Rime

“ Similarly, in septenary verse internal rime was often used together with end-rime, with a resulting resolution into short-line stanzas riming either aabb or abab. [14] The following specimen from a celebrated ballad shows the popular use of a somewhat complex system of internal rime.
Be it right or wrong, these men among on women do complaine,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vaine,
To love them wele, for never a dele they love a man agayne. ”

“ The idiom of crime, a language at once sanguinary and grotesque, united to the voice of a young girl, that graceful transition from the voice of childhood to the voice of woman,—all these deformities of words delightfully sung, cadenced, rounded! ”

“ Nor all that heralds rake from coffined clay, Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime. ”

“ BOUTS-RIMÉS, literally (from the French) “rhymed ends,” the name given in all literatures to a kind of verses of which no better definition can be found than was made by Addison, in the Spectator, when he described them as “lists 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 odd and perplexing the rhymes are, the more ingenuity is required to give a semblance of common-sense to the production. ”

“ Note the apparent “feminine” rhymes, torren-sorren, which are really rimes riches in the French style.
The whole Poem of the Passion is in this metre, but is written in lines of fourteen syllables.
IV. Four-syllabled lines, often written as eight-syllabled, rhyming alternately. Thus (Passio D. N. J. C. in the Ordinalia, 1. 35) :—
p. ”

“ Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakespeare's mode of composition is the same; an interchange of seriousness and merriment, by which the mind is softened at one time, and exhilarated at another. But whatever be his purpose, whether to gladden or depress, or to conduct the story, without vehemence or emotion, through tracts of easy and familiar dialogue, he never fails to attain his purpose; as he commands us, we laugh or mourn, or sit silent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity without indifference. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And in Comedy more regular and confin'd Measures had been ridiculous. How inexcusable, then, is the Practice of the French Poets, who have written whole Comedies in Rhyme, and Heroic Verse? Rhymes are ridiculous enough in Tragedy; [Pg 299] but that an easy and familiar Conversation, such as Comedy is suppos'd to be, should be all in Rhyme and Epic Verse, has something in it so extravagantly absurd, that I am surpriz'd a Nation, so remarkable for Wit and good Sense, could bear with it. ”

“ If there is poetry and verse, there is also verse and verse. Poetry may be said to be a fixed quality; but that is not so with the inferior article. There are many different [Pg 30] sorts of verse. There is that which is strongly sentimental, there is that which is broadly comic, and there is that which is something between the two—neither over-sentimental nor over-comic, but altogether light in tone, and marked in the main by wit and humour. Now, to this last class of verse has been given, in general, the name of vers de société or vers d’occasion—verse of society or for the moment. ”

“ When we repeat what we have already said, that it is an unnatural appendage to speech—that the tongues of men in real life are not hung with the bells of rhyme, we have said quite enough to vindicate and establish the truth of this assertion. Therefore any appeal made to our critical clemency in behalf of inverted constructions, or other imperfections of language, not usually met with in prose or conversation—made, we say, on the score that they are to a certain extent compensated by the extra pleasure, forsooth, communicated to us by the rhymes—will be made in vain ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ We ground our opinion upon the three following reasons:—In the first place, a dramatic writer in rhyme, already and from the very character of his composition, stands in a false and unnatural position. He has to describe the thoughts and passions of real men, and to do this successfully he must employ the language of actual life; but at the same time there is an element in the kind of composition he has chosen, which, in the first instance, necessarily and conspicuously takes his dialect out of the pale of nature, or from under the category of ordinary discourse—we mean the element of rhyme. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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! ”

“ Rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic element— rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts. ”

“ Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one there sate fifty men’. ”

“ But I come now to the Inference of your first argument. You said, 'The dialogue of Plays is presented as the effect of sudden thought; but no one speaks suddenly or, ex tempore, in Rhyme' [p. 498] : and you inferred from thence, that Rhyme, which you acknowledge to be proper to Epic Poesy [p. 559] , cannot equally be proper to Dramatic; unless we could suppose all men born so much more than poets, that verses should be made in them, not by them. ”

“ Language (treating the poet's most striking deviations from standard prose usage) ; The Metres.
The Introduction to the Satires and Epistles is equally exhaustive, and
treats of the Life and Works of Horace; The Development of the Roman
Satire; The Dramatic and Literary Satire; The Schools of Ennius and
Lucilius; General Characteristics of the Satires; The Style of the
Satires; Colloquial Language of the Satires; The Metres.
In both volumes the commentary is eminently judicious, telling the student all he needs to know, but never more than he will understand and appreciate. ”

“ On the revival of letters, when the judgment of the public is yet raw and unformed, this false glitter catches the eye, and leaves no room, either in eloquence or poetry, for the durable beauties of solid sense and lively passion. ”

“ Rhyme, indeed, is a common but not an essential adjunct, some of our noblest poems being composed in unrhymed or Blank Verse. Measure, Rhythm, Accent, and Pause, are all features of much moment in English Versification, but they cannot be reduced to absolutely uniform rules. The variations to which they are subject are many and important. Of the positive and correct signification of the terms Rhyme, Measure, Rhythm, Accent, and Pause, it is needful to give some explanation. ”

“ Any thing would do to ‘hitch into a rhyme,’ no matter whether striking or agreeable, or not, so that it would puzzle the reader to discover the meaning, and if there was the most remote circumstance, however trifling or vague, for the pretended comparison to hinge upon. ”

“ They shade into one another. But they are all based upon a common sensitiveness to the effects of rhythmic prose, a common restlessness under what is felt to be the restraint of metre and rhyme, and a common endeavor to break down the conventional barrier which separates the characteristic beauty of prose speech from the characteristic beauty of verse. ”

“ Only the skilled can dance gracefully in fetters. Moreover, a too frequent repetition of rhyme at short intervals gives a jigginess to the verse. It is on this account 48that the use in a line of a sound similar to the rhyme should be avoided. [16]
As a final warning, let me entreat the writer of verses to examine his rhymes carefully, and see that they chime to an educated ear. Such atrocities as "morn" and "dawn," "more" and "sure," "light in" and "writing," "fought" and "sort," are fatal to the success of verse. ”

“ Speech is always in close contact with writing; in time, even slang may become elegant and pass into the recognized vocabulary of literature. Poetical, a specialized branch of the literary language, tends for special reasons of rhythm, ryhme, assonance, solemnity, dignity, pathos, sonority and the like to be more conservative, archaic and formal than the language of prose, but even the poetry of an age reflects its tendencies of educated speech and thought. ”

“ This literature proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It involves a careful recognition of what psychology calls the 'prose attitude' and the 'verse attitude,' and also (as has been suggested above) the peculiar union of prose with the spatial rhythm of verse. We read with ear and eye together, though with varying proportions of emphasis on the one or the other; for some 'vocalize' whatever they read, others read almost entirely with the eye. Since it is the eye that takes the earlier and quicker perception of printed language, we tend to judge by the appearance of a page whether it contains prose or verse. ”

“ To apply words, and more especially adjectives, in an unwonted and unusual sense is one of the arts which go a long way to make conversation agreeable. To do this with taste, and without corrupting or annihilating the meaning of the word, demands a certain amount of literary skill. ”

“ 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. ”