They have certainly been used as eye-rhymes since, however. Larkin used the same pair nearly four hundred years later in ‘An Arundel Tomb’:…and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.
In his poem ‘Meiosis’ Auden employs another conventional eye-rhyme for that pesky word:The hopeful falsehood cannot stem with loveThe flood on which all move and wish to move.
The same poet’s ‘Precious Five’ shows that eye-rhyme can be used in all kinds of ways:Whose oddness may provokeTo a mind-saving jokeA mind that would it wereAn apathetic sphere:
Another imperfect kind is WRENCHED rhyme, which to compound the felony will usually go with a wrenched accent.He doesn’t mind the language being bentIn choosing words to force a wrenched accent.He has no sense of how the verse should singAnd tries to get away with wrenched rhyming.A bad wrenched rhyme won’t ever please the eye:Or find its place in proper poetry.
Where ‘poetry’ would have to be pronounced ‘poe-a-try’.3 You will find this kind of thing a great deal in folk-singing, as I am sure you are aware. However, I can think of at least two fine elegiac poems where such potentially wrenched rhymes are given. This from Ben Jonson’s heart-rending, ‘On My First Son’.Rest in soft peace, and asked say, ‘Here doth lieBen Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
Auden uses precisely the same rhyme pair in his ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’:Let the Irish vessel lieEmptied of its poetry.
I think those two examples work superbly, and of course no reader of them in public would wrench those rhymes. However, we should not necessarily assume that since Yeats and Jonson are officially Fine Poets, everything they do must be regarded as unimpeachable. If like me you look at past or present poets to help teach you your craft, do be alive to the fact that they are as capable of being caught napping as the rest of us. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, as Horace famously observed: ‘sometimes even the great Homer nods’. Here is a couplet from Keats’s ‘Lamia’ by way of example:Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by,Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully
Again, a reader-out-loud of this poem would not be so unkind to poet or listener as to wrench the end-rhyme into ‘thoughtful-eye’. Nonetheless, whether wrenched or not the metre can safely be said to suck. The stressed ‘he’ is unavoidable, no pyrrhic substitutions help it and without wrenching the rhyme or the rhythm the line ends in a lame dactyl.Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully
Add to this the word order inversion ‘gainst a column he leant’, the very banality of the word ‘thoughtfully’ and the archaic aphaeretic4 damage done to the word ‘against’ and the keenest Keatsian in the world would be forced to admit that this will never stand as one of the Wunderkind’s more enduring monuments to poesy. I have, of course, taken just one couplet from a long (and in my view inestimably fine) poem, so it is rather mean to snipe. Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel, nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling worthy of admiring gasps. In fact, Keats so disliked being forced into archaic inversions that in a letter he cited their proliferation in his extended poem Hyperion as one of the reasons for his abandonment of it.
Wrenching can be more successful when done for comic effect. Here is an example from Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Motorcycle Song’.I don’t want a pickleJust want to ride on my motorsickleAnd I’m not bein’ fickle’Cause I’d rather ride on my motorsickleAnd I don’t have fish to fryJust want to ride on my motorcy…cle
Ogden Nash was the twentieth-century master of the comically wrenched rhyme, often, like Guthrie, wrenching the spelling to aid the reading. These lines are from ‘The Sniffle’.Is spite of her sniffle,Isabel’s chiffle.Some girls with a sniffleWould be weepy and tiffle;They would look awfulLike a rained-on waffle.…Some girls with a snuffleTheir tempers are uffle,But when Isabel’s snivellyShe’s snivelly civilly,And when she is snufflyShe’s perfectly luffly.
Forcing a rhyme can exploit the variations in pronunciation that exist as a result of class, region or nationality. In a dramatic monologue written in the voice of a rather upper-class character fearfully could be made to rhyme with stiffly for example, or houses with prizes (although these are rather stale ho-ho attributions in my view). Foot rhymes with but to some northern ears, but then foot in other northern areas (South Yorkshire especially) is pronounced to rhyme with loot. Myth is a good rhyme for with in America where the ‘th’ is usually unvoiced. This thought requires a small explanatory aside: a ‘sidebar’ as I believe they are called in American courtrooms.
Voiced consonants are exactly that, consonants produced with the use of our vocal chords. We use them for z, b, v and d but not for s, p, f and t, which are their unvoiced equivalents. In other words a ‘z’ sound cannot be made without using the larynx, whereas an ‘s’ can be, and so on: try it by reading out loud the first two sentences of this paragraph. Aside from expressing the consonant sounds, did you notice the two different pronunciations of the word ‘use’? ‘We use them for…’ and ‘without the use of…’Voiced for the verb, unvoiced for the noun. Some of the changes we make in the voicing or non-voicing of consonants are so subtle that their avoidance is a sure sign of a non-native speaker. Thus in the sentence ‘I have two cars’ we use the ‘v’ in have in the usual voiced way. But when we say ‘I have to do it’ we usually un-voice the ‘v’ into its equivalent, the ‘f’–‘I haff to do it. ‘He haz two cars’–‘he hass to do it’, ‘he had two cars’–‘he hat to do it’. When a regular verb that ends in an unvoiced consonant is put into the past tense then the ‘d’ of ‘-ed’ usually loses its voice into a ‘t’: thus missed rhymes with list, passed with fast, miffed with lift, stopped with adopt and so on. But we keep the voiced -ed if the verb has voiced consonants, fizzed, loved, stabbed etc. Combinations of consonants can be voiced or unvoiced too: the ‘ch’ in sandwich has the voiced ‘j’ sound, but in rich it is an unvoiced ‘tch’; say the ‘th’ in thigh and it comes out as an unvoiced lisping hiss, say the ‘th’ in thy or thine and your larynx buzzes.
To conclude with the pair that started this excursion: in British English there is no rhyme for our voiced with, whereas the Americans can happily rhyme it with pith, myth, smith and so on. Weirdly we British do voice the ‘th’ of with in ‘forth with’ (but not for some reason in ‘herewith’). All of these pronunciations are, of course, natural to us. All we have to do is use our ears: but poets have to use their ears more than anyone else and be alive to all these aural subtleties (or ‘anal subtitles’ as my computer’s auto- correct facility insisted upon when I mistyped both words). Rhyming alerts us to much that others miss.
Feminine and Triple Rhymes
