The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

met all the types we are likely to meet and seen ways in which they may be arranged. The questions that concern us next are how and why?

I have already addressed the idea of rhyme as a connective, unifying force in poems, but it is worth considering the obvious point that rhyme uses language. Or is, I should say, exclusive to language. Paint can evoke landscape, sculpture the textures of physical form, but neither of these modes of expression has rhyme available to them (save in some metaphorical sense); music, like verse, can do rhythm but it is only poetry that can yoke words together in rhyme (sometimes, of course, and aboriginally, at the service of music). Rhyme may not be a defining condition of poetry, but poetry is pretty much a defining condition of rhyme. If poets shun rhyme, they are closing themselves off from one of the few separate and special techniques available to them and that, in my estimation, is foolishly prodigal.

Not all my poetry is in rhyme, but sometimes (and I cannot always be certain at the time why this should be) rhyming seems right and natural for a poem. It is more than likely that this will hold true in your work too.

One of the great faults we ‘amateur’ poets are prey to is lazy and pointless rhyming. If a poem is not to rhyme then it seems to me very silly indeed arbitrarily to introduce rhymes from time to time with no apparent thought but apparently because a natural rhyme has come up at that moment. So let us look now at good and bad rhyming, or convincing and unconvincing rhyming if you prefer. ‘Deferred success rhyming’ as those nervous of the word failure would have us say.

III

Good and Bad Rhyme?

There are two issues to consider when rhyming: firstly and most clearly there is the need to avoid hackneyed rhyme pairs. For the past seven hundred years poets have been rhyming love with dove, moon with June, girl with curl and boy with joy. Certain rhymes are so convenient and appropriate that their use had already become stale by the mid 1700s. Alexander Pope was fierce on the subject of bad rhymers in his An Essay on Criticism:While they ring round the same unvary’d chimes,With sure returns of still expected rhymes.Where-e’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze’,In the next line, it ‘whispers thro’ the trees’;If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep’,The reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with ‘sleep’.

Night/light/sight, death/breath and cherish/perish might be included in that list. The poor old word love, a natural subject for poetry if ever there was one, offers very few rhyme choices in English. Frances Cornford in ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train’ did her best:O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?O fat white woman whom nobody loves,Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,When the grass is soft as the breast of dovesAnd shivering sweet to the touch?O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?

Only the unlikely shoves could have been added. When it is a singular love, the word above becomes available and for the Cockney rhymesters among us, there is, I suppose, guv. Of is a popular assonance, especially in songs. In written verse you would be forced either to run the word on with an enjambment which is likely to make it overstressed and clumsy or to resort to this kind of stale formulation:You’re the one I love,The one I’m dreaming of.

Hate is so much easier…

If there is a rule to rhyming, I suppose it is that (save in comic verse or for some other desired effect) it should usually be–if not invisible–natural, transparent, seamless, discreet and unforced. The reader should not feel that a word has been chosen simply because it rhymes. Very often, let us not pretend otherwise, words are chosen for precisely that reason, but ars est celare artem–the art lies in the concealment of art. So, two blindingly obvious points:

AVOID THE OBVIOUS PAIRS

STRIVE NOT TO DRAW ATTENTION TO A RHYME

Trying to mint fresh rhymes and being transparent and uncontrived in one’s rhyming may seem like contradictory aims. Therein lies the art, of course; but if one guideline has to be sacrificed then for my preference it should certainly be the first. Better to go for a traditional rhyme pair than draw unnecessary attention to an unusual one.

Both ‘rules’, like any, can of course be broken so long as you know what you are doing and why. If you want an ugly rhyme, it is no less legitimate than a dissonance and discord might be in music: horrific in the wrong hands of course, but by no means unconscionable. Talk of the wrong hands leads us to pathology.

It is a deep and important truth that human kind’s knowledge advances further when we look not at success but at failure: disease reveals more than health ever can. We would never have understood, for example, how the brain or the liver worked were it not for them going wrong from time to time: they are not, after all, machines whose function is revealed by an intelligent inspection of their mechanisms, they are composed of unrevealing organic spongy matter whose function would be impossible to determine by dissection and examination alone. But when there is injury, disease or congenital defect, you can derive some clue as to their purpose by noticing what goes wrong with the parts of the body they control. A trauma or tumour in an area of the brain that causes the patient to fall over, for example, might suggest to a neurologist that this is the area that controls balance and mobility. In the same way rhyming can be shown to control the balance and mobility of a poem, doing much more than simply providing us with a linked concord of sounds: there is no better way to demonstrate this than by taking a look at some diseased rhyming.

Thus far almost all the excerpts we have scrutinised have been more or less healthy specimens of poetry. We did take a look at a couplet from Keats’s ‘Lamia’:Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by,Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully.

There was not much doubt in our minds, I think, that this was a triumph neither of rhyme nor metre: in such a long poem we decided (or at least I maintained) this was not a terminal problem. We questioned, too, William Blake’s prosodic skill in lines like:A Robin Red breast in a CagePuts all heaven in a Rage.

We forgave him also. It is time now to go further down this path and compare two poems from approximately the same era treating approximately the same themes. One is a healthy specimen, the other very sick indeed.

A Thought Experiment

Your task is to imagine yourself as a Victorian poet, whiskered and wise. You have two poems to write: each will commemorate a disaster.