explains our delight in rhythm, there is no doubt that it can easily be
utilized to construct a theory of rime. Indeed, it is the one principle
which provides a satisfactory solution to the problem propounded by
Mrs. Browning. No one can deny that more or less of our enjoyment of
rimed verse is due to the skill with which the poet satisfies with the
second rime the expectation he has aroused with the first. When he ends
a line with _gray_, or _grow_, or _grand_, we do not know which of the
twoscore or more of possible rimes to each of these the lyrist will
select, and we await his choice with happy anticipation. If he should
balk us of our pleasure, if he should omit the rime we had confidently
counted upon, we are rudely awakened from our dream of delight, and
we ask ourselves abruptly what has happened. It is as tho the train
of thought had run off the track. Spencer notes how we are put out by
halting versification; “much as at the bottom of a flight of stairs a
step more or less than we counted upon gives us a shock, so too does a
misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable.”
So, too, does an inaccurate or an arbitrary rime give us a shock. If
verse is something to be said or sung, if its appeal is to the ear
primarily, if rime is a terminal identity of sound, then any theory
of “allowable” rimes is impossible, since an “allowable” rime is
necessarily inexact, and thus may tend to withdraw attention from the
matter of the poem to its manner. No doubt there are readers who do not
notice the incompatibility of these matings, and there are others who
notice yet do not care. But the more accurately trained the ear is, the
more likely these alliances are to annoy; and the less exact the rime,
the more likely the ear is to discover the discrepancy. The only safety
for the rimester who wishes to be void of all offense is to risk no
union of sounds against whose marriage anybody knows any just cause
of impediment. Perhaps a wedding within the prohibited degrees may be
allowed to pass without protest now and again; but sooner or later
somebody will surely forbid the banns.
Just as a misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable gives us a
shock, so does the attempt of Mrs. Browning to pair off _remember_ and
_chamber_; so may also the attempt of Poe to link together _valleys_
and _palace_. The lapse from the perfect ideal may be but a trifle,
but a lapse it is nevertheless. A certain percentage of our available
attention may thus be wasted, and worse than wasted; it may be
called away from the poem itself, and absorbed suddenly by the mere
versification. For a brief moment we may be forced to consider a defect
of form, when we ought to have our minds absolutely free to receive the
poet’s meaning. Whenever a poet cheats us of our expectancy of perfect
rime, he forces us to pay exorbitant freight charges on the gift he has
presented to us.
It is to be noted, however, that as rime is a matching of sounds,
certain pairs of words whose union is not beyond reproach can hardly
be rejected without pedantry, since the ordinary pronunciation of
cultivated men takes no account of the slight differences of sound
audible if the words are uttered with absolute precision. Thus
Tennyson in the ‘Revenge’ rimes _Devon_ and _Heaven_; and thus Lowell
in the ‘Fable for Critics’ rimes _irresistible_ and _untwistable_. In
‘Elsie Venner’ Dr. Holmes held up to derision “the inevitable rime of
cockney and Yankee beginners, _morn_ and _dawn_”; but, at the risk
of revealing myself as a Yankee of New York, I must confess that any
pronunciation of this pair of words seems to me stilted that does not
make them quite impeccable as a rime.
We are warned, however, to be on our guard against pushing any
principle to an absurd extreme. If certain pairs of words have been
sent forth into the world by English poets from a time whereof the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary, then perhaps they may now
plead prescription whenever any cold-hearted commentator is disposed to
doubt the legitimacy of their conjunction. Altho the union is forbidden
by the strict letter of the law,--like marriage with a deceased
wife’s sister in England,--only the censorious are disposed to take
the matter into court. In time certain rimes--falsely so called--“are
legitimated by custom,” one British critic has declared, citing _love_
and _prove_, for example, and asserting that “_river_ has just got
to rime with _ever_ or the game cannot be played.” You must have
_forgiven_ or you will never get to _heaven_. “We expect these licenses
and do not resent them, as we do resent Poe’s _valleys_ and _palace_
and the eccentricities of Mrs. Browning.” That there is force in this
contention cannot be denied; but it must be remembered that those who
urge it are necessarily lovers of poetry, or at least fairly familiar
with a large body of English verse, or else they would not be aware of
the fact that _love_ and _prove_, _heaven_ and _given_, have often been
tied together. But even if these critics, who have been sophisticated
by over-familiarity with poetic license, do not resent this pairing of
unequal sounds, it does not follow that those who for the first time
hear _dove_ linked with _Jove_ are equally forgiving or negligent.
