The first difference between meter and rhyme lies in their opposite obviousness: the first one is subtle, requiring a learned and attuned ear; the second is so sonorous and clear that children hear it as self-evident.
Take one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
I’m sure that almost every reader will hear the rhyming couplets (pairs of lines end-rhyming with each other), but most will not, at least consciously, perceive the iambic trimeter that forms the meter of this piece, nor how the last line’s final effect comes from shortening the meter by one syllable.
Still, it’s worth a quick primer on what counts as a rhyme in English, given that it is subtly different from the definition of other languages (including my native French).
A perfect/exact end-rhyme in English, which is the meaning implicit when “rhyme” is used without qualifier, is a correspondence between the ending of two words:
Our typical rhyme looks like this: slick/trick, book/crook, dump/trump. The sounds of the paired words initially differ, then converge. There’s a motion to it, which, happily, might itself be presented as a rhyme: from disparity to similarity.
There’s a code that simplifies this process. C stands for consonant sound, V for vowel sound. We’ll use subscripts for differentiation, so C1 and C2 are different consonant sounds. C3 and C3 are the same consonant sound or consonant blend. (Note that we’re talking sounds, not letters. Hence, the divergent spellings of tuft and roughed would not affect their status as rhymes: C1V1C2 and C3V1C2.)
Regardless of spelling, rhymes of this sonic sort—tuft and roughed, or name and fame, or salt and vault—are our prototype, though in fact both rhyming words may lack a final consonant sound, as in slow/go (C1V1/C2V1) or one may lack an initial consonant, as in in/bin (V1C1/C2V1C1). None of this alters the crucial, distinguishing motion, from disparity to similarity.
What Leithauser doesn’t say, but which is essential, is that the starting syllable of the perfect rhyme must be the stressed syllable of the word. It’s trivial for one-syllable words, but for longer ones, it sometimes make words that look like they should rhyme fail to. As an example that will come in the next quote, furtively and leisurely do not rhyme with each other despite ending with the same sounds, because the stressed syllables of each is the first one (fur and lei), and so to rhyme, you would need -urtively and -eisurely to be the same sounds.
This is the big difference with French for example, where the only criterion is that the final sounds are the same
French poetry traditionally encouraged rhyming through identical terminal sounds: hérédité/fécundité, or furtivement/lentement. English poets refer to this as rime riche, whether the identicals are in English or in French. That we resort to a French designation for English rhymes is solid evidence of how rare and exotic these remain in our practice. For us, with our different tradition, rhymes like excite/incite or elate/relate look suspect, and rhymes like heredity/fecundity or furtively/leisurely (borrowed from Baudelaire) look positively sloppy. And while such rhymes may sometimes find artful employment, our poets usually reserve rime riche for special effects and occasions. It isn’t your everyday way of pairing up.
I’m not that interested in exactly why this difference arises[1]; what matters here is that exact rhyme is the baseline, the gold standard of rhyming for english. From there, we can study variations and their effects.
But first, before plucking the depths of rhyme, we need to ask the key question of any methodological enquiry: what is the goal?
Rhyme’s Goals: Focus, Promises, and Memory
Rhyme serves three purposes in poetry:
Directing the attention of the reader;
Creating patterns of expectations; and
Enhancing the memorability (and thus memorizability) of the poem.
The first goal arise from the limitation of human readers. Even though poems are small and compressed, humans have trouble paying careful attention to that many words. Rhyme directs that attention, sifts between the most important words and the less essential ones.
But, just as important, a poem is also a device for instructing the reader when to tune out. Some sounds are primary, some secondary. The formal poem, recognizing our frailties, and understanding that despite our good intentions all sounds naturally dissipate, takes upon itself the task of indicating which sounds should be deliberately and artificially preserved. It’s a sort of traffic cop that sometimes overrides your readerly instincts, signaling you to halt, to turn, to ignore normal procedures, to advance with special care, or to face front and just hustle along.
The second goal of rhyme is about expectations: what Leithauser calls the “prosodic contract”: rhyme, especially exact rhyme, promises a match for a previous word:
[The poet whose piece is being analyzed] still “owes” you, according to the prosodic contract of the sonnet, a rhyme at line four, and the pressing question is whether he’ll provide it. He may follow the rhyme scheme respectfully. Or may startle you with an unexpected sound, in which case you're left to wonder whether to applaud or disparage his boldness, his trickery.
