EVERY DAY, I make or discover a rhyme. I’m writing what you’re reading now a few hours after writing my ‘Q is for Qwerty’ chapter. I told my children what I was doing and my daughter said, ‘What’s qwerty?’
‘It’s the first six letters on a keyboard,’ I said, ‘and so it gives its name to the kind of keyboard we use; I had mastered qwerty, by the time I was thirty.’ This isn’t true, but rhyme’s a bit like that. If it works, it works.
Rhyming also draws attention to the fact that language is a made thing. It’s not a transparent hole through which we look at reality. It’s a tool we make and use in order to then shape reality, rather as if we kept making chisels in order to sculpt. One of the peculiar things about language is that we often forget we’re making it and using it. We do have explicit ways of discussing it, which is what I’m doing now, but we also have many furtive ways of drawing attention to it, without saying, ‘What I’m doing now is talking about language.’ The poetical word for this is ‘prosody’, meaning the musicality of speech or writing or, more specifically, of poetry. Anything that patterns a piece of speech or writing is prosody. It’s the aesthetics of language. Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, repetition, stress, intonation (in speech) – or some or all of these in combination with each other, are the main colours that writers have on their palette to work with. The alphabet is the brush. And, to grind this metaphor into the ground, the same brush will sometimes give you different strokes. And sometimes the same stroke can be produced by different brushes.
Both problems can be found in the days of the week: Sunday and Monday are perfect rhymes but the ‘un’ of ‘Sunday’ does not have the exact same letters as the ‘on’ of Monday, and most of us will pronounce the ‘-day’ part of the name as ‘day’ or ‘dee’. We can make the same letters do different jobs. When we line up words together that look unalike to make them sound alike – as with rhyme – we draw attention in a small way to the making of words and the use of letters. A good deal of the time, though, we can take thousands of words and find rhymes for them where the rhyming part of the word is identical: ‘cup’ and ‘pup’, ‘hill’ and ‘pill’. We notice this stuff in different ways: it may make us laugh, it may be the means by which one idea or feeling is linked to another; and the neatness and completeness give us pleasure:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
Andrew Marvell
The alphabet in the original spelling gave the rhyme as ‘tyme’ and ‘crime’ – the same sound produced by different letters – but in modern print, the spelling adds to the symmetry. The rhyme links ‘time’ and ‘crime’ but in one sense there is no link between time and crime. A crime is still a crime whenever it happens or no matter how long it takes to commit.
In the opening couplet and with its opening rhyme, the poem announces that it will be paradoxical, that era’s favourite poetical stance. A paradox yokes together unlikely partners, usually playing on the irony that these two unalike elements are so close. (‘What goes round the world but stays in one corner?’ a child asks me. ‘A stamp.’). The implied meaning of Marvell here is of course that the Lady’s coyness is a crime and it is precisely because, or so he claims, of a problem with time: the impossibility of human beings having all the time in the world. Without announcing itself, the rhyme draws attention to the paradox and theme of the poem: the crime of coyness in contrast to the time available.
In poetry, rhyme has company: some kind of rhythm or beat, regular – as here – or subverted, as with, say, Ogden Nash or John Hegley. Either way, there is usually a quality in the air of running up to take a jump, leading up to the rhyme. In this poem, Marvell does this with four metrical ‘feet’, each containing a ‘te-TUM’. If you were writing it musically, each foot would be a crotchet-quaver. This means that as we read the poem, we get to know when the jumper is going to take off, when the rhyme is going to happen: ‘te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-RHYME, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-RHYME’. And here the alphabet plays tricks on us. It conceals as it reveals. There are no specific letters to help us see the rhythm, but by pronouncing the letters of the words according to custom, we make the rhythm: ‘Had WE but WORLD eNOUGH, and TIME . . .’ By the time we get to the end of the second line, the last foot is waiting to trip the ‘Lady’ up. The foot says it’s ‘no crime’ when the poet means that it is.
The alphabet has yet another job to do here. The pulse of poetry before Andrew Marvell’s day was marked and aided by alliteration and assonance. In each line of the poem – or, in the case of Old English poetry, in each half-line – there were sounds, consonants or vowels which were repeated. Here from the middle of the fifteenth century are the opening four lines of a poem about blacksmiths:
Swarte-smeked smethes [black-smoked smiths], smattered with smoke,
Drive me to deth with den of here dintes [their blows]:
Swich nois [such noise] on nightes ne herd men never,
What knavene [what workmen] cry and clattering of knockes!