Even if these licenses are pardoned by some as venial offenses, there
are others whose ears are annoyed by them and whose attention is
distracted. In other words, we are here face to face with the personal
equation; and the only way for a writer of verse to be certain that one
or another of his rimes will not be resented by this reader or that is
to make sure that all his marriages are flawless.
Thus and thus only can he avoid offense with absolute certainty. If
his rimes are perfect to the ear when read aloud or recited, then they
will never divert the attention of the auditor from the matter of the
poem to the mere manner. On the other hand, it is only fair to confess
that there are some lovers of poetry who find a charm in lawlessness
and in eccentricity. A series of perfect rimes pleases them; but so
also does an occasional rime in which the vowel is slightly varied. And
the poet’s consolation for the loss of these must lie in the knowledge
that he cannot hope to satisfy everybody. Consolation may lie also in
the belief that any lapse from the perfect rime is dangerous, for even
if there are some who enjoy the divergence when it is delicate,--that
is, when the vowel sound, even if not absolutely identical, is
sympathetically akin,--there are very few who are not annoyed when the
difference becomes as obvious as in the attempt to link together _dial_
and _ball_ or _water_ and _clear_.
And as it is only a sophisticated ear which enjoys the mating of
_valleys_ with _palace_, for example, so the attempted rime of this
type is to be found chiefly in the more labored poets--in those who
are consciously literary. The primitive lyrist, the unconscious singer
who makes a ballad of a May morning or rimes a jingle for the nursery
or puts together a couplet to give point to a fragment of proverbial
wisdom, is nearly always exact in the repetition of his vowel. Where
he is careless is in the accompanying consonants. As is remarked by
the British critic from whom quotation has already been made, “we may
observe that in all early European poetry, from the ‘Song of Roland’ to
the popular ballads, the ear was satisfied with assonance, that is,
the harmony of the vowel sounds; _hat_ is assonant to _tag_, and that
was good enough.” So in the proverbial couplet,
See a pin and pick it _up_,
All day long you’ll have good _luck_.
So again more than once in the unaffected lyrics of the laureate of the
nursery, Mother Goose:
Goosy, goosy _gander_,
Where do you _wander_?
Upstairs and downstairs,
And in my lady’s _chamber_.
Leave them _alone_
And they will come _home_.
This assonance is visible in the linking of _wild wood_ and
_childhood_, which many versifiers have proffered as tho it was a
double rime; it is to be seen again in Whittier’s _main land_ and
_trainband_; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte’s ‘Her Letter’:
Of that ride--that to me was the _rarest_;
Of--the something you said at the gate.
Ah! Joe, then I wasn’t an _heiress_
To the best-paying lead in the State.
Altho this substitution of assonance for rime is uncommon in the more
literary lyrics, which we may suppose to have been composed with the
pen, it is still frequently to be found in the popular song, born on
the lips of the singer, and set down in black and white only as an
afterthought. It abounds in the college songs which have been sung into
being, and in the brisk ballads of the variety-show--which Planché
neatly characterized as “most music-hall, most melancholy.” In one
dime song-book containing the words set to music by Mr. David Braham
to enliven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan’s amusing pictures of life among
the lowly in the tenement-house districts of New York, there can be
discovered at least a dozen instances of this use of assonance as tho
it were rime:
De gal’s name is _Nannie_,
And she’s just left her _mammie_.
He can get a pair of crutches
From the doctor, it’s well _known_,
And feel like the King of Persia,
When he goes marching _home_.
One husband was a _toper_,
The other was a _loafer_.
’T is there the solid _voters_
Wear Piccadilly _chokers_.
On Sundays, then, the _ladies_
With a hundred million _babies_.
To the poor of suffering Ireland:
Time and time _again_;
We thank you for our countrymen,
And Donavan is our _name_.
When these lines are sung, rough as they are, the ear is satisfied
by the absolute identity of the final vowel, upon which the voice
lingers--while the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed.
It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of those who heard these
songs ever discovered any deficiency in the rimes. In more literary
ballads only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard; but in
folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance seems to be legal tender by
tacit convention. When Benedick was trying to make a copy of verses
for Beatrice, he declared that he could “find out no rime to _lady_
but _baby_, an innocent rime”--a remark which shows us that Benedick’s
theory of riming was much the same as Mr. Harrigan’s.