Rhyme—that decisive repetition of sound at the end of lines—gives the kind of pleasure felt with any anticipation and arrival. We learn from the early lines of the poem when to expect the rhyming sound; we feel pleasure as each rhyming unit is brought to its fruition; our pleasure increases throughout the poem each time we anticipate the rhyme, and wait for it, and are not disappointed. It is the closing of the perfectly fitting lid upon the delicate box. It is the sound the tumblers make in the lock as the combination is given, and they click their respect for order as they spin and find their place.
Personally, I find it much simpler to remember a rhymed poem than an unrhymed one. First because I tend to remember the rhymed words better. And then, because I also internalize the rhyme schema quickly, I can notice whenever I’m reordering lines by accident: they don’t rhyme anymore in the set pattern!
Now, these goals are the same ones behind the use of meter. Indeed, one could argue that meter is better able to accomplish these than rhyme.
Meter shapes the whole line, and the split between the lines, giving a much tighter and subtler control over the emphasis and the direction of attention;
Meter forms most of the prosodic contract, and a much tighter form of expectation, which can then be breached in minute ways; and
Meter is particularly common in forms of poetry that are mostly memorized, such as ancient epics.
On the last point, Leithauser even argues that the main factor behind the memorizability of a poem is whether or not it is metrical:
Yet there can be no question that memory loves meter. When I occasionally meet somebody who has locked away substantial amounts of verse, it’s almost always metrical. He or she may adore free verse. Indeed, he or she may devote most of their creative energies to writing it. But the bulk of the internal archive will be metered.
This superiority of meter over rhyme is also demonstrated by the fact that meter is far more prevalent than rhyme in poetic history. Indeed, there are very few unmetered poems before the XXth century, whereas many traditions, such as Greek and Latin, simply don’t use rhyme (or rarely, as a punctual effect). Even when rhyme is a defining feature of the poetry, such as in Arabic, Chinese or French poetry, it is almost always combined with meter, not used on its own. It can even be part of the meter, as in the Old English prosody and alliterative verse in general, where head-rhyme inside the line is key to the meter.
Even in English poetry is defined more by meter than rhyme, as the overwhelming importance of blank verse demonstrates:
Consider the most important of all forms in English language poetry: blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Back in the late seventies, the literary critic Paul Fussell estimated that “about three-quarters of English poetry is in blank verse.” Such statistics are difficult to pinpoint, and it may be, too, that the ratio has shifted somewhat since Fussell made his judgment. Still, there can be no doubt of the primacy of blank verse. More than any other form, it defines what English poetry is.
Stately yet pliable, solid without being stolid, blank verse comprises most of Shakespeare’s plays, most of Wordsworth’s longer work, most of the poetry Robert Lowell wrote in his last decade. It attains a noble summit in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which offers us 10,565 continuous lines of unrhymed pentameter.
My point here is not that rhyme is weak or bad; simply that it is a blunter instrument than meter, serving essentially similar functions in a different, complementary way.[2] In a sense, this is exactly why rhyme is so valuable from a methodological standpoint: even us non-experts can perceive it and understand it quickly, and so it offers a door into the more subtle movements of meter.
Rhyme Poorness: The Obstacle of English Rhyming
Another factor making rhyming particularly exciting methodologically is how hard it is to do well in English, due to the shape of the language itself.[3]
English is often called “rhyme-poor,” a lament traceable back to Chaucer, who complained of a “skarsete” of rhymes to work with. Many of our profoundest words, those engaging the poet with greatest urgency and intimacy, are painfully rhyme-deficient. We’ve already seen how death is often paired with breath. The two make a handsome and believable couple, but the truth is they’re all but handcuffed together; death simply doesn’t offer many other choices. (That’s the thing about death: so few alternatives.) I typed death into rhymezone.com and discovered seventeen possible one syllable mates, nearly all highly unpromising, to say the least. (Breth? Creath? Cheth? Or what about greth—which turns out to be a Shetland Islands slang term for a piss?)
That is, the deepest and most powerful words of the language, the bones of poetic thoughts, are severely bound by their lack of rhyming options. This is a notable difference from other language, say my native french, where I can off the top of my head enumerate countless rhymes of mort (death): sort (fate), l’or (gold), fort (strong/castle), dors (you sleep), nord (north), l’aurore (dawn)...[4]
Death, life, love, money, God... In English, the fundamentals of our existence collude to hamstring the rhyming poet. Rhyme poverty may initially present an aural problem—a monotony of sound. But ultimately the problem becomes imaginational, since paucity of rhyme fosters straitened thought. If self is unfailingly to be coupled with shelf, the poet’s range of thought—images and objectives—itself is shelved. Far better to be soaring through the heavens, to be bobbing on the ocean, to be trekking through the jungle, but none of these words comes close to providing rhymes for the demanding self.