By Marvell’s day, with rhyme in the ascendancy, the alliteration and assonance (repeat of vowel sounds) was quietening down.
Had We but World enough, and time,
This Coyness, Lady, were no Crime.
This kind of repetition of sound can do all sorts of things but here, I suspect, it works like the bassist in a band, helping to hold together the melody and rhythm. When you hear the alliteration or assonance, there is a sense in which you have been bounced from one sound to another. Just as that runner, running up for the long jump, does that stuttering and rhythm of the run, so alliteration-assonance marks out the ‘feet’ of the poem’s lines. Or put another way: I’ve underlined the alliteration – alliteration is like an oral underlining. It’s also a way of showing the ‘letter-i-ness’ of letters. It shows off what any given letter can do. If we want to exaggerate it, we can give those Ws a real elongated quality, lengthening them into the vowels that follow: ‘weeee’ and ‘worrrrrld’, like time, can go on for ever. And if we want to curse the Lady’s coyness then we can be as guttural and phlegmy as we like with ‘cccccoyness’ and ‘cccccrime’. Or we can just hint at it and let the alphabet do its work.
The word ‘rhyme’ is a screw-up. It should be ‘rime’. It once was ‘rime’. This spelling showed the roots of the word in both Old English and Old Irish, but someone thought that ‘rime’ was related to ‘rhythm’. ‘Rhythm’ is spelled like that because of its origins in Greek. But the origins of ‘rhyme’ aren’t Greek. To sum up: someone very clever changed ‘rime’ to ‘rhyme’ because he thought everyone was ignorant. But they weren’t. He was. But he thought he wasn’t. And his view won the day. Result: the alphabet misapplied. If you’re disturbed that I’ve taken twenty seconds out of your life to explain that, please spare a thought for my children who have all in their time had ‘rhyme’ on their lists of words for spelling homework.
To complicate matters further, ‘rime’ still exists as a technical term. Many teachers of early reading find it useful to show children that there are two parts to a syllable: the ‘onset’ and the ‘rime’. In ‘bat’, ‘b’ is the ‘onset’ and ‘at’ is the ‘rime’. Maybe, the person who came up with ‘rime’ to mean something that isn’t ‘rhyme’ could have thought of another word. Apart from anything else, ‘rime’ already existed as a word. It means ‘frost’. I think I could make an argument for saying that ‘rime’ (meaning a part of a syllable) is the alphabet misapplied too.
Rhyme is so much with us and in us that it’s easy to think that it’s ‘natural’ or ‘inborn’. But some cultures get by without it. The ancient Greeks knew about it, didn’t do it much, and when they did, it was often for comic effect, as in a play by Euripides, where Hercules speaks in rhyme when he’s drunk. There are two short moments of rhyme in The Iliad but The Odyssey doesn’t rhyme. If you’re looking for a rhyme for ‘Odyssey’, ‘theodicy’ would work:
his hubris and his Odyssey.
Voltaire wrote about Pangloss,
his idiocy and theodicy.
The ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Arabic and Persian poets were rhymers, and rhyme for most of these writers was one of the defining characteristics of poetry. The Roman poets Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus gave it a go but didn’t stick with it. How and why it became the dominant form of poetry in the West has never been fully explained. One possibility is that the Arab presence in Spain helped create the hugely successful rhyming troubadour poetry. The Church became enthusiastic rhymers in religious song, perhaps influenced by Irish verse. By the thirteenth century in England there were rhymes appearing in the shape of ballads.
The first rhymes I remember were when my mother read me Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin where the cheeky squirrel (and surrogate child-reader) is rude to Mr Brown the Owl, peeping in through his keyhole and singing a riddle:
A house full, a hole full!
And you cannot gather a bowl-full.
My father meanwhile took on the responsibility of delivering anything from Shakespeare to rude rhymes, from Virgil to Yiddish comedy. The first I remember was:
Herrel Shmerel [the foolish little man]
went to the races,
lost his gatkes [long johns or trousers]
and his braces.
Once rhyme was embedded and we had become acculturated to it, he could subvert our expectations:
The higher up the mountain
the sweeter grows the grass
the higher up the donkey climbs
the more he shows his face.
At school we sang rhyming hymns (‘There is a green hill far away’), and learned rhyming poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches’). Out in the playground we said:
Inky pinky ponky
The farmer bought a donkey.
The donkey died,
The farmer cried,
Inky pinky ponky.
On the radio they were singing about the doggie in the window, the one with the waggly tail. Then Elvis said that he wasn’t nothing but a hound dog, and my brother’s friends had blues records from the Mississippi Delta that rhymed ‘bed’ with ‘bread’.
