Question on Rhyme

Brett Thibault

Have come away from some recent responses to a rhyming poem scratching my head. Poem by T.Coe, responses by esteemed Wiley Clements and Jim Hayes.

I don't know what constitutes intellectual bad manners in the rhymes: poem/home/alone. I'm not trying to be smart—I’m drawing a blank, I honestly don’t understand this comment or intellectual bad manners. This answer may help to alleviate my chronic reception of blank looks.

Also, “requirement of precise rhymes is stringent unless clearly telegraphed” has pulled the boot off my plug. Are precise rhymes masculine rhymes? Why is this rule stringent? What does telegraphing mean in context? Help?

Julie Carter

I can't find the poem in question, but I can try to answer some of your questions.

First, poem and home are very questionable as rhymes. I pronounce poem as two syllables--POem--and it sounds like an attempted parody (to my ear) to say POME.

Home and alone are slant rhymes. I'd have to see the poem in question to understand the specific complaint.

As for the precise rhymes comment, if a poem is trotting along with complete rhymes--rain/pain, sigh/eye, etc.--it comes as something of a shock if a half-rhyme is tossed in.

Twinkle twinkle, little star.
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
like a diamond in the night.

Would be an example of a "perfect" rhyme being thrown off track by a half-rhyme. Mixing the two is a tricky business, and bound to displease someone.

Readers of rhymed poetry form expectations. If you start out with perfect rhymes, you are expected to continue that way. To do less usually seems like cheating.

The opposite is not necessarily true, as a poem can move from slant to perfect rhymes (eg in the couplet) to convey a sense of completion.

Masculine words end with a stress or have only one syllable. Feminine words end with an unstressed syllable. Mixing the two for a rhyme is rarely successful, as most readers will attempt to contort one word or the other to make them fit. So "swing" which is masculine, shouldn't be rhymed with "laughing" which is feminine, even if the last syllables do, in fact, rhyme.

I don't know if this answers your questions.

Julie

Staff A. E. Stallings

Good clear explanation from Julie.

Rhyme schemes work much the way jokes do. They are all about the setting up of expectations, and then how those expectations are fulfilled, disappointed, or cleverly subverted.

And of course rhyme has a special place in English because in it true rhymes are so rare (and history laden), relative to in most tongues. Perhaps because of that, slant rhyme in English also has a venerable tradition, with its own set of expectations. A rhyme that works well in one poem might be ghastly in another. It is all context. What is daring in Emily Dickinson would be a gaff in Alexander Pope.

Interesting thread, Brett. Thanks.

Alicia

John Boddie

Poets try for perfect rhyme
and get it right from time to time.
Often though, it seems they can't
and settle for imperfect slant.
The reader then must pause and wonder
was it planned or was it blunder?
If the former, great applause.
If the latter, that's just how it goes.

Carol Taylor

Everything's someone's opinion,
Mitchell's, John's, my own,
Julie's, Jim's, or Wiley Clements';
but it's widely known
that no two experts ever settled
on a single rule,
except that what I write's poetic
and anybody who doesn't think so must be a fool.

Carol

Jim Hayes

CJ,
I, in common with other formalists, also applaud the skilled use of slant rhyme, what I do not accept is the flitting from true to slant and vice versa within a poem as a form of cheap convenience, or sometimes justified 'because it carries the sense'.

The acceptable exception being a change from slant to true in a concluding couplet as Julie pointed out.

English is the hardest of languages to rhyme truly. Using slant or assonance increases the poet's options and accordingly makes 'rhyming' easier, but the skill still involved in doing it well, is noted and acknowledged..

Staff A. E. Stallings

Oh rats. I really was going to try to behave myself and steer clear of this topic. I've enough of a reputation as a geek as it is.

Another thing we should add, is that slant rime can be very useful at expressing some kind of dissonance. So I can see the use of ending a perfect-rimed poem on a slant rime, to express some sort of "wrongness" in the close.

But I would like to point out that the difference between slant and perfect rime is not always black and white. There are traditional riming pairs in English, such as "prove" and "love," that no one would object to appearing in a perfect rimed poem, but which to most speakers of "standard" English in England and America are distinctly slant. At one time they were perfect rimes of course, and, indeed, still are in some areas of the English-speaking world. Vowels pronunciations shift from generation to generation, region to region, class to class. "Tired" and "hard" are perfect rimes to speakers of Appalachian English.