Such a constraint is not death to rhyming in English poetry, but it is a massive hurdle. It risks turning every option into a hackneyed trope. Yet constraints breed invention. And in this case, English poets have unearthed trick after trick to enrich the paucity of rhyme that the rhyme-poor language offers.
From first principle, if you find yourself within an overly restrictive setting, what can you do?
In English poetry, one example leverages subtle variations of consonant clusters.
You could find an alternative (often implicit) constraint, and weaken that one, to give yourself some breathing room.
In English poetry, one example comes from removing the constraint that only words can rhyme, and instead rhyming pieces of sentences together.
You could look for a solution that has the same or a close effect, but relies on a different, somewhat orthogonal method.
In English poetry, one example comes from rim rhyme, which is an example of itself (the consonants are the same, but the internal vowels differ)
Perturbations In Consonant Clusters
The simplest way to sidestep an overwhelming constraint is by relaxing it. But not too much: just enough to get most of the expected bang for almost all the buck. Thankfully, the very phonological structure of english words comes to the assistance of the poet.
How is the rhyming English-language poet, or the English language itself, to compete with [Italian]? Only by venturing in a contrary direction. If we’re no match for quantity, we must look to quality: to the existence of particularly rewarding sets of English rhyme.
[…]
In particular, our rhyme is enriched by our language’s hospitality toward dense consonant clusters, which breed quirky sonic effects. My students are skeptical when I tell them that they all know a word of nine letters that contains eight consonants. The word is strengths. These consonant clusters regularly allow for an extraordinary closeness of rhyme that isn’t, quite, exact rhyme.
If, desperate for a fresh rhyme for death, I seize upon breadth, one can only marvel at how near to rhyme the two are. So lightly, so smoothly, the d in breadth glides by—and yet it wrenches the two words apart, ever so slightly. The letter d, like the letter b in breadth, is what phoneticians call a “voiced consonant,” meaning its utterance sets the voice box reverberating, so that while death sets up a single tingle, breadth, with its b and d, provides a pair. It is, physiologically, a different sort of rhyme. Breath and breadth may be separated by only a hairsbreadth, but it’s a vibrating hair.
[…]
If it’s an exact rhyme, it’s one to which an asterisk is attached, and it turns out that (a) English offers many, many rhymes with asterisks attached and (b) quite a few are among the most interesting rhymes the language supplies.
[…]
There is a slight tension to all such pairings. Having grown up in a tradition of exact rhyme, the reader may seek to smooth out and “perfect” irregularities by minimally bending pronunciation. Meanwhile, since poetry also brings out the precisionist in us, encouraging us to enunciate more sharply, we’re contrarily tempted to heighten and exaggerate all such minor discrepancies.
Poets love small tensions—thrive on them—and are forever contriving ways to exploit them for subtle effect. Minor variations of this sort are a godsend.
Because they are made of so many parts, consonant clusters offer a whole degradation spectrum: from exact rhyme to fully different sound, there is a series of steps where more and more consonants are altered.[5]
What is lost from the perfection of stringing exact rhymes together, is gained in the breadth of minute effects the poets can conjure, all by tuning the discrepancies between expected rhymes.
Rhyming Beyond Words
Another way to make do with an overbearing constraint is to remove another one, and see if that sets you free.
Implicitly, both in this discussion and in the tradition of English poetry, rhyme was conducted between two words. What if instead, rhyme applied between two sequences of sounds, whatever their partitioning into words?
The field of potential rhymes becomes dizzyingly large, free and open, once you begin to think not in terms of which word rhymes with which, but—as Byron saw—which syllables rhyme with which combination of syllables, irrespective of word boundaries.
And as Leithauser mentions in passing in the above quote, Lord Byron was a master of this specific trick.
In the history of English rhyme, Byron is the great pioneer. He’s best known for his exaggerated or outlandish rhymes: apartment/art meant or Paris/war is. This sort of rhyming was hardly his invention, and it’s instructive to see, a century and a half before, a staid personage like John Milton in one of his sonnets rhyming Tetrachordon with pored on and word on and Gordon. But to my mind, Byron was the first to make brilliant use of the great discovery referred to in the last chapter: Rhyme might best be viewed not in terms of words but of syllables.
