for unity.  Rossetti’s rhymes keep coming back long after they might have ended.  They stage a parting – separated by intervening lines and other rhyme-words – and then a return. CRITICAL VIEWS:  ‘Rhyme counters the transience of orality. A spoken word is an event that can never be exactly repeated... Each line of a rhymed poem evaporates as soon as it is uttered, with its receding into the already-said marked by its end-rhyme. But with the advent of the next line, the one just spoken into the abyss of fleeting time reappears as a similar sound.’ - Debra Fried  She is saying a word vanishes as soon as you say it.  But with rhyme, it returns again, transformed but still recognisable.  Rhyme might be a way of giving form to the act of remembering. Giving form to acts of preservation. Making happen in language the permanence which cannot happen in real life – in this case, the permanence of relationship between two lovers who cannot be together.  And where Rossetti’s speaker fears that memory will be unreliable, the shaping structures of predictable rhyme offer a space in which known things can recur reliably.  And Rossetti uses an unusual sonnet pattern to emphasise this further – by giving additional space to the A-rhyme, based around the word ‘you’, she allows ‘you’ – referring to the speaker’s lover – to last longer, gives ‘you’ a longer life.  She keeps bringing her lover back into the couplings of rhyme, bringing it together and apart with its rhyme-word.

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A rhyme-word might be imagined as a kind of partner or soulmate; here, Rossetti’s recurring, rhyming ‘you’ gives her speaker’s soulmate a longer life through poetic form.

BROWNING AND ROSSETTI:  Rossetti’s use of the irregular form isn’t the only way she builds on Barrett Browning.  Both use the well-established breath-death rhyme.  It builds on rhyme’s capacity to draw contrasts: where words with vastly different or opposite meanings are coupled in rhyme.  Breath is the stuff of life – the opposite of death, which makes the fact that they rhyme/come together particularly striking.  One of the things which the sonnet form does so is that, with so many rhymes in play, weaving in and out of each other, these “debts” are not clear-cut in the way they might be in a couplet, or even a four-line stanza.  In a couplet, the “debt” is raised, and then paid almost immediately.  But with sonnets like these, you weave in and out of rhymes.  A rhyme might vanish for a while, be almost forgotten, replaced by others – and then it reappears.  So, if rhyme is a debt, then the debts in these poems are not clear-cut.  They are debts we forget about, maybe don’t pay fully, and then remember again later, and repay, or try to repay.  Both of these poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, are poems about what it means to love enough.  To repay the debt of love.  in Rosetti, this is ‘How do I love thee?’ and in Browning, this is “of me what will they say? Not that I lov'd you more than just in play, For fashion's sake as idle women do.”  Rossetti’s speaker worries about the fact that, after her death, her lover’s love will be respected, while her love will be thought trivial or fashionable.  Both are concerned, especially Rossetti’s poem, with loving appropriately, loving the right amount, and having the repayment of their lover’s love recognised and respected.  Exact rhyme offers a space in which we have the experience of things matching up, things being equal to each other.  Rossetti uses rhyme to play out the experience of the equality of two entities being recognised and celebrated, with rhyming words standing in here for love.

SECTION TWO – RHYME AS EXPLOSION Emily Dickenson, ‘Ample Make This Bed’ CONTEXT:  Two of her acquaintances published her first collection of poetry after her death. And they edited it very heavily. In ways which minimised the originality of her work: made it seem more ordinary.  More in line, perhaps, with the sweetness and placidity they expected of a woman’s writing.

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Even the poems published during her life were heavily edited. A selection of her poems were published anonymously in the Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868. In her original version, Dickinson rhymes ‘Pearl’ with ‘Alcohol’. That’s a slant-rhyme in a couple of ways: not just a different vowel sound, but matching a masculine ending (pearl, stress on the last syllable) with a feminine ending (AL-cohol, ending the rhyming line on an unstressed syllable). What the Republican does is to change this to a full rhyme. Pearl and whirl. It’s an act of neatening and of disciplining a verse seen as unruly. This makes Dickenson’s half rhyme startling.

THE POEM ITSELF:  In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, we witness both behaving and misbehaving. Dickinson uses punctuation and rhyme in a really original, startling way – she’s best known for her dashes.  An example of her slant rhyme: ‘Ample make this Bed — Make this Bed with Awe — In it wait till Judgment break Excellent and Fair.’  Here, the ‘bed’ is the grave, being prepared for a body. A resting place to be tenderly made up, so that its occupant can wait comfortably until the Day of Judgement. But look at that rhyme.  She rhymes ‘Awe’ with ‘Fair’. What is so interesting about this is that she could so easily have used the word ‘care’ instead of ‘awe’ – deliberately used slant rhyme. Emily Dickinson, ‘I died for Beauty’.  Dickinson imagines two corpses talking to each other. One died for beauty, one died for truth: the second corpse suggests that they are the same thing.  The corpses feel that they’re kinsmen – that they’re closely related – and they talk together, till they’re silenced: by the growth of moss, and by their own decay.  The rhyme plays an important part in ambiguity. Here  The rhyme scheme is ABCB. RHYME:  In the first stanza, we have an exact rhyme. Tomb and room.  John Donne used this rhyme in his poem ‘The Canonization’, for instance, over two hundred years before Dickinson. The idea of a tomb as a room is a common one.  As we move on to the second stanza, we lose that perfect rhyme. Instead, we have a slant rhyme: ‘replied’ and ‘said’.  Dickinson uses a slant rhyme here because she wants a slant rhyme – as ‘Ample make this Bed’ proves, she often uses a slant rhyme even when an exact rhyme presents itself perfectly.  We Brethren are’, says one. We’re brothers. All of the content of this poem is about harmony and closeness.  Yet the rhyme works against that. The slant rhyme suggests a kind of connection missed. Something almost close, but not quite. An incomplete intimacy, a communion not quite working.  The rhyme works against the meaning. It suggests something directly opposed to the poem’s apparent meaning. Let’s move on to that third stanza. It’s another half rhyme.

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‘Rooms’ and ‘names’. And what’s happening in the stanza? The bodies are losing the power of speech, as they rot away quietly and are absorbed by the moss. Communication is ceasing, is slipping away. The bodies imagined perfect communion – ‘we brethren are’ – and yet, like the rhyme in this stanza, trying but failing to meet its companion rhyme, the communication they achieve is only partial, and fades further and further away. What’s interesting is that the speaker just presents these ideas. She doesn’t comment on them. The rhyme provides a really trenchant commentary, a sharp modelling of how intimacy and communication fail. The speaker performs a kind of innocence, while the rhyme tells another story. The rhyme might warn us not to trust what we’re hearing. To ask whether such kinship, such relationship, between truth and beauty, and those who die for them, is really possible....