So slant rimes with the final consonants matching up have been acceptable in English verse for a long time, and I find them quite beautiful to the ear (river/lover; comb/tomb). The shift in vowel quality is almost like a chord change from major to minor to me.

The importance of consonant sounds in English verse goes back to native alliterative verse such as Beowulf, and is also present in Gaelic & Welsh traditions. (So it is perhaps no coincidence that a Welsh poet such as Wilfred Owen would so boldly use slant & pararhyme; or that Heaney so often practices a muscular slant rime.)

Personally, I do not consider assonance (like vowel sounds without agreement of final consonants) a species of rime at all. It is... assonance. A fine effect in itself, especially internally. Words such as "day" and "crate" were not considered "rimes" until quite recently. Whether its current popularity in poetry gets it from bad pop lyrics, or the other way round, am not sure. The truth is, this sort of rime in the past was often associated with inept or adolescent verse experiments. (Though a lot of new formalists are using it. So no doubt this will make some people bristle.)

Of course I am not saying assonance cannot be a sophisticated tool in the right hands. There are examples. Joyce's "I Hear an Army," for one. Our Julie, for instance (if I remember aright) had a whole sonnet based on a pattern of end-assonance, and the refusal to come to any perfect rime closure was very appropriate to the dissonance of the subject. But USUALLY if I see a rime of say, "face" with "wait," I am allerted to look out for other problems in the poem. For people new to writing rimed & metered verse, I'd say get a handle on perfect rime first, before experimenting with such spices as slant rime.

An obvious problem with pegging a whole rime scheme on assonance is that vowels are so variable. A Brit might assonate "again" with make. An American might assonate "again" with keg. But no one has problems with seeing the "rime" in again/pain or again/men.

I have a whole monograph on this in a drawer. One of these days I'll inflict it on the public...

Jerry H. Jenkins

Alicia,

I was especially caught by your statement that assonance in the terminal vowel sounds without correspondence in the terminal consonants may originate in lyrics (whether bad pop stuff or other songs). It seems to me that a number of folk ballads (the kind that are sung) use this technique, and I'm guessing that it's tolerated in that genre because of the difficulty in singing terminal consonants with any volume. The expulsion of breath occurs with the vowel sounds, not with the consonants, so they receive the most attention (that is, if approximate rhyme is used at all). The kind of music that originated in English folk balladry, was perpetuated in Appalachia, and spread westward after the Civil War, an which has become the root of much contemporary song, especially country and western, has undoubtedly led to its influence in simple rhyme and lyrics that now, in reverse, form the rhyming poetry of many starting poets. I've been informed that many vestiges of usage and even inflection of Elizabethan idiom prevail in Appalachia and in cultural pockets west and south of that region.

You and I have had a few exchanges regarding the usefulness of this kind of rhyme, and I agree with you that its use in formal poetry should probably be cautious, but it may be spontaneous and "natural" for poets who are influenced by the musical tradition that draws on Elizabethan origins.

Jerry

Staff A. E. Stallings

Jerry,

Yours is a good point and one which I address in the aforesaid paper. Assonance does show up in nursery rimes (why, for instance, I didn't mind it so much in Ms. Coe's poem) and folk songs--in performance and non-literate traditions,it does not have the problems I described (not "travelling" well on the page). And the final consonants are not as important a fact in singing, as you mention. My concern with it is in poetry, and with the literary tradition.

I probably come down on it a little harder than I might simply because I see it ab-used so much.

I do think, though, you'll find that it is much less prevalent in early country music than you might think, probably because, as well as folk traditions, literate hymn are a factor. Hank Williams Sr., for instance, almost never uses it (if at all), but Hank Jr. uses it quite a bit. It is all over the place in new country, much, much more so than old (where perfect and consonantal slant rimes are actually more prevalent). This would suggest to me that the poets & lyricists are probably not deriving it from earlier music. But I could be wrong. Mr. Graber might be able to enlighten us further on the folk song tradition aspect.

Alicia

Wiley Clements

I think we are teethed on assonance:

Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree-top.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.

and later:

Young Dick Whittington shall become
First Lord Mayor of London town.