Byron regularly trampled over lexical boundaries, ignoring the spaces between words: welcome and hell come, prided and I did, luck holds and cuckolds. He regularly spotted hidden resemblances among differences, endlessly testing whether one clump of sounds came close enough to another to posit a rhyme. His rhyming of bewildering and children looks like a bit of a stretch, though he may well have heard someone say bewild’rin’, in which case he was pretty close to an exact rhyme. He kept his ears out.
And this is not an exaggeration: just riffling through my copy of Don Juan, I find these three consecutive stanzas from Canto 1: (emphasis mine)
His mother was a learned lady, famed
For every branch of every science known
In every Christian language ever named,
With virtues equall’d by her wit alone,
She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,
And even the good with inward envy groan,
Finding themselves so very much exceeded
In their own way by all the things that she did.
Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart
All Calderon and greater part of Lope,
So that if any actor miss’d his part
She could have served him for the prompter’s copy;
For her Feinagle’s were an useless art,
And he himself obliged to shut up shop—he
Could never make a memory so fine as
That which adorn’d the brain of Donna Inez.
Her favourite science was the mathematical,
Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,
Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,
Her serious sayings darken’d to sublimity;
In short, in all things she was fairly what I call
A prodigy—her morning dress was dimity,
Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,
And other stuffs, with which I won’t stay puzzling.
Note that such freedom has a cost: the very freshness and unexpected nature of such rhyme, their fun, means that they are particularly noticeable and noticed. It’s not a coincidence that such rhymes are preferred by the writers of satire and mock-epic, and avoided by poets after tighter and more natural effects, like Frost.
Rim Rhyme
Still another technique might be to reproduce the effect desired from a slightly different angle.
But turn from the sprawling empire of exact rhyme to the modest principality of rim rhyme—that variant set of rhyme, like light and late or sickened and second, where consonants are held steady while internal vowels are shifted—and we do find a basic, an ur-rhyme: live and love. It holds clear pride of place. “Come live with me and be my, love,” Christopher Marlowe invites us in the first line of one of the best-loved poems in the English language, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” The poem inspired Sir Walter Raleigh’s rejoinder, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” which concludes
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.
The rhyme is potentially all the richer because live is so flexible—so lively. It offers dual pronunciations, and comes in various permutations: relive, alive, outlive, et cetera. If we needed a pairing to characterize the human condition, bundling together earthly burdens and celestial ambitions, how could we improve upon live and love?
Although rim rhyme can be even more constraining that exact rhyme in some aspect, for some key words it unfolds a world of options.
We've already seen that English rhymes often run scarce in the fields of greatest ardor for the poet. Life, death, money, sex, beauty, loss, work, youth, verse, passion—all are rhyme-poor. But the shortage is still more biting when we turn from exact to rim rhyme. Rim rhymes for work or youth? For verse? For passion? (I predict a love potion.) Stymied, the rim rhymer may be driven into silence.
One noble exception is love, which comes alive with possibilities (alive being but one). If love lacks exact rhymes, it abounds in handy rim rhymes. And something similar happens with God, whose exact rhymes are few and impractical. But with guide and goad and—especially—good, God welcomes a new and logical and pliant set of partners.
Wilfred Owen was the first systematic user of rim rhyme, in his poems about World War I.
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall? —
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
As for the use of rim rhyme, there is a claim that it is phonetically more subtle than exact rhyme, without clinging in the uncanny valley of near rhyme.
But what sort of instrument was it, exactly? What was the young Owen (dead at the age of twenty-five, killed at the Battle of the Sambre, a week before the armistice) so brashly introducing? Rim rhyme is innately quieter than exact rhyme, as a consequence of the engineering of the human ear. In an exact rhyme, the shared content is typically a vowel (my/why) or a vowel and consonant (might/white). The shared content in a rim rhyme is purely consonantal. The difference has consequences. Vowels speak more distinctly, more forcibly, than consonants.
As hearing declines, aging folks learn to distrust consonants as evasive and tricky. Consonants are far more likely to foster mistakes—potentially embarrassing mistakes—than the more trustworthy vowels, which hang in the air. Vowels can sing in a literal sense; lyricists understand that long musical notes favor open vowels. Most consonants disappear as soon as spoken, and attempts to extend them can be painfully comic. No singer, however profound his passion, wishes to stand onstage belting out his lovvvvve; he’d much prefer to declare that he loves youuuuuu.
Beyond the innovations fostered by rhyme poorness, the methods of English poets also help demonstrate how to exploit apparent weaknesses as unexpected regularities.
