Ottava rima

“ RHYME. Every language has powers, and graces, and music peculiar to itself; and what is becoming in one, would be ridiculous in another. Rhyme was barbarous in Latin and Greek verse, because 71these languages by the sonorousness of their words, by their liberty of transposition and inversion, by their fixed quantities and musical pronunciation, could carry on the melody of verse without its aid; and an attempt to construct English verses after the form of hexameters, and pentameters, and sapphics, is as barbarous among us. It is not true that rhyme is merely a monkish invention. ”

“ It is also used in a specific way to denote a poem of iambic hendecasyllables, generally intermingled with verses of seven and even of five syllables. Each line of the strophe stands in consonantal rhyme with some other. The poet constructs the typical strophe according to his fancy, but he must make all the others like it. A xlvi short envoi—usually addressed to the composition itself—may end the poem. Cf. p. 70, ll. 7 ff., p. 87, ll. 4 ff.
The octava rima, or octave, is an eight-lined stanza, generally of hendecasyllables, with consonantal rhyme according to the scheme a b a b a b c c. ”

“ In a language as unrhythmic as the French, rime is far more important than it need be in a lilting and musical tongue like our own; but in the masterpieces of the English lyrists, as in those of the French, rime plays along the edges of a poem, ever creating the expectation it swiftly satisfies and giving most pleasure when its presence is felt and not flaunted. Like the dress of the well-bred woman, which sets off her beauty without attracting attention to itself, rime must be adequate and unobtrusive, neither too fine nor too shabby, but always in perfect taste. ”

“ Rym (for Ryme, before a vowel) , verse, D 1127; Rymes, pl. T. iii. 90; B 96. A.S. rīm; cf. Icel. rīma, Swed. rim, Du. rijm, G. reim, F. rime, Ital., Span., Port. rima. The spelling rhyme is rare before A.D. 1600.
Ryme, v. describe in verse, put into rime (or rhyme) , R. 31; HF. 1255; L. 570; A 1459, B 2122; ger. 5. 119; 16. 35; HF. 520; L. 996; T. ii. 10; G 1093; pr. pl. 16. 41.
Rymeyed, pp. rimed, or rhymed, F 711; see above. A.F. rimeier O.F. rimoier (Godefroy) .
Ryming, s. riming, or rhyming, versemaking, B 2120; the art of riming, B 48. ”

“ While the classic tongues, especially the Greek, possess, by power of accent, several advantages for versification over our own, chiefly through greater abundance of spondaic feet, we have other and very great advantages of sound by the modern usage of rhyme. Alliteration is nearly the only effect of that kind which the ancients had in common with us. It will be seen that much of the melody of 'The Raven' arises from alliteration and the studious use of similar sounds in unusual places. ”

“ The sonorous march and sultry splendour of the terza rima stanzas, bearing on their tide of song those multitudes of forms, processionally grand, yet misty with the dust of their own tramplings, and half-shrouded in a lurid robe of light, affect the imagination so powerfully that we are fain to abandon criticism and acknowledge only the dæmonic fascinations of this solemn mystery. ”

“ I was not so crazed as not to know it; only a phantom, an illusion, yet more real than reality—real as my crime and vain remorse and death to come. It was, indeed, Rima returned to tell me that I that loved her had been more cruel to her than her cruellest enemies; for they had but tortured and destroyed her body with fire, while I had cast this shadow on her soul—this sorrow transcending all sorrows, darker than death, immitigable, eternal. ”

“ Verse appeals to the ear by its melodious combinations of sounds and also by the regular recurrence of similar sounds in rhymes. These usually occur at the ends of verses. In order that a rhyme may be perfect the two rhyming syllables must both be accented, the vowel sound and the consonants following must be identical, and the sounds preceding the vowel must be different. For example, fate and late rhyme; fat and late do not; fate and lame do not; debate rhymes with relate, but not with prelate. Double rhymes occur frequently, as in the words bowlders, shoulders. ”

“ We have had magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back to blank verse or on to free verse. The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. ”

“ Rhyme consists in a likeness or uniformity of sound in the closing, syllable, or syllables, of successive or 154contiguous lines of verse. We find used, in English poetry, three several sorts of Rhymes, namely, Single, Double, and Treble. Of the first, or one-syllabled rhyme, the following is an example:—
"O, mortals, blind in fate, who never know
To bear high fortune, or endure the low!" The closing word, however, is not necessarily a monosyllable. There may be two syllables, as here:—
"What though his mighty soul his grief contains,
He meditates revenge who least complains." ”

“ And now we find not only alliteration, but also syllable rhymes, and indeed the lines alternate with perfect and half-rhymes. A perfect rhyme requires that two of the syllables in the same verse correspond perfectly, and a half rhyme that they have different vowels before the same consonant or combination of consonants. More seldom do we find our modern masculine and feminine rhymes. Still they occur and that in a very early period (e.g. in Egil Skallagrimsson) , and sometimes we even find that the four or eight verses of a strophe have the same rhyme. ”

“ Rhyme, which I would by no means admit into the dialogue of graver tragedy, seems to me the most proper style for representations of this heroic romantic kind, and best adapted to accompany music. The solemn language of a haughty tyrant will by no means become a passionate lover, and tender sentiments require the softest colouring. ”

“ When there is a difference either in the vowel sound or in the following consonantal sound, that is, when assonance or consonance is substituted for rime, the rime is usually said to be approximate or imperfect, as worth: forth, was: pass, gusht: dust (Coleridge) . When the rime words look alike but are pronounced differently, they are called eye rimes, as war: car, brow: glow. Sometimes false rimes occur which have no similarity of sound or appearance, but are more or less sanctioned by earlier pronunciation or by custom, as high: humanity. ”

