Rhyme in Poetry: Old-Fahsioned but Not Ancient
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Perhaps to speak too much for others, rhyme tends to have certain associations today which prevent it from accomplishing its task of enchanting and helping to make for an atmosphere of sacredness and enchantment. Today rhyme has associations more of “lightness,” “childishness,” “frivolity,” or sometimes “stodginess” or “Britishness”—i.e. “oldness” instead of “ancientness.” What is old does not necessarily feel sacred anymore, but what is ancient does feel sacred. Meter does not run into these issues when it is not rhymed. Blank verse, accordingly, can still have great ceremonial power, for it lacks rhyme which conflicts with the production of sacredness; hence free verse can produce an contribute to a sacred atmosphere corresponding to Greekness (but not just Greekness) more than Britishness, even though it has less traditional formal baggage than metrical verse. And what is traditional is not necessarily bad for creating a poetic atmosphere, since line breaks can help produce the ancient mist of the sacred when that is what the poet desires. What rhyme does excel in is helping to generate an atmosphere of down-to-earth wittiness and wisdom. This is why it works so well in rap music. It produces in rap the effect of “folksiness” more than sorcery, however. Merlin is not the Wizard of poetry—the Pythia of Delphi generally is. It is hard for us to imagine the ancient Egyptians rhyming, and we know that the Hebrew Bible did not rhyme. It is in the Middle Ages, we feel, that rhyme really took over, marking a boundary between the old and the ancient. Rhyme is for Renaissance fairs and Shakespeare festivals, but is incompatible with consciousness conversing with itself in solitude. Rhyme, moreover, is the language of folk magic, but not biblical prophecy—witch and trickster more than seer.
This is all to say that rhyme is one of the faces of wit, which is often viewed now—for a complex of reasons—as more profane than sacred, and so we feel that a little of it goes a long way, but too much can “ruin the mood.” Rhyme, furthermore, does tend to work well even in a non-sacred capacity when it is deployed in contexts where Britishness is less evoked than some alternative tradition (e.g.: in rap music, a vital, non-stodgy Anglophone form grown out of an alternative cultural tradition). However, it is simply difficult for poetry to separate itself from Britishness, when the English language itself calls forth Britishness by default. Rhyme in English poetry all too often feels British, and things British are viewed today as old-fashioned. When we hear the words “English poetry” we automatically hear “British poetry,” which is why many poets in English go out of their way to avoid associations of Britishness. But of course this is simply the general prejudice of the moment. The contradiction is that, intellectually, many people feel that poetry ought to rhyme, and therefore have trouble understanding how an object could be a poem without rhyming. Yet since rhyming in poetry feels so often very old-fashioned—and thus too emotionally mediate rather than immediate—poetry ceases (but surely not only for this reason) to have the attraction of a truly living form. Thus it is “damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t.”
. . .
Perhaps to speak too much for others, rhyme tends to have certain associations today which prevent it from accomplishing its task of enchanting and helping to make for an atmosphere of sacredness and enchantment. Today rhyme has associations more of “lightness,” “childishness,” “frivolity,” or sometimes “stodginess” or “Britishness”—i.e. “oldness” instead of “ancientness.” What is old does not necessarily feel sacred anymore, but what is ancient does feel sacred. Meter does not run into these issues when it is not rhymed. Blank verse, accordingly, can still have great ceremonial power, for it lacks rhyme which conflicts with the production of sacredness; hence free verse can produce an contribute to a sacred atmosphere corresponding to Greekness (but not just Greekness) more than Britishness, even though it has less traditional formal baggage than metrical verse. And what is traditional is not necessarily bad for creating a poetic atmosphere, since line breaks can help produce the ancient mist of the sacred when that is what the poet desires. What rhyme does excel in is helping to generate an atmosphere of down-to-earth wittiness and wisdom. This is why it works so well in rap music. It produces in rap the effect of “folksiness” more than sorcery, however. Merlin is not the Wizard of poetry—the Pythia of Delphi generally is. It is hard for us to imagine the ancient Egyptians rhyming, and we know that the Hebrew Bible did not rhyme. It is in the Middle Ages, we feel, that rhyme really took over, marking a boundary between the old and the ancient. Rhyme is for Renaissance fairs and Shakespeare festivals, but is incompatible with consciousness conversing with itself in solitude. Rhyme, moreover, is the language of folk magic, but not biblical prophecy—witch and trickster more than seer.
This is all to say that rhyme is one of the faces of wit, which is often viewed now—for a complex of reasons—as more profane than sacred, and so we feel that a little of it goes a long way, but too much can “ruin the mood.” Rhyme, furthermore, does tend to work well even in a non-sacred capacity when it is deployed in contexts where Britishness is less evoked than some alternative tradition (e.g.: in rap music, a vital, non-stodgy Anglophone form grown out of an alternative cultural tradition). However, it is simply difficult for poetry to separate itself from Britishness, when the English language itself calls forth Britishness by default. Rhyme in English poetry all too often feels British, and things British are viewed today as old-fashioned. When we hear the words “English poetry” we automatically hear “British poetry,” which is why many poets in English go out of their way to avoid associations of Britishness. But of course this is simply the general prejudice of the moment. The contradiction is that, intellectually, many people feel that poetry ought to rhyme, and therefore have trouble understanding how an object could be a poem without rhyming. Yet since rhyming in poetry feels so often very old-fashioned—and thus too emotionally mediate rather than immediate—poetry ceases (but surely not only for this reason) to have the attraction of a truly living form. Thus it is “damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t.”
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