The weirdest aspect of English to a non-native speaker is probably its notoriously ridiculous spelling.[6] While we’re in a poetic mood, let’s demonstrate it by way of the first few stanzas of a poem titled Chaos:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written). Made has not the sound of bade, Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.
What English poets can exploit is the opposite point of the one made in the poem above: in the madness of English spelling, many words that are not written alike actually sound alike.
One of the peculiarities of English (pretty much unthinkable to an Italian speaker) is that two words can rhyme exactly without having a single letter in common: glyph/tiff, or spew/through, or ticks/pyx, or flee/quay/prix. They can also rhyme when it appears they must merely repeat themselves: re-sign/resign. (Or better still, an opening sentence I once found in a magazine article about martinis: “Begin with gin.”) At such moments, when the eye and ear are at odds, the often neglected ear—blessedly—dominates. […]
Some letters in English, like b or m, create a single sound, rarely duplicable by other letters. Others, though, create a multiplicity of sounds, like the chameleonic c (call, cell, cello) or the slippery s (as, ass, pleasure). Confusion naturally reigns. It’s all a delightful cacophonous morass, and when you add to it the way identical sounds can be rendered by different combinations of letters—laugh, staff, staph—you realize that the possibilities of disguise are endless. Poets are forever bringing together words whose sonic kinship flouts appearances: certain/hurtin’; hydroponics/onyx; mirror/nearer; header/meadow […].
And yet, though rhyme’s an aural phenomenon, it’s striking how many of its effects depend on visual insignia. Typically, the more remote the spelling, the more pleasure in the union, as occurs in pointed form when one of the words is “spelled” with numbers. There’s a potential wit to the rhyme of plenty/20 that doesn’t exist for plenty/twenty, though the ear is deaf to any difference.
In the same vein as rhyming pieces of sentences, the effect here is generally more obvious, more visible. It’s not necessarily as jarring and humorous, but it hardly fits the quiet contemplation of an elegy.
Spoiling Regularities: Internal Rhyme and Language Change
This post has already gone on for too long for Substack, but I need to mention how rhyme reveals the fragility of epistemic regularities.
There are two ways in which the fragile equilibrium of rhyme can be destroyed.
First, because of the very limitation of the human ear and memory that makes rhyme so potent, massively assonantal and alliterative lines, with sound patterns fusing in every direction, overwhelms the tenuous promise of rhyme.
That is, for rhyme to be perceivable, there needs to be a bound on the internal resonance of the lines.
How can a reader possibly be expected to hear that “girlgrace” rhymes with “face,” some hundred-plus syllables earlier, in a line like the following (and it is all one line): “Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace…”
Then, there is the much bigger, and omnipresent disruptor: spacetime.
You see, rhyme depends on two words ending with the same sounds (modulo the precise definition of exact rhyme) in English. But what is English? For the English that I’m speaking is not the exact same English that Frost was speaking, and that one was different from Pope’s English. It’s not even clear that it’s the same English you are speaking.
During this whole discussion, I have implicitly idealized English as this fixed system. But languages change, especially their sounds.[7] And even at a fixed time, different groups speak slightly different forms of the language, and pronounce it differently.
Farther down the same page in An Essay on Man I find four rhymes that to my ears are off: endued/good, sustain/again, born/return, and good/food. My guess is that only born/return was an off rhyme to Pope’s ear. I’ve spoken of metrical decay in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (largely caused by e’s having gone silent), but rhyme decay is a much more widespread phenomenon. The shifting of pronunciation, rumpling the rhymes, occurs not only over time but over geography. Imagine four native speakers of English declaiming An Essay on Man today. One is from Edinburgh, one from Mumbai, one from Trinidad, and I’m reciting in flat midwestern American. Doubtless, we would each detect a different number of decayed rhymes.
What’s significant isn’t the precise number of rhymes twisted or shifted over the centuries. What’s important is the overall trend, which is always going to devolve from exact rhyme to off rhyme, rather than the reverse. And since we tend, by convention, to hear exact rhyme as euphonious and oft rhyme as cacophonous, it follows that the tidal movement of formal poetry is toward dissonance and disorder. Even Pope’s hardy couplets come undone. In the universe of poetry, as in the universe at large, entropy is the ultimate victor.
