When Rhyme Goes Wrong
by and published in Edition Seven of Pomegranate
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
I think William Blake’s unerring belief in the innocence of the child might have been challenged if he’d recited those lines out loud to me when I was six. I’d have told him in no uncertain terms that only an idiot would rhyme ‘lamb’ with ‘name’. There’s no way at all that he could make them sound the same, at least not this side of the Great Vowel Shift; all that couplet’s done is made him look silly, as if he’d dashed this song off in five minutes before scurrying off for some alfresco sex in his Lambeth summerhouse. So much for poems that ‘every child may joy to hear’.
OK, seeing as I was only six, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned the Great Vowel Shift or the alfresco sex. I bet that’s the only time those two topics have been raised in the same sentence. But the point still stands. Slant-rhymes. Half-rhymes. Wrenched rhymes. Near rhymes. Off-rhymes. I could never stand the things. Perhaps (and, at this point, I swerve to avoid the debate about poetry and lyrics from the last couple of issues) it stems from the fact that I used to instinctively sing poetry when I read it aloud. With that extra musical reinforcement behind them, vowel sounds that didn’t quite rhyme came off out of tune. They were discordant. They were noise.
Nor is this a new or unusual attitude. In Practical Criticism in 1929, I A Richards reports that it’s normal to dismiss mediocre rhymes when critiquing poetry. He’s specifically responding to some vitriolic undergraduates’ comments on a poem which has the indecency to rhyme ‘boughs’ with ‘house’. He argues that we do this because it reminds us of the poetry we all wrote as young children which now looks pretty pathetic: back when we thought rhyming was absolutely crucial and we struggled so damn hard at it. To quote my favourite line from Howl, they’re those ‘lofty incantations’ which come out as ‘stanzas of gibberish’. Richards adds that our disdainful attitude also occurs because rhyme is such an easy-to-spot surface feature of a poem – to attack a poem simply because of the way it rhymes is ‘to content ourselves with a glance at [the poem’s] buttons’ rather than ‘trying it on’.
Of course, the genius of Richards’ experiment was that the amateur critics he tested weren’t told the authors of the poems they were looking at. The ‘boughs’/‘house’ poem happened to be by Christina Rossetti, who safely sits among the lesser nobility of the English canon. (I hope that’s a fair comment. I’m looking forward to a Rossetti afficiniado out there penning an attack on my use of the word ‘lesser’ for the next issue.) But then why can so many Great AuthorsTM get away with iffy rhymes – apart from, as Richards says, because we ignore those rhymes by grace of the fact that we know they’ve been produced by Great AuthorsTM? Indeed, is it possible to try a poem on and find it even more comfortable because of that button which hasn’t be sewn on properly? I’d better hurry up and give examples, before the UN paratroopers come in and arrest me for torturing that poor helpless metaphor…
I think the main reason why half-rhymes can be effective is that literature’s essentially a rather crap art form. Don’t point that at me, I’ll explain. Unlike other forms such as painting and music, which can set out their basic constituents in any arrangement so long as they aren’t clashing or discordant, the way in which poets arrange words has to make some form of sense (or, I suppose, sense in its nonsense). Josephine Hart describes poetry as a ‘trinity of sound, sense and sensibility’ and sometimes the second of those has to take precedence over the first – after all, there’s only so many words in the English language. But it’s not just a matter of saying that we can’t blame poets for being too ambitious in their rhyme schemes: the fact that such rhyme schemes are flawed reminds us of our inability to express exactly what we want to say in words, and more broadly, our own imperfect nature. They behave like a poet’s ‘memento mori’. Language is essentially crap and humankind is essentially crap, which makes literature the most achingly human of art forms.
Coleridge understood this perfectly and Kubla Khan has a cracking example of a messed-up rhyme:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she play’d:
Singing of Mount Abora
This poem is so taut in its metre and rhyme, particularly in the iambic tetrameter sections, that this rhyme’s about as unobtrusive as the Eiffel Tower. When reading it aloud, it seems necessary to shorten ‘Abora’ to ‘Abor’; but Coleridge shortens the river Alpheus to ‘Alph’ further up, so why not here? As it stands, this Abor/Abora tension works as a microcosm of the poem as a whole – an aborted fragment of a much longer, more majestic poem that never got completed; a brief moment of dizzying, near-perfect poetic rapture that was cut short when the opium wore off and the bloke from Porlock showed up. That unnecessary ‘a’ floats on the page like a frustrated ghost. (And now for today’s tongue-twister: if you’re bored of ‘Abor/Abora’, go abroad to Bora Bora.)