There were some books that said you didn’t have to rhyme. There were poems by Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams. It was a modern thing. Or an American thing. You could just say it. The grip of the alphabetical echo was loosened. D. H. Lawrence said that you could say that you went to a water-trough and saw a snake and so you threw something at it, and it went away and you felt ashamed. I wrote that I was in my room and saw a moth so I killed it and it made me think that we’ve been like that since prehistoric times. It didn’t rhyme.
But then we did Gerard Manley Hopkins.
He noted that the two lines of ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’ have the same number of beats but a different number of syllables: three beats per line. First line: three syllables. Second line: five syllables. He invented ‘sprung rhythm’ where his poems would rhyme but the beat of the line would depend on where he stressed the syllable. And using the Old English effects of alliteration and assonance, he could knit the lines together. He got rid of the ‘foot’ that repeats itself along the line. So, on his own, in the 1870s he created a kind of jazz poetry where the beat loops over several unstressed syllables: BOOM ba-ba-ba-ba BOOM BOOM ba ba BOOM. He realized that some people just wouldn’t get it, so as he wrote, he marked his poems with accents:
With swíft, slow, sweet, soúr, adázzle dím.
[Ba BOOM ba ba BOOM ba-BOOM BOOM]
With Hopkins’ alliteration this became: Wa-SOOM sa sa SOOM, a-DOOM DOOM.
Needless to say, when he sent his first sprung rhythm poem off to be published, they asked him to take the accents out and then didn’t publish the poem anyway. Hopkins was a Jesuit and perhaps the editor of a Jesuit journal wasn’t the most likely person in the Victorian era to be hip to this sort of thing. Though these rhythms became all-important to Hopkins, he went on rhyming. Sometimes the rhyme-words almost disappear in an unstressed or half-word limbo:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding.
To my ears, this sounded like play, jazz, experiment and impro. Miles Davis on the page. Not that I saw it at the time: it’s shot through with alphabetical dance. In French, we were taught that some writers spent whole days or weeks looking for ‘le mot juste’ – the right word, but the rightness of the word would depend on it being right in meaning for that place and time. Here was another kind of search for the right word, to find the one that chimed with the ones next to it. Again and again. Poem after poem.
The poet laureate of the time, Robert Bridges, didn’t know what to make of it and sat on the stuff that Hopkins sent him, until 1918. Hopkins had died of typhoid in Dublin not long before his forty-fifth birthday in 1889.
I spent two years trying to write like Hopkins and although it worked for Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, I wasn’t good enough at it. I went back to free verse which is called by its detractors ‘chopped-up prose’ or ‘tennis without the net’. Looked at that way, it is poetry at its least alphabetical, rarely drawing attention to its letters in any consistent way, except in the experiments of e. e. cummings, Apollinaire and concrete poetry. It draws on timing, and the length of the line as its ‘foot’ or basic unit. It’s been around for a long time: ever since people translated the metrical Hebrew verse of the ‘Song of Songs’ and the Psalms into non-metrical verse. Greek and Latin were the first languages for that, followed by the various vernaculars, like Old English, gothic and on into the modern era. The Wycliffe Bible of 1382–95 does free verse pretty well – here I’ve arranged the lines:
lo! thou art fair,
thine eyes be the eyes of culvers [doves].
Lo! my darling, thou art fair and shapely;
our bed is fair as flowers.
The beams of our houses be of cedar;
our couplings be of cypress.
As the Wycliffe translators show, repetition is the most useful tool in the box for free verse poets. It’s ‘free’ because you decide what to repeat and when, rather than be bound by the demands of a ‘foot’ or of a rhyme. It’s in the repetition that the prosody creeps in and the letter-i-ness of letters assert themselves.
In my own writing I’ve mixed and matched, noting that children love rhythm and rhyme but that sometimes means that they don’t hear the words or that the words tell the rhyme but not the truth. Sometimes the youngest ones don’t hear these things either.
I do a poem that says:
Down behind the dustbin
I met a dog called Jim
He didn’t know me
and I didn’t know him.
One sharp lad says, ‘How did you know his name was Jim then?’ I don’t know the answer. I say to very young ones:
Down behind the dustbin
I met a dog called Felicity.
It’s a bit dark down here,
They cut off my . . .?
‘. . . head,’ they say. Well, it would be dark. One of them said:
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Trod on him.
Which proves that a not-rhyme can do as much as a rhyme. I reply:
Roses are red
violets are blue
most poems rhyme
this one doesn’t.