Because exact rhyme, as we’ve seen, is a minuscule target. Any change, any alteration, is much more likely to break the initial finetuning than to create a new unexpected rhyme.[8]
Worse, this spontaneous breaking of rhyme obscures the intended effect, because now the variations need to be inferred from the context rather than directly perceived. We can’t just start from our natural perceptions about the poem: we need to know what was the context of the poem. How was rhyme defined? Was it even a thing? How open was the culture to the different variations of exact rhyme?
Yet it is often possible to effect this reconstruction. Thanks in part to the often conservative nature of older poetry, we can (regularly) infer the constraints that bound ancient poets. And from public discourse about their art, if it exists, we can reconstruct what was shocking and what was expected.[9]
The true cost of this irregularity is not that poems cannot be reconstructed (although sometimes they are lost for good). It’s that they cannot be fully and intimately heard again.
Of course, the scholar emerges at this juncture, playing stopgap and restorer, reconstructing the meters, the rhythms, the wordplay. Hers is a noble task. But if Homer could be returned to us for one command performance, placed before the world’s most erudite audience, there’s no classicist on Earth who could attend to him with the visceral immediacy of those bright-eyed, torchlit faces once clustered around their talebearer. Those scruffy listeners were illiterate, but also far abler and richer than we can ever be. For they could hear Homer, regular as breathing.
One possibility is that French always has the stress on the last syllable, so french rhyme could be seen as a superset of english rhyme with regard to accent, where you can have similarity of things before the stressed syllable too.
A common claim for why (Modern) English is rhyme poor is that it has shed most of the inflections of Old English, and thus of Proto-Indo-European. The multiplicity of sources for words and morphological paradigms (Germanic, Latin…) doesn’t help either.
I’m cheating a bit, since in classical french there was a big debate on whether the unpronounced letters, notably the mute “e”, mattered or not for allowing a rhyme. But even then, there is more choice than in english.
I can hear my friends calling out French orthography behind my back. Yes, French has a lot of mute consonants (and sometimes “e”) due to massive phonological changes since orthography was settled, but at least in French, context-dependent changes are not arbitrary, but systematic. Yes, I’m looking at you finite/infinite and wind/rewind.
Indeed, the mess of both English and French spelling ultimately comes down to these languages’ phonologies evolving much faster than their orthography. See The Great Vowel Shift and Phonological History of French.
Meter also breaks down, but it is so intertwined with the fabric of a language that it is far less fragile to variation. My understanding is that meter changes when the language itself becomes a successor language.
This touches on fascinating ideas about historical methods, and how the structural ties between the different parts of the past system can be used to reconstruct it, even with lacking direct traces. For more insights in this direction, see Rock, Bone, and Ruin.
As promised in the previous instalment on meter, let’s explore rhyming from a methodological perspective.
The first difference between meter and rhyme lies in their opposite obviousness: the first one is subtle, requiring a learned and attuned ear; the second is so sonorous and clear that children hear it as self-evident.
Take one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:
(Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay, 1923)
I’m sure that almost every reader will hear the rhyming couplets (pairs of lines end-rhyming with each other), but most will not, at least consciously, perceive the iambic trimeter that forms the meter of this piece, nor how the last line’s final effect comes from shortening the meter by one syllable.
Still, it’s worth a quick primer on what counts as a rhyme in English, given that it is subtly different from the definition of other languages (including my native French).
A perfect/exact end-rhyme in English, which is the meaning implicit when “rhyme” is used without qualifier, is a correspondence between the ending of two words:
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.126)
What Leithauser doesn’t say, but which is essential, is that the starting syllable of the perfect rhyme must be the stressed syllable of the word. It’s trivial for one-syllable words, but for longer ones, it sometimes make words that look like they should rhyme fail to. As an example that will come in the next quote, furtively and leisurely do not rhyme with each other despite ending with the same sounds, because the stressed syllables of each is the first one (fur and lei), and so to rhyme, you would need -urtively and -eisurely to be the same sounds.
This is the big difference with French for example, where the only criterion is that the final sounds are the same
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.125-126)
I’m not that interested in exactly why this difference arises[1]; what matters here is that exact rhyme is the baseline, the gold standard of rhyming for english. From there, we can study variations and their effects.
But first, before plucking the depths of rhyme, we need to ask the key question of any methodological enquiry: what is the goal?
Rhyme’s Goals: Focus, Promises, and Memory
Rhyme serves three purposes in poetry:
The first goal arise from the limitation of human readers. Even though poems are small and compressed, humans have trouble paying careful attention to that many words. Rhyme directs that attention, sifts between the most important words and the less essential ones.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.130)
The second goal of rhyme is about expectations: what Leithauser calls the “prosodic contract”: rhyme, especially exact rhyme, promises a match for a previous word:
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.128)
(Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, p.40)
Lastly, rhyme assists with memorization.