Probably, however, the attempt to substitute assonance for rime would
be resented by many of the readers who are tolerant toward such
departures from exactness as _heaven_ and _shriven_ or _grove_ and
_dove_. That is to say, the unliterary ear insists on the identity of
the vowel while careless as to the consonant, and the literary ear
insists on the identity of the consonant while not quite so careful as
to the vowel. And here is another reason for exact accuracy, which
satisfies alike the learned and the unlearned, and is also in accord
with Herbert Spencer’s principle. It is true, probably, that such minor
divergencies as the mating of _home_ and _alone_ and of _shadow_ and
_meadow_--to take one of each class--are not generally conscious on the
part of the poet himself. Nor are they generally noticed by the reader
or the auditor; and even when noticed they are not always resented
as offensive. But just so long as there is a chance that they may be
noticed and that they may be resented, they had best be avoided. The
poet avails himself of his license at his peril. That way danger lies.
It is in the ‘Adventures of Philip’ that Thackeray records his hero’s
disapproval of a poet who makes _fire_ rime with _Marire_. Even
if the rime is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convicting
the lyrist of carelessness of speech--not to call it vulgarity of
pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes himself, sharp as he was upon those who
rimed _dawn_ and _morn_, was none the less guilty of a peccadillo
quite as reprehensible--_Elizas_ and _advertisers_. Whittier ventured
to chain _Eva_ not only with _leave her_ and _receive her_, which
suggest a slovenly utterance, but also with _give her_, _river_,
and _never_, which are all of them wrenched from their true sounds
to force them unto a vain and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred
cockney recklessness can be found in one of Mrs. Browning’s misguided
modernizations of Chaucer:
Now grant my ship some smooth haven _win her_;
I follow Statius first, and then _Corinna_.
In each of these cases the poet takes out a wedding license for his
couplet, only at the cost of compelling the reader to miscall the names
of these ladies, and to address them as _Marire_, _Elizer_, _Ever_,
and _Corinner_; and tho the rimes themselves are thus placed beyond
reproach, the poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and
precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of pronunciation is as
disenchanting as any vulgarity in grammar.
Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that makes these rimes are
certain of Mr. Kipling’s, as to which we are a little in doubt whether
he is making his rime by violence to the normal sound or whether his
own pronunciation is so abnormal that the rime itself seems to him
accurate:
Railways and roads they _wrought_
For the needs of the soil within;
A time to scribble in _court_.
A time to bear and grin.
Long he pondered o’er the question in his scantly furnished _quarters_,
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin’s _daughters_.
I quarrel with my wife at home.
We never fight _abroad_;
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact,
I am her only _lord_.
Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness, and yet akin to it,
is the trick of forcing an emphasis upon a final syllable which is
naturally short, in order that it may be made to rime with a syllable
which is naturally long. For example, in the exquisite lyric of
Lovelace’s, ‘To Althea from Prison,’ in the second quatrain of the
second stanza we find that we must prolong the final syllable of the
final word:
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go _free_,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liber_ty_.
Here the rime evades us unless we read the last word _libertee_. But
what then are we to do with the same word in the second quatrain of the
first stanza? To get his rime here, the poet insists on our reading the
last word _libertie_:
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her _eye_,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liber_ty_.
Lovelace thus forces us not only to give an arbitrary pronunciation
to the final word of his refrain, but also to vary this arbitrary
pronunciation from stanza to stanza, awkwardly arresting our attention
to no purpose, when we ought to be yielding ourselves absolutely to the
charm of his most charming poem. Many another instance of this defect
in craftsmanship can be discovered in the English poets, one of them in
a lyric by that master of metrics, Poe, who opens the ‘Haunted Palace’
with a quatrain in which _tenanted_ is made to mate with _head_:
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenan_ted_,
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--reared its _head_.
In the one poem of Walt Whitman’s in which he seemed almost willing
to submit to the bonds of rime and meter, and which--perhaps for that
reason partly--is the lyric of his now best known and best beloved,
in ‘O Captain, My Captain,’ certain of the rimes are possible only by
putting an impossible stress upon the final syllables of both words of
the pair:
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all _exulting_,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and _daring_.
And again:
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths, for you the shores _a-crowding_;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces _turning_.
In all these cases--Lovelace’s, Poe’s, Whitman’s--we find that the
principle of Economy of Attention has been violated, with a resulting
shock which diminishes somewhat our pleasure in the poems, delightful
as they are, each in its several way. We have been called to bestow a
momentary consideration on the mechanism of the poem, when we should
have preferred to reserve all our power to receive the beauty of its
spirit.