“ Rhyme exists to satisfy the ear by the richness of repeated sound. In the beginnings of modern verse, alliteration, a repetition of a consonant, satisfied the listener. A further ornament was discovered when assonance, a repetition of the vowel-sounds, was invented. Finally, both of these were combined to procure a full identity of sound in the entire syllable, and rhyme took its place in prosody. When this identity of sound occurs in the last syllable of a verse it is the typical end rhyme of modern European poetry. ”

“ I was persuaded that rhymes where the consonant sounds correspond while the vowel sounds merely approximate—like wreck and make, gone and son—are the counterpart on the one hand of assonances upon the other, in which the vowels correspond but not the consonants; that their relation to perfect rhymes is exactly that of minor to major harmonies, and that they relieve the ear in a long-rhymed poem, no less than the latter in a musical composition. ”

“ In the Celtic languages, moreover, rime is the indispensable mark of the poetic form, even in the oldest extant specimens. The Latin poetry just referred to gives interesting evidence that rime is a characteristic sign of popular poetry. While the quantitative system became dominant, with the artistic verse-forms of the Greeks, in the Golden Age of Roman literature, the early Saturnian verses, written in free rhythms, already showed the popular taste for similarity of sound in the form of alliteration ”

“ Professor Corson remarks that in this case the rime serves "as a most effective foil to the melancholy theme. It is not unlike the laughter of frenzied grief." It is interesting to note that in the Italian language, where double rimes are almost constant, masculine rimes are sometimes used for grotesque effect in the same way that English poets use the feminine. ”

“ Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. ”

“ Who spoke of “wind” as “wined,”
And yet we use it, on the whole,
To rhyme to “find” and “blind.”
We say, “Now don’t do that agen,”
When people give us pain;
In poetry, nine times in ten,
It rhymes to “Spain” or “Dane.” ”

“ The one-time primitive directness of English was overrun by such forms as the ballade, the chant royal, the rondel, the kyrielle, the rondeau and the rondeau redoublé, the virelai and the pantoum, the sestina, the villanelle, and last, yet by no means least, the sonnet. But through the immense tangle of our intricate lyric growths it can now be seen that mere mechanics do not always make poetry. While rhyme has, indeed, served its limited purposes, it must be remembered that the highest English verse has been written without rhyme. ”

“ The gradual development of rime from assonance among the Romance peoples suggests the same thing. The early appearance of rime by the side of alliteration is illustrated by C. F. Meyer (Historische Studien, Leipzig, 1851) from the Norse Edda, from Beowulf, Cædmon, etc. In the later Anglo-Saxon period rime was evidently securing a considerable though uncertain hold. The Riming Poem suggests what development rime might have had in English without the incoming of Romance influences. ”

“ The rule of the limited number of rhymes holds good of nearly all. One feature prominent in the French rules is impossible in English, as the difference between the rhyme masculine on words that have not the e mute for their final letter, and the rhyme feminine on words that possess the e mute, is unknown to us; but side by side with the release from one binding law in French verse, a new one is imposed. ”

“ As a rule, both where the rhyme in the same stanza is single and where it is varied, all the stanzas have different rhymes, and only the rhyme-system, the arrangement of rhymes, is the same throughout the poem. It is, however, very rarely and only in Modern English literary poetry that the several stanzas are strictly uniform with regard to the use of masculine and feminine rhyme; as a rule the two kinds are employed. ”

“ The interval between the rhymes may be of different lengths in different poems, but when the interval is once established, it should be followed throughout the poem. A rhyme out of place jars upon the rhythmic perfection of a stanza just as an accent out of place interferes with the rhythm of the verse.
Not only should the rhymes occur at expected places, but they should be the expected rhymes; that is, real rhymes. If we are expecting a word which will rhyme with blossom and find bosom, or if we are expecting a rhyme for breath and find beneath, the effect is unpleasant. ”

“ Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of gods ”

“ In grave poetry, which uses the double rhyme occasionally, but on the whole sparingly, the last or short syllable should be entirely alike in double rhymes, and to the penultimate or accented one the same rules should apply as in the case of perfect single rhymes. That is to say, the consonants preceding the accented vowels should be varied, though licenses are taken in this respect. "Trading" and "degrading," for example, would be held a passable rhyme. The unison of sound, [22] and not the spelling, largely guides the 157formation of double rhymes, even in serious verse. ”

“ That the Consonants that precede the Vowel where the Rhyme begins, must not be the same in Sound, but different. In all which we vary from our Neighbours; for neither the French, Italians not Spaniards will allow that a Rhyme can be too perfect: And we meet with frequent Examples in their Poetry, where not only the Compounds rhyme to their Simples, and to themselves ”

“ Rhyme natural in English.
31. It is natural to English poetry—i.e. Middle and Modern English, or English poetry proper—to rhyme; and, except in the case of blank verse, no unrhymed measure for the last seven centuries has ever produced large quantities of uniformly satisfactory quality.
It must be "full,"
32. Rhyme in English must be "full," i.e. consonantal (on the vowel and following consonant or consonants) , not merely assonantal (on the vowel only) . Assonance by itself is insufficient. ”

“ In three of these comedies rhyme can hardly be said to be beaten; that is, the rhyming scenes are on the whole equal to the unrhymed in power and beauty. In the single tragedy, and in one of the two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but is undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a large proportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears no proportion whatever to the unrhymed. In two scenes we may say that the whole heart or spirit of Romeo and Juliet is summed up and distilled into perfect and pure expression ”