Personally, I find it much simpler to remember a rhymed poem than an unrhymed one. First because I tend to remember the rhymed words better. And then, because I also internalize the rhyme schema quickly, I can notice whenever I’m reordering lines by accident: they don’t rhyme anymore in the set pattern!
Now, these goals are the same ones behind the use of meter. Indeed, one could argue that meter is better able to accomplish these than rhyme.
On the last point, Leithauser even argues that the main factor behind the memorizability of a poem is whether or not it is metrical:
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.93)
This superiority of meter over rhyme is also demonstrated by the fact that meter is far more prevalent than rhyme in poetic history. Indeed, there are very few unmetered poems before the XXth century, whereas many traditions, such as Greek and Latin, simply don’t use rhyme (or rarely, as a punctual effect). Even when rhyme is a defining feature of the poetry, such as in Arabic, Chinese or French poetry, it is almost always combined with meter, not used on its own. It can even be part of the meter, as in the Old English prosody and alliterative verse in general, where head-rhyme inside the line is key to the meter.
Even in English poetry is defined more by meter than rhyme, as the overwhelming importance of blank verse demonstrates:
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.13)
My point here is not that rhyme is weak or bad; simply that it is a blunter instrument than meter, serving essentially similar functions in a different, complementary way.[2] In a sense, this is exactly why rhyme is so valuable from a methodological standpoint: even us non-experts can perceive it and understand it quickly, and so it offers a door into the more subtle movements of meter.
Rhyme Poorness: The Obstacle of English Rhyming
Another factor making rhyming particularly exciting methodologically is how hard it is to do well in English, due to the shape of the language itself.[3]
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.154)
That is, the deepest and most powerful words of the language, the bones of poetic thoughts, are severely bound by their lack of rhyming options. This is a notable difference from other language, say my native french, where I can off the top of my head enumerate countless rhymes of mort (death): sort (fate), l’or (gold), fort (strong/castle), dors (you sleep), nord (north), l’aurore (dawn)...[4]
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.156)
Such a constraint is not death to rhyming in English poetry, but it is a massive hurdle. It risks turning every option into a hackneyed trope. Yet constraints breed invention. And in this case, English poets have unearthed trick after trick to enrich the paucity of rhyme that the rhyme-poor language offers.
From first principle, if you find yourself within an overly restrictive setting, what can you do?
Perturbations In Consonant Clusters
The simplest way to sidestep an overwhelming constraint is by relaxing it. But not too much: just enough to get most of the expected bang for almost all the buck. Thankfully, the very phonological structure of english words comes to the assistance of the poet.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.158-161)
Because they are made of so many parts, consonant clusters offer a whole degradation spectrum: from exact rhyme to fully different sound, there is a series of steps where more and more consonants are altered.[5]
What is lost from the perfection of stringing exact rhymes together, is gained in the breadth of minute effects the poets can conjure, all by tuning the discrepancies between expected rhymes.
Rhyming Beyond Words
Another way to make do with an overbearing constraint is to remove another one, and see if that sets you free.
Implicitly, both in this discussion and in the tradition of English poetry, rhyme was conducted between two words. What if instead, rhyme applied between two sequences of sounds, whatever their partitioning into words?
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.148)
And as Leithauser mentions in passing in the above quote, Lord Byron was a master of this specific trick.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.148)
And this is not an exaggeration: just riffling through my copy of Don Juan, I find these three consecutive stanzas from Canto 1: (emphasis mine)
(Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1819-1824, Cantos 1.10-12)
Note that such freedom has a cost: the very freshness and unexpected nature of such rhyme, their fun, means that they are particularly noticeable and noticed. It’s not a coincidence that such rhymes are preferred by the writers of satire and mock-epic, and avoided by poets after tighter and more natural effects, like Frost.
Rim Rhyme
Still another technique might be to reproduce the effect desired from a slightly different angle.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.192-193)
Although rim rhyme can be even more constraining that exact rhyme in some aspect, for some key words it unfolds a world of options.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.193)
Wilfred Owen was the first systematic user of rim rhyme, in his poems about World War I.
(Wilfrid Owen, Futility, 1918)
As for the use of rim rhyme, there is a claim that it is phonetically more subtle than exact rhyme, without clinging in the uncanny valley of near rhyme.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.197)
The Obstacle Is The Rhyming Way
Beyond the innovations fostered by rhyme poorness, the methods of English poets also help demonstrate how to exploit apparent weaknesses as unexpected regularities.
