'Our Instinctual Taste for Periodicity and Return'

I got a kick out of Damian at A Sunday of Liberty reveling in a rhyme that seems genetically implanted in American kids, regardless of age or geography: 

“Greasy, grimy gopher guts!

Little dirty birdie feet!”

 

As in any folk tradition, variants abound. This is the version I grew up singing:

 

“Great gobs of greasy gopher guts,

Tiny, dirty parakeet feet,

Big hunks of monkey meat.”

 

The obvious appeal of such lyrics is audacious, nose-thumbing grossness. No profanities but the vicar would frown. Kids inhabit an alternate reality they learn to conceal from grownups, especially parents. The smart ones devise idiolects unintelligible to adults, most of whom have forgotten or sanitized memories of their own childhoods. Children are not by nature genteel. Remember this one?:

 

Verse:

“Don’t shed your eyes when worms go by,

’Cause you might be the next to die.

They dig a whole ’bout twelve feet deep

And throw you in by your feet."

 

Chorus:

“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

The ants play pinochle in your snout.”

 

Joseph Mitchell, The New Yorker writer whose abiding theme was death, uses a variation of this rhyme in The Bottom of the Harbor (1959):

 

“The worms crawl in,

The worms crawl out.

They eat your guts

And spit them out . . .”

 

Besides the disgust quotient, such rhymes survive because of their rhythm and rhyme. Free verse would never do the trick. Meter, however irregular, and rhyme, no matter how ridiculous, make words a lot of fun. They feel good in the mouth. Say aloud the lines I remembered above. Besides the playful alliteration, I like the rhyming of “parakeet feet” and “monkey meat.” Richard Tillinghast writes in his essay “In Praise of Rhyme” (Poetry and What Is Real, 2004):

 

“On the psychic level, rhyme’s appeal must have something to do with our instinctual taste for periodicity and return, the regular rising and setting of the sun, the sound of two hands clapping, a pair of aces. Just now on the top branch of the pear tree that grows over the stone wall at the foot of our garden, a male bullfinch alighted. As I was admiring his stout bill, his watered-pink waistcoat, his burgher’s prosperous midsection, the female flew briskly over the wall and joined him, jostling the fellow slightly as she perched --the pair of them like a banker and his wife settling down in their box at the theater. That’s rhyme.”

 

X.J. Kennedy, a master of rhyme, in “Lonesome George” (That Swing: Poems 2008-2016, 2017), cherishes the pure, sometimes silly sound:

 

“For a long moment we bind

     sympathetic looks,

we holdouts of our kind,

     like rhymed lines, printed books.”