But the specific topic of this thread, and of the thread from which it derives, is the rhyming the two-syllable, front-stressed *PO-em* with end-stressed *a-LONE,* and one-syllable *home* and *foam.* Julie takes care of that issue above, and very well, I think.

Especially in the northern states of the US, pronouncing "poem" as "pome" is deplorably common. Here at Bucknell we have English faculty members who say "pome" -- one of them a well-published writer of obscure non-musical poetry(?) and another, by contrast, a traditionalist prosody scholar. I cannot help cringing when I hear these people, who know better and who should have more respect for the language, say "pome." I assume they picked it up at an early age from family, friends--even from teachers. Now, by their examples, they validate it to their students.

I grew up in the south, and although some of our pronunciations are mocked by yankees and other foreigners, you would never, in my day, have heard a southerner, even one with only a few years of schooling, say "pome" for po-em.

Julie Carter

I have seen one sonnet start out with perfect rhyme, then "degenerate" (used only because I can't think of a good word for the effect) through sight rhymes to slants until the final couplet didn't rhyme at all.

I would have posted it as an example, but I can't for the life of me think who wrote it, where, or when. It's a great example of someone blowing the tires of the reader's expectations in a thrilling way. If anyone knows the poem I mean, speak up, I beg!

Wiley Clements

I don't know the sonnet you mean, Julie, but if a poem concerns a depressing, or deteriorating subject, might not the poet degrade the rhyme and/or the rhyme scheme in concomitance? This is what Hayes and Dunham attempted in their *Old House Song,* posted under Announcements the other day. It might work for some and be perceived as carelessness by others.

TS Eliot's *Preludes* may be an example of the technique to which you refer. There the rhymes are exact and the scheme pretty regular in Prelude #1, but both pretty well disintegrate by the end of Prelude #4.

Staff RJ McCaffery

Excellent thread- I agree with Jim whole heartedly; inflict/infect us Alicia.

As we seem to be expanding from questions of rhyme to repetitive sonics in general, perhaps we should consider the relationship of assonance and consonance to rhyme in an historical setting. It should be noted that much of the "formal" body of poetics in English were imported (and adapted) from varied sources, different languages: Italian, Latin, French and so forth. While it's certainly possible to make coherent arguments as to rhyme and sonic repetition mirroring the cosmos, the ethos of any age, etc. we shouldn't loose track of the basic fact that (any) accepted system of English poetics is going to be, more or less, a hodgepodge of contradictory traditions.

American poets write sonnets and Haiku, epics in heroic couplets and free verse - surely, they are all (prima facea) poems. I don't think there's anything *wrong* with this; it's one of the great strengths of Contemporary poetry. Nor do I mean to suggest we can't discuss poetics or should blindly ignore the sources for poetry in English.

I do think a lot of the more traditional poetics (foot scansion as an example) can only be regarded as useful starting points in discussing poetics in general. Or perhaps, foundation stones.

As Wiley enacts in his above posting, theory and poetic "rules" should both illustrate the possible And explain what's actually there in terms of concrete poems. If something pops up that is not in the theory, the theory needs modification; perhaps that modification will suggest other, yet unrealized, poetic possibilities. There has to be a constant give and take, a mutual spurring, between both theory and poems if we're to have any hope of putting the possibilities of the language into practice, or, in some cases, simply discussing what "is going on" in a poem.

That said, I think it's problematic to invoke a "universal" hierarchical system of sonic repetition, i.e. saying that one form of sonic rep is inherently "better", "purer", than others. I don't doubt that given certain forms and patterns of composing (say if we're discussing sonnets) that certain types of sonic rep have met with greater success than others, and, (rolling the dice as it were) would fare better in future poems. But that does not preclude a successful poem with a new modulation.

I'm particularly fascinated by the popular music/poetry discussion in light of the troubadorial influence on English poetry. Cool stuff.

Wiley Clements

I think Poe was onto something when he wrote that human beings find pleasure in the preception of what he called "equalities." equalities he meant not only equalities of number, as in math, and of shape, as in the facets of a crystal, but also equalities of sound, in music and verse. In verse the sound equalities include meter, rhythm and rhyme. Rhyme, of course, is the recurrance of similar (equal) sounds.