The weirdest aspect of English to a non-native speaker is probably its notoriously ridiculous spelling.[6] While we’re in a poetic mood, let’s demonstrate it by way of the first few stanzas of a poem titled Chaos:
(Gerard Nolst Trenité, The Chaos, 1922)
What English poets can exploit is the opposite point of the one made in the poem above: in the madness of English spelling, many words that are not written alike actually sound alike.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.197)
In the same vein as rhyming pieces of sentences, the effect here is generally more obvious, more visible. It’s not necessarily as jarring and humorous, but it hardly fits the quiet contemplation of an elegy.
Spoiling Regularities: Internal Rhyme and Language Change
This post has already gone on for too long for Substack, but I need to mention how rhyme reveals the fragility of epistemic regularities.
There are two ways in which the fragile equilibrium of rhyme can be destroyed.
First, because of the very limitation of the human ear and memory that makes rhyme so potent, massively assonantal and alliterative lines, with sound patterns fusing in every direction, overwhelms the tenuous promise of rhyme.
That is, for rhyme to be perceivable, there needs to be a bound on the internal resonance of the lines.
(Brad Leithauser, Preface to “Mortal beauty, God's grace : major poems and spiritual writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins”, 2003, p.xxix)
Then, there is the much bigger, and omnipresent disruptor: spacetime.
You see, rhyme depends on two words ending with the same sounds (modulo the precise definition of exact rhyme) in English. But what is English? For the English that I’m speaking is not the exact same English that Frost was speaking, and that one was different from Pope’s English. It’s not even clear that it’s the same English you are speaking.
During this whole discussion, I have implicitly idealized English as this fixed system. But languages change, especially their sounds.[7] And even at a fixed time, different groups speak slightly different forms of the language, and pronounce it differently.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.134)
Why is variations necessarily rhyme-breaking?
Because exact rhyme, as we’ve seen, is a minuscule target. Any change, any alteration, is much more likely to break the initial finetuning than to create a new unexpected rhyme.[8]
Worse, this spontaneous breaking of rhyme obscures the intended effect, because now the variations need to be inferred from the context rather than directly perceived. We can’t just start from our natural perceptions about the poem: we need to know what was the context of the poem. How was rhyme defined? Was it even a thing? How open was the culture to the different variations of exact rhyme?
Yet it is often possible to effect this reconstruction. Thanks in part to the often conservative nature of older poetry, we can (regularly) infer the constraints that bound ancient poets. And from public discourse about their art, if it exists, we can reconstruct what was shocking and what was expected.[9]
The true cost of this irregularity is not that poems cannot be reconstructed (although sometimes they are lost for good). It’s that they cannot be fully and intimately heard again.
(Brad Leithauser, Rhyme's Rooms, 2022, p.136-137)
One possibility is that French always has the stress on the last syllable, so french rhyme could be seen as a superset of english rhyme with regard to accent, where you can have similarity of things before the stressed syllable too.
Leithauser has a catchphrase for this: “Meter is prospective; rhyme is retrospective.”
A common claim for why (Modern) English is rhyme poor is that it has shed most of the inflections of Old English, and thus of Proto-Indo-European. The multiplicity of sources for words and morphological paradigms (Germanic, Latin…) doesn’t help either.
I’m cheating a bit, since in classical french there was a big debate on whether the unpronounced letters, notably the mute “e”, mattered or not for allowing a rhyme. But even then, there is more choice than in english.
The enormous number of vowels in english allow the same kind of degradation for the vowel sounds in rhymes.
I can hear my friends calling out French orthography behind my back. Yes, French has a lot of mute consonants (and sometimes “e”) due to massive phonological changes since orthography was settled, but at least in French, context-dependent changes are not arbitrary, but systematic. Yes, I’m looking at you finite/infinite and wind/rewind.
Indeed, the mess of both English and French spelling ultimately comes down to these languages’ phonologies evolving much faster than their orthography. See The Great Vowel Shift and Phonological History of French.
Meter also breaks down, but it is so intertwined with the fabric of a language that it is far less fragile to variation. My understanding is that meter changes when the language itself becomes a successor language.
This touches on fascinating ideas about historical methods, and how the structural ties between the different parts of the past system can be used to reconstruct it, even with lacking direct traces. For more insights in this direction, see Rock, Bone, and Ruin.