Rhymer

“ A rhymer, rhyming a futile rhyme, * he had crept for convoy through Eden-ways
Into the shade of the poet’s glory, * darkened under his prevalent rays,
Fearfully hoping a distant welcome * as a poor kinsman of his lays.
p. 58The angels laughed with a lovely scorning: *—“Who has done this sorry deed in
The garden of our Father, God? * ’mid his blossoms to sow this weed in? ”

“ Those who are acquainted with writing, know that our language runs almost naturally into blank verse. The writers of our novels, romances, and all of this class, who have no notion of stile, naturally hobble into this unharmonious measure. If rhymes, therefore, be more difficult, for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme. Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain, plays highest by diminishing the aperture. ”

“ Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. ”

“ His rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and carrying him into the widest digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme.
Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known subjects. Sometimes [267] the whole poem is written in this manner. ”

“ The preceding poem, while it places in a new light the immortal history of the hatchet, also illustrates the wonderful adaptability of the English language to the purposes of the poet. Thus, in the last stanza, a rhyme is required for “down,” while the sense demands the word “man” at the end of the corresponding line. ”

“ Melody, Rhyme, Form.—Music and rhyme are among the earliest pleasures of the child, and, in the history of literature, poetry precedes prose. Every one may see, as he rides on the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter what objects are near it,—a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder-bush, or a stake,—they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. ”

“ As to the astonishing rhymes which meet us at every step, they form in themselves a poignant kind of wit; often double and even treble, one word rhyming with an entire phrase or one phrase with another,--not only of the oddest kind, but as nicely adapted to the necessities of expression and meaning as if intended or invented for that purpose alone,--they produce on us the effect of the richest humor. ”

“ I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body; and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expression mounts. ”

“ Oscar Wilde's praise of rime—"that exquisite echo which in the music's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of a 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 into the speech of the gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre." ”

“ Of this he said, in his “Essay on Lyric Poetry,” prefixed to the poem—“For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me under great difficulties. But difficulties overcome give grace and pleasure. Nor can I account for the pleasure of rhyme in general (of which the moderns are too fond) but from this truth.” Yet the moderns surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by their own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony. ”

“ For rhyme shimmers on the surface of language like sunlight on the surface of a shallow stream; it conducts the mind as in a circle; its sphere is a world of harmonious delights. Rhyme is to the mind what sentimentality is to art.—Francis Grierson. ”

“ Because of you, it is believed That all who earn their bread by rhyme Are like yourselves, exuding slime. Oh, cease to write, for very shame, Ere all men spit upon our name! Take up your needles, drop your pen, And leave the poet's craft to men! ”

“ But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you writing in prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for the harmonies of language, would all have full play. ”

“ In prose, therefore, we are of opinion that the usual forms of prose may occasionally, and to a certain extent, be departed from, without giving any great offence to the reader.
Not so, however, in rhyming poetry—and, above all, not so in that species of it we are now writing about, the rhymed drama. ”

“ It had formerly been said, that the easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant; but that the labour of rhyme bounds and circumscribes an over-fruitful fancy; the sense there being commonly confined to the couplet, and the words so ordered, that the rhyme naturally follows them, not they the rhyme. To this you answered, that it was no argument to the question in hand; for the dispute was not which way a man may write best, but which is most proper for the subject on which he writes. ”

“ It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled “Observations in the Art of English Poesy”) to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. “Poesy,” he writes, “in all kind of speaking is the chief beginner and maintainer of eloquence, not only helping the ear with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raising the mind to a more high and lofty [Pg xiv] conceit. ”

“ The sign by which one most immediately recognises the genuine poet, both of the higher and lower species, is the unforced nature of his rhymes. They have appeared of themselves as if by divine arrangement; his thoughts come to him already in rhyme. The homely, prosaic man on the contrary, seeks the rhyme for the thought; the bungler seeks the thought for the rhyme. ”

