Back in college, I pored again and again over a book of Ezra Pound's essays, trying to mine them for a metrical poet's secrets. In one essay, he rhapsodizes over the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, especially one classically themed poem (forgotten which) in which (as I now recall -- I may still have it wrong) "cross-rhymes abound."
My overheated youthful brain kept misreading it "cross-rhythms" -- a nonexistent term, AFAIK. And I spent years searching for such things in poems and music.
When I went back to my old school and went into the library and found my old Ez book in the stacks, I went to my favorite essay on Swinburne and -- turned crimson in the face.
Cross-rhymes are used when writing hexameters in English to break up the monotonous sounding lines (probably not at all monotonous in the languages they were meant for, in English hexameters just drone on and on).
"Cross-rhythms" don't exist. Or do they?
See if you can read (aloud) the following verbal masterpiece by an American master about a pictoral masterpiece from a Dutch master in two ways.
The Dance
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
-- by William Carlos Williams
See?
Sometimes it pays to make embarrassing mistakes.
Normally, I'd cite my source for the text. But I found lots of pages on Blogger with both the painting and the poem reproduced.
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