In partial response to RJ's penultimate paragraph above, here is one idea I have found helpful: of the vowel sounds, certain ones may be situationally preferable to others. Sidney Lanier (poet and musician) considered the robust vowel sounds ah, ai, au, aw, eh,oh,oi,oo,ou,ow, etc., much better for vocal poetry than the shrill ae (as in they) and ee (as in week). While it is hard say much while avoiding the shrill sounds altogether, one can try, at least, to avoid too frequent use of them as rhymes.

Innumerable examples can be given, both to support and to contest this notion. But I think there's practical utility in it, and I only wish I could better practice what I preach.

Carol Taylor

Nevertheless, he wrote:

"Each day, all day," these poor folk say,
"In the same old year-long, drear-long way,
"We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
We sieve mine-meshes under the hills,
And thieve much gold from the Devil's bank tills,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills?"

The Symphony, Sidney Lanier

Wiley Clements

But compare the spoken sound of those lines to that of this stanza from Song of the Chattahoochee (a's being uh's and the's being thuh's):
And oft in the hills of Habersham,
And oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
—Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet, and amethyst—
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

William K. Gourley

Oh, as a newbie I love this discussion. I learn so much here. Ever since junior high, when a substitute teacher from USC had us read a poem about a cowboy and loping horse -- and I saw, heard, and felt the rhythm, and looked up at her and there was that flash of recognition, of shared appreciation -- I was hooked for life.

Now I have learned that there are more things that mark repetition (equalities, thanks Wiley) in poetry than meter, and even more than "repetitive sonics" (thanks R.J.). What fun. How satisfying.

So Alicia, keep us geeks, hungry for niches, fulfilled. "Personally, I do not consider assonance (like vowel sounds without agreement of final consonants) a species of rime at all. It is... assonance." Didn't Rita, in "Educating Rita" characterize assonance as "failed rhyme"? But I still want to know (in the Bibical sense) how to use and love it. (Won't go any farther with that thought).

I'm glad for diversity - for versity, free, metered, blank, serious, playful, even ugly sometimes. The universe is big enough (the diverse is ... fill in the blank).

Question-
is there any laboratory evidence for the effect of meter and other repetitive poetic tricks? I suspect that scientific hypotheses could be formed and tested around the use of sounds, meter, assonance, etc. Any data?

Carol Taylor

William, art is different from science, can't be proved in a laboratory because you can't isolate the individual factors that make art work or not work, and even if you did, the way they are combined along with the individual ear and eye of the tester would impact and corrupt the experiment.

Most of us will keep trying to place art in an absolute category according to our own preferences, but we have to understand and accept the subjective nature of those preferences if nothing else.

I'm a left-brained, analytical person by nature, but am learning to be a bit less dogmatic about poetry, opening up a little to its huge variety so that I can appreciate the music when the music works for me. It's hard to dance with both feet firmly planted on the ground.

Staff A. E. Stallings

I'd absolutely agree with R.J. that "theories" and "rules" of poetry are things to describe what is going on with the poems themselves, and not the other way around. A "rule" that fails to deal with a great poem is inadequate to the poem, rather than vice versa.

Rules are, of course, only made to be broken (what is a Shakespearean sonnet, after all, but a Petrarchan sonnet breaking all the rules?), or superceded. My caveat is that it is better to know them first.

Wiley-

I use my own version of the Nims Scale (reflecting my particular pronunciation of English)

Alto
ee (see)
i (hi)
a (say)
*****

Tenor
i (hit)
e (set)
a (cat)
u(r)(bird)
oi (boy)
ah (car)
*****

Bass
ow (now)
aw (thought)
oo (book)
o (bone)
u (sud)
oo (shoe)

Consonants have their own sounds, which, combined or singly, can interact with the vowel sounds to tip the "overall" sound of a word in one direction or another. "Tin" is sharper than "pin" or "bin". On a slightly larger level word parings between pauses (which may or may not be classical metrical "feet") can employ any number combination of sounds to shift the overall pitch. "Old Blue Shoe" v. "Sue's New Shoe". Of course, when reading small chunks "naked" as it were, you can artifically pitch up or down. This extends to, in my mind, a sonic chain or thematic section (which can be a whole poem). I think that the real skill in using sound is segueing from one chain of sound to the next, or running multiple chains parallel for effect.

