Rhymes in Time (We Know!)

To me, the art of choosing rhyme words is less about finding a word at the end of a line that says what you want to say and, to boot, sounds a lot like another word in an earlier line. It's more about finding the word that does do that, but also sets you to thinking.

I was looking earlier today at a poem about someone getting a new knife. It's great song-like poem that has a nice twist, and it explores that twist a little.

One end word was "glint." The poet didn't rhyme that word (though he did others), but he could have, thought I. He could have chosen "hint," "tint," "stint," for instance. Each of the words would have ended up dramatically changing the course of the poem's meaning.

For that particular poem, it would have been a bad idea. But that's not always the case.

Sometimes choosing a rhyme that ends up changing the entire course of the poem can make something run-of-the-mill a lot better. I've found that it can improve the entire poem, in fact.

The idea is to stick with good rhyme sounds at the start, ones that give you the most possibilities. In other words, stick with rhyme sounds with the most words in standard English.

"Glint" i'nt one of 'em. So the poet did the right thing in that case.

Words that (merely) end in "-ing" or "-ion" don't count. There are reasons for that, and I'll go into why another time.

You can get a rhyming dictionary to help you find those good rhyme sounds.

Or, you can refer to a book I've mentioned earlier. It's one you might have: a copy of the sonnets of Shakespeare.

The Drama of the Phoneme

I remember getting funny looks from my fellow English majors (and alums, later) when I talked with enthusiasm about my Phonemics class.

Not everyone felt it was odd, but some did. Phonemics is the study of what phonetically gives a language its meaning. The "bilabial fricative" made famous by the late (and lamented) George Carlin is phonetic, but not phonemic (well, formally, anyway).

From at least the Renaissance, writers on poetry have been fascinated by the subject. Especially, which phonemes fit their aesthetic, and which do not. Dante wrote about it (I read a translation of the book, I forget the title, as an undergrad. For fun. No kidding.), as have others.

The funny looks came more from the free-verse poets. That's natural. A Jackson Pollack is going to look pretty much the same in oil as it does in tempera, or just wall paint. It's the materials of the unconscious that are important in that particular aesthetic practice, IMHO.

Now, Pollack fans are going to assail me over that, as would any free-verse fans: the details do matter to them, they might say, just not in the same way. That's OK. Diversity is important. IGT.

But to the formal poet (even part-time), the technical details of what, say, makes a "d" sound like a "d" are important, as what certain phonemes sound like in combination, also.

As well as the "supra-segmental phonemes." (The wha ... ?)

In English, they are: stress, pitch and juncture, as best I recall. Which makes for a dramatic language, don't you think?

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Afternote: (2/8/11) The book by Dante was De Vulgari Eloquentia. I don't recall the translator's name.

Push and Pull

You most certainly can improve a free-verse poem by introducing an element of dramatic tension into your conception.

In rhymed, metrical verse, the tension is already there (in a sense). Look at Shakespeare's sonnets: see if you can tell how he interplays tension and slack from line to line, quatrain to quatrain, then to the final couplet.

Food for thought?

"I knew that, but I didn't know I knew it ... ."

I made an "interesting" mistake a few weeks back.

In the post about Gerard Manley Hopkins and his "sprung" rhythm, I said a scholar had possibly confused the Hopkins prosodic invention with so-called "fourteener" verse, which I said does not count unstressed syllables strictly.

I was the one confused.

I later reasoned (correctly) that the verse form wouldn't be called "fourteener" if the unstressed syllables don't count.

A "fourteener" line of verse has fourteen syllables, obviously. The verses are often formed as a "ballad" quatrain, alternating four iambic feet with three in rhymed lines.

Clearly, I was muddled. I do realize that, in music, "meter" is only one aspect of rhythm, so metrical verse written for songs needs more of a flow to allow a composer to fit a melody to the words (see Byron's "Stanzas for Music" for an example).

However, the more I try to explain verse for hymns (short measure or meter, long ... , common ... etc.) the more ignorance I expose. It's not something I studied way back (though now I find it really interesting), and I seem to recall being told in a poetry class as an English lit major to ignore it (as literature goes, anyway).

Here's an overview:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen

Look for the entry called "Hymnody and Hymnology" there.

This much I knew: hymns are metrical poems set to any one of several "tunes." What I'm learning: syllable count in hymnology is very important. (It's usually printed in the lower right corner of the hymn entry in hymnals.)