“ I have a notion I can tell a poet that gets himself up just as I can tell a make-believe old man on the stage by the line where the gray skullcap joins the smooth forehead of the young fellow of seventy. You'll confess to a rhyming dictionary anyhow, won't you?
—I would as lief use that as any other dictionary, but I don't want it. When a word comes up fit to end a line with I can feel all the rhymes in the language that are fit to go with it without naming them. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Nation for a whole Age together, and that at a Time when it abounded in Wit and Learning. They were a List of Words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another Hand, and given to a Poet, who was to make a Poem to the Rhymes in the same Order that they were placed upon the List: The more uncommon the Rhymes were, the more extraordinary was the Genius of the Poet that could accommodate his Verses to them. ”

“ Over and over and over again—the little fleering, jeering, heartless tune, with yet its sub-note of pathos and of pain, the tinkle of the harp, the girlish voice singing, the poet's deeper tones in speech. Herries had no ear for music or for verse, yet that air and those words stayed with him all his life. He could never hear a boy whistle the one, or a lass lilt the other at her work, without an unbearable stab of pain. ”

“ Those elders of you who have followed certain earlier lectures 'On the Art of Writing' may remember that they set very little store upon metre as a dividing line between poetry and prose, and no store at all upon rhyme. I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. ”

“ Shakespeare says ‘the lover, the lunatic, and the poet, are of an imagination all compact.’ It matters little whether it is prose or poetry; there is often more imagination and more poetry in prose than in rhyme. ”

“ In real, that is, spontaneous minstrelsy, the fittest assonance, consonance, time, even rhyme,—if rhyme be invoked, and rhyme has been aptly called "both a memory and a hope,"—come of themselves with the imaginative thought. ”

“ I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! ”

“ The accidents of form, such as rhyme, stanza, alliteration, etc., we find worthily and advantageously used in much true poetry, as well as worthlessly used in the tawdry puppet-shows of mere mechanicians;—those persons who, having nothing to say, yet attempting to say something, mistake rhyme for sense, a tickling jingle for meaning, their desire to create for the creative power. ”

“ The best poems are probably those in which the poet's effort to find a rhyme is unconscious, and in which both thoughts have from the beginning exercised a mutual influence in the selection of their verbal expressions, which can then be made to rhyme by a means of slight remodification. ”

“ His next work is the translation of the Art of Poetry; which has received, in my opinion, not less praise than it deserves. Blank verse, left merely to its numbers, has little operation on the ear or mind: it can hardly support itself without bold figures and striking images. A poem frigidly didactick, without rhyme, is so near to prose, that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse. ”

“ Perhaps the very necessity of fitting rhymes together stimulates as much poetic activity as it discourages; for many poets have testified that the delight of rhyming adds energy to the imagination. If, as Shelley said, "the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness," why may it not be the breath of rhyme, as well as any other form of rhythmic energy, which quickens its drooping flame? ”

“ It admits of more variety of pauses than either the couplet or the alternate rhyme; and it concludes with a pomp and majesty of sound, which, to my ear, is wonderfully delightful. It seems also very well adapted to the genius of our language, which, from its irregularity of inflexion and number of monosyllables, abounds in diversified terminations, and consequently renders our poetry susceptible of an endless variety of legitimate rhymes. ”

“ The second range of problems with which we are immediately concerned, when we examine the poetic craft, is that which is generally expressed under the name of rhyme.
Now rhyme is undoubtedly an element of poetry, but it is neither an indissoluble element, nor is it, in every case, an inevitable one. In the main, the instinct which makes for rhyme is sound. Poetry is an art which demands—though not invariably—the utmost richness and fulness of musical effect. When rhyme is considered as an additional instrument of what may be called the poetic orchestra, it both loses and gains in importance. ”

“ My system is, to take the bull by the horns; in short, to try at first what words will chime, before you go farther, and fare worse. To say nothing of other advantages, it will at least have one good effect,—and that is, to correct the erroneous notion of the would-be poets and poetesses of the present day, that the great end of poetry is rhyme. ”

“ I find the burden and restrictions of rhyme more and more troublesome as I grow older. There are times when it seems natural enough to employ that form of expression, but it is only occasionally; and the use of it as the vehicle of the commonplace is so prevalent that one is not much tempted to select it as the medium for his thoughts and emotions. ”