However, I think that in general poems (esp longer poems) will via cadence, subject, setting, whatnot, provide their own pacing and tone, suggesting (for simple example) an elevated (energetic) reading that might add some gloss to those sharper sounds, or a more subdued voice which might make the lower sounds sustain a bit more. This is, more or less, how I think about sound when composing or reading.

Alicia-

Rule breaking is fun. I've always liked the tool box metaphor for poetics; you may not need to use the triangular needle file for your project at hand, but it does not hurt to know what it's capable of.

Best to you both,

Wiley Clements

RJ, I like your scale.

Has anybody, using such a scale, composed sets of contrapuntal poems or poems for recitation in three-part harmony? Short of that, I think we can at least try to fashion poems in which all or most of the word groups sound well when spoken in sequence by a solo voice.

Rodney Armstrong

Alicia said:

A rhyme that works well in one poem might be ghastly in another. It is all context.

Ain't that the truth! It largely depends on the language that surrounds it, the other poetic devices employed, whether the there is enjambment or not.

Consider "Do Not Go Gentle." Arguably, the -ay and -ight rhymes are among the 'easiest' in the English language. Yet, DT used them in this most chimy of forms to create something fresh. Takes great skill.

Terese Coe

I'm very grateful for the discussion here. At times enlightening, at times disconcerting—as discussions should be.

Alicia's comment, "What is daring in Dickinson would be a gaffe in Alexander Pope," is the bottom line of truth for me. Though I haven't yet finished reading your meaning-packed comments, Alicia, I second Jim entirely: "Inflict your monologue," for Pete's sake! And please call me Terese.

Look at the "Lydia-encylopedia" line! There's no way that rhymes, yet it's a tour de force. To me, the wittier or more clownish a line is, the less important the exactness of the rhyme. I think. The truth comes out in saying it aloud, and there are so many varieties in the style of delivery that can't be presumed.

John Boddie's and Carol's verses are delightful! As are the first three lines of Eric's. Inspirations all.

In my own case, I'm quite loath to discuss rhyme or meter and all that beyond a few simple-minded expostulations. The fact is I work on intuition (don't know how else to put it) and feel that too much (or any?) analysis of my own methods will strangle the work.

I'm always amazed that other poets don't seem to feel the same way! Men may not have as much need for mystery in their methods, I find—even though it's suicide to make gender distinctions these days and obviously there are exceptions. Perhaps I'm being overly daring, perhaps I just don't understand what's going on when I write. Whatever it is, I need to protect it, as we all do.

Wiley, I've skipped around in the thread and find truth in your piece on which vowel sounds are better for rhyming. I'd begun to come to these same conclusions myself, but you set it out so concisely.

Thanks to all for the astute information. I'll continue to study the thread...

Carol Taylor

Terese, aesthetic preferences are one thing we all seem determined to have everybody else to share with us, maybe to validate our right to have them. It's not going to happen, so we have to either develop personal preferences, insofar as we can resist the "consensus of opinion," or else hitch onto somebody else's doctrines and parrot them come hell or high water.

If writing poetry were as simple as learning all the "rules" and keeping to the letter, we would see little variety or imagination in poetry. I can't think I'd be much interested in reading it after a while. That's just my own opinion, it isn't a rule.

Staff A. E. Stallings

Terese,

Form should not at all be a barrier to publication. There are a huge number of journals (the principal one being the Formalist, but also the Lyric, Pivot, Light, Dark Horse, etc), and a burgeoning number of e-zines, that specialize in form. And, if you're looking to get out of the "formalist ghetto," most mainstream journals nowadays are more than happy to take a formal poem if it is well done. The knee-jerk bias against form per se is, happily, mostly a thing of the past.

If you do not already know it, I suggest visiting the excellent site Able Muse (www.ablemuse.com). They are among the most professional of the online form fora, and their poetry discussion board ERatosphere is quite lively and knowledgeable. Wiley also has an excellent on-line journal, Susquehanna Quarterly. Then there is the very useful Expansive Poetry & Music Online. I have links to a small slew of such sites on my home page.

So no reason to feel isolated!

cheers,

Alicia

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