'The Consonance of Verses'

“Like meter, rhyme seems to appeal to a basic human capacity for play and fun. Just as people enjoy and respond to rhythmical patterns, so they delight in verbal correspondences . . .” 

As evidence to bolster Timothy Steele’s observation, I cite not Yeats, Cunningham or Larkin but these lines, memorized through repetition fifty-seven years ago:

 

“Well, she don’t make me nervous

She don’t talk too much

She walks like Bo Diddley

And she don’t need no crutch”

 

And these, from a decade later, including the Longfellow allusion that had already been committed to memory:

 

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

When the skies of November turn gloomy”

 

Meter and rhyme abet memorability, regardless of the quality of the verse, and memorability is a traditional gauge of reader pleasure and a poem’s worth. Memorizing free verse at significant length is more difficult and usually less rewarding. Presumably, there are readers who carry around anthologies of the Roberts -- Bly and Creeley -- in their heads. My data-storage capacity is limited. Steele continues:

 

“[R]hyme entails, as does meter, both predictability and surprise. . . . reading a rhymed poem, we can foresee that a word or syllable at the end of one line will be answered by a word or syllable at the end of another, but we can’t usually or always tell what the answering word or syllable will be or what significance the correspondence will produce.”

 

In 1997, Steele edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press). Cunningham was a master of rhyme. As a practitioner of the plain style, he wasn’t afraid to use conventional, monosyllabic rhymes, as in this epigram from the late nineteen-forties:

 

“Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,

And life is fresh and death is salt to me.”

 

Reading Cunningham closely again, I’ve noted that some of his most interesting rhymes are found in his first stanzas, as though they served to “jump-start” his poems. That’s pure speculation. Here is “Montana Pastoral,” from 1941:

 

“I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.

I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

 

“Thirst where the grasses burn in early May

And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

 

“There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat

Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.

 

“So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove

To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove,

 

“And found no images of pastoral will,

But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.”

 

The best rhymes, plain or fancy, seem to combine unexpectedness with inevitability. They have a rightness about them. They seem to spark an adventuresome spirit in good poets -- and dullness in drones. Boswell reports this exchange with Johnson on July 9, 1763:

 

“He enlarged very convincingly upon the excellence of rhyme over blank verse [not free verse] in English poetry. I mentioned to him that Dr. Adam Smith, in his lectures upon composition, when I studied under him in the College of Glasgow, had maintained the same opinion strenuously, and I repeated some of his arguments. JOHNSON: ‘Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have HUGGED him.’”

 

Johnson was no gratuitous hugger. Here is the definition of rhyme in his Dictionary: “the consonance of verses; the correspondence of the last sound of one verse to the last sound or syllable of another.”