3 Key excerpts on "Internal Rhyme"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Poet's Freedom

  A Notebook on Making

  • Susan Stewart(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Poetic rhyme is a record of the living language, more particularly the poet’s living language at a moment of relation between languages and poetic practices—it is thus both more local and more universal than any given language’s storehouse of rhymes. Those third- and fourth-century Latin hymns mentioned above that work under both quantitative and qualitative systems of meter are a practice where diverging traditions meet. 35 The variable initial, internal, and terminal rhymes of Hebrew liturgical poetry in the fourth century and the free-floating rhymed strophes of early eleventh-century Iberian Arabic poetry are further examples of syncretic rhyming practices. Whereas Chaucer’s rhymes tend, like those French rhymes on which they were modeled, to be full or “perfect” for the most part, from the time of Spenser forward similar, rather than identical, sounds are used. Sidney’s Defence of Poetry suggests that rhyme is an ornament, adding a pleasing melody and harmony to a work. 36 Other writers, such as the prosodist George Saintsbury, have been concerned with rhyme as a punctuating device in rhythm. 37 Moments of intense rhyming activity seem to coincide with the meeting of dialects and languages—the melting pot of troubadour culture, the macaronic verse of medieval scholasticism, Dante’s turn between Latin and the Tuscan vernacular, Chaucer’s encounter with Romance languages, Edmund Spenser’s with Irish. We find other polyglot practices in Pushkin’s use of Turkish rhyming words in his poems of 1829 38 and the Greek, French, German and English rhymes of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The freezing and melting that typify erotic poetry in the West also seem to characterize the social life of rhymes. Rhyming fixes sounds inflexibly at the ends of lines, or freezes a local pronunciation like a fossil

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Prosody Handbook

  A Guide to Poetic Form

  • Robert Beum, Karl Shapiro(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  Rhyme may occur at the ends of lines (TERMINAL RHYME), at the beginnings (INITIAL RHYME), or within the line (Internal Rhyme). Terminal or end rhyme is by far the most common, and initial rhyme is extremely rare.

  Had we but world enough, and time , This coyness, lady, were no crime. Little here has changed, least of all, the gulls mewing over flotsam, scouting harbor, sleep of hulls and guanoed cobblestone. Wind the whirlpool Blind and certain; Dark as the dark there, Stark , you shall disturb.

  Until very recent times Internal Rhyme almost always followed a certain pattern: a word near or at the middle of the line rhymed with the last word of the line: Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December.

  Such rhyme is only technically internal, since it really has the effect of breaking the line into two lines. In many such cases, as in this line from Poe’s “The Raven,” it is difficult to see any point in joining the two lines as if they were one. Here, however, is an instance of Internal Rhyme that does not break the line:

  Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song.

  II. SLANT RHYME

  Synonyms are near rhyme, oblique rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme. Slant rhymes are approximate rhymes, and the possible varieties are very numerous. Here are only a few possibilities of slant rhyme with the word “blink”

  • (i ) blink-blank
  • (ii ) blink-blip
  • (iii ) blink-thank
  • (iv ) blink-bleak
  • (v ) blink-brisk

  The vowel sound only may be changed (i, iii ) or one of the consonant sounds (ii ) or more than one consonant sound (v ) or the vowel and one or more—but not all—of the consonant sounds (iv ) . To coin separate terms for each type of slant rhyme is a work of supererogation.

  This type of rhyming was relatively rare in English poetry until the twentieth century. It is found with some frequency, however, in the poetry of William Blake and Emily Dickinson. It abounds in the verse of Wilfrid Owen, W B. Yeats, and W H. Auden.

  The exact effect of slant rhyme is difficult to describe, and of course different kinds have somewhat different effects. It is not nearly as pleasing to the ear, and sometimes it is undeniably dissonant. Its harshness or dissonance is at once its strength and its limitation. It frustrates the ear by coming close to the melodic quality of rhyme without resolving into it. Hence it is suitable for poems in which any form of euphony would be disastrous. Notice how it helps create a tone of despair and anxiety in the following lines from Wilfrid Owen’s war poem “Arms and the Boy” :

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  RE:Verse

  Turning Towards Poetry

  • Jeremy Tambling(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lyrical Ballads . ‘Digging’ (example 84) half-rhymes throughout, as though rhymes are half-accidental, adding something if they happen to appear; as the poet Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927) puts it in a poem called ‘The Chances of Rhyme’: ‘The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting’. Rhyme was not associated with either classical Greek or Latin poetry, but became important in European poetry perhaps with Latin hymns, and became a feature of medieval verse, save that which is alliterated. Modernist poetry relied less on rhyme, perhaps with the sense that it imposes too much of a sense of unified form on the poem. But rhyme is integral to everything else in a poem. Take the first verse of Donne’s poem, ‘Song’:

  87

  Go, and catch a falling star,

  Get with child a mandrake root,

  [forked plant, supposed to resemble a human

  Tell me where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy’s stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind.(Fowler 1991, 106)

  Here the wit uses the balance between the single syllabic rhymes (‘star’/‘are’, ‘root’/‘foot’) and the polysyllabic (‘singing’/‘stinging’: note the antithesis of joy and pain here) and the point that rhyme appeals both to the ear, but to the eye also: some rhymes are only ‘eye-rhymes’, visible on the page (like ‘find’/‘wind’), not audible, though most readers will make ‘wind’ to rhyme by their pronunciation. See also the eye-rhymes in Chapman (example 86).

  Poetic forms that build rhymes into their structure, so that the rhyme dictates the poem, include: terza rima , in Dante’s form, where the verse moves in three line sections, with a final single line, with the rhyming scheme aba, bcb … ghg, h. Its most famous example in English is Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The villanelle has been discussed in examples 13 and 69; another example of it is by W.H. Auden, ‘If I could tell you’. The rondel , a favourite with Swinburne (1837–1909), has a fixed form, ending as it began, and with the first two rhyming words setting the pattern throughout. The sestina uses the repetition of words at the end of a stanza as the rhyme scheme. It has typically six lines each, where the endings follow this pattern: 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. Eliot adapted the sestina form for the opening of ‘The Dry Salvages’ II in Four Quartets

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book