This frustration turns up again with – who else? – Emily Dickinson:
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch – This gave me the precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
Reading literature is a linear experience, much like life, and not at all like art forms such as painting: the whole sensation relies on the way our often subconscious predictions about what’s coming next are subverted or fulfilled. Here, Dickinson gives the impression of cautious, unpolished movement from sound to sound, as if from event to event in life. The fact that she doesn’t know what comes next is strange and disturbing in the usually more controlled medium of poetry. She doesn’t dare to add the ‘h’ to complete the rhyme, as she risks overstepping the ‘final Inch’ and falling into the sea of blank space around the poem.
In Browning’s My Last Duchess, the only really dodgy rhyme in 56 lines comes at the moment when the Duke of Ferrara’s mask slips, when the human sin scrateches the polished veneer of the rhyme:
This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
The moral of the story: whereas a painting can make everything seem perfectly rosy and innocent, use words and the horrid truth will out…
Finally, grab your hankies for some Ben Jonson:
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
The stilted rhyme highlights the fact that the power to create life itself is more spectacular than our struggle to create through poetry, which simply resorts to imitating life. Or, to paraphrase the football chant, Jonson’s going ‘IT’S SHIT AND I KNOW IT IS!’
And this isn’t the only way in which employing half-rhyme can be one of the most modest things a poet can do. It’s an admittance on their part that a poet can never be in complete control of the effect their poem produces, as individual readers ‘write’ the text too. Half-rhymes are particularly obvious examples of this: they are unfinished business, puzzles to be solved, press-the-red-button interactive features. Take The Second Coming by Yeats, who frequently near-rhymed deliberately, probably because he was pissed off about his name not rhyming with Keats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
If I’d read this aloud when I was six, I would have clocked that these words don’t rhyme but probably have believed that they desperately want to, so I’d have wrenched their pronunciation to tie them together. Try it. Change the ‘y’ of ‘gyre’ into an ‘er’ sound, and the first line grinds to a halt, as if to symbolise the circle of history suddenly contracting. More interestingly, give the ‘er’ of ‘falconer’ the extra stress of a ‘y’ sound, and the whole line seems to be yanked up unnaturally around the word ‘falcon’. This creates a near-Miltonic image of awkward flight, which clearly matches the poem’s later anti-Christian imagery. Hopefully by now, you’ve been sounding out the lines to yourself and realised that I have the wrong end of the stick because it actually sounds like… well, answers on a postcard please. And again, there’s something very flawed and messy and human about what we’re doing here: we’re trying to establish meaning by forging connections between experiences. Oh, how wonderfully postmodern…
Which brings us back to that Blake couplet. The glaring difference between ‘name’ and ‘lamb’, whether intentional or not, poses a challenge to the critical reader. I find it hard to wrench them to sound the same. Instead, I think that the discordant ‘a’ sounds – the higher hymn-like ‘a’ in ‘name’ and the earthy bleating ‘a’ in ‘lamb’ – emphasise God the Son’s transformation from a heavenly being among the angels into a crude (human) animal, which is at the heart of the Songs of Innocence. In this respect, Blake is expressing a highly original idea about the experience of becoming incarnate from God’s perspective. The fact that, as we read the poem, we moved from ‘lamb’ to ‘name’ reinforces Blake’s idea that through this simple belief we can transcend the ways of earth and take off to reach God, also expressed in The Little Black Boy for example. For more examples of off-rhyme which, in my opinion at least, reflect how Earth and its sounds are transfigured thanks to the Incarnation, you may want to check out Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.
So there you have it.. I think we can safely unbutton the poems and stick them back on the rack. Oh, and if you’ve spent the entire article thinking about Blake having alfresco sex, I recommend Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright. Perhaps after a cold bath…
Jack Belloli
Jack Belloli is 18 and not quite sure why he’s writing this now, when he’s got two A Level exams left to revise for. He considers himself a bit of a novice and is inspired by staring at the photos in the cafe of a certain central London bookshop. But he’s not telling you which one…