It may be doubted whether any pronunciation, however violently
dislocated, can justify Whittier’s joining of _bruised_ and _crusade_
in his ‘To England,’ or Browning’s conjunction of _windows_ and
_Hindus_ in his ‘Youth and Art.’ In ‘Cristina’ Browning tries to
combine _moments_ and _endowments_; in his ‘Another Way of Love’ he
conjoins _spider_ and _consider_; and in his ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish
Cloister’ he binds together _horse-hairs_ and _corsair’s_. Perhaps
one reason why Browning has made his way so slowly with the broad
public--whom every poet must conquer at last, or in the end confess
defeat--is that his rimes are sometimes violent and awkward, and
sometimes complicated and arbitrary. The poet has reveled in his own
ingenuity in compounding them, and so he flourishes them in the face
of the reader. The principle of Economy of Attention demands that in
serious verse the rime must be not only so accurate as to escape
remark, but also wholly unstrained. It must seem natural, necessary,
obvious, even inevitable, or else our minds are wrested from a rapt
contemplation of the theme to a disillusioning consideration of the
sounds by which it is bodied forth.
“Really the meter of some of the modern poems I have read,” said
Coleridge, “bears about the same relation to meter, properly
understood, that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exercise, and
pretty severe too, I think.” A master of meter Browning proved himself
again and again, very inventive in the new rhythms he introduced, and
almost unfailingly felicitous; and yet there are poems of his in which
the rimes impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise. In the
‘Glove,’ for example, there not only abound manufactured rimes, each
of which in turn arrests the attention, and each of which demands a
most conscientious articulation before the ear can apprehend it, but
with a persistent perversity the poet puts the abnormal combination
first, and puts last the normal word with which it is to be united in
wedlock. Thus _aghast I’m_ precedes _pastime_, and _well swear_ comes
before _elsewhere_. This is like presenting us with the answer before
propounding the riddle.
In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily vanquished may be a part
of the joke, and an adroit and unexpected rime may be a witticism in
itself. But in the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ and in the ‘Fable for Critics’
it is generally the common word that comes before the uncommon
combination the alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a line of
Barham’s ends with _Mephistopheles_ we wonder how he is going to solve
the difficulty, and our expectation is swiftly gratified with _coffee
lees_; and when Lowell informs us that Poe
... talks like a book of iambs and _pentameters_,
we bristle our ears while he adds:
In a way to make people of common sense _damn meters_.
But the ‘Glove’ is not comic in intent; the core of it is tragic,
and the shell is at least romantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant
playfulness of treatment might not be out of keeping with the
psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but not a few readers
resentfully reject the misplaced ingenuity of the wilfully artificial
double rimes. The incongruity between the matter of the poem and the
manner of it attracts attention to the form, and leaves us the less for
the fact.
It would be interesting to know just why Browning chose to do what he
did in the ‘Glove’ and in more than one other poem. He had his reasons,
doubtless, for he was no unconscious warbler of unpremeditated lays. If
he refused to be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention, he
knew what he was doing. It was not from any heedlessness--like that of
Emerson when he recklessly rimed _woodpecker_ with _bear_; or like that
of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming the same _woodpecker_ with
_hear_. Emerson and Lowell--and Whittier also--it may be noted, were
none of them enamoured of technic; and when a couplet or a quatrain or
a stanza of theirs happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently
they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a fortunate accident. They
were not untiring students of versification, forever seeking to spy out
its mysteries and to master its secrets, as Milton was, and Tennyson
and Poe.
And yet no critic has more satisfactorily explained the essential
necessity of avoiding discords than did Lowell when he affirmed that
“not only meter but even rime itself is not without suggestion in
outward nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each
other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray
answers to spray, strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
an embodied ode, Nature’s triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rime who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o’erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below?... You must not only expect, but you must expect in the
right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fiber by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought.”
Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe, who declared that “what,
in rime, first and principally pleases, may be referred to the human
sense or appreciation of equality.” But there is no equality in the
sound of _valleys_ and _palace_, and so the human sense is robbed of
its pleasure; and there is no consonance, visible or audible, between
_woodpecker_ and _hear_, and so we are suddenly demagnetized by our own
sensibility, and cannot feel what and how we ought.
So long as the poet gives us rimes exact to the ear and completely
satisfactory to the sense to which they appeal, he has solid ground
beneath his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos come again.
Admit _given_ and _heaven_, and it is hard to deny _chamber_ and
_remember_. Having relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound,
you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy. Allow _shadow_
and _meadow_ to be legitimate, and how can you put the bar sinister
on _hear_ and _woodpecker_? Indeed, we fail to see how you can help
feeling that John Phœnix was unduly harsh when he rejected the poem of
a Young Astronomer beginning, “O would I had a telescope with fourteen
slides!” on account of the atrocious attempt in the second line to rime
_Pleiades_ with _slides_.
Lieutenant Derby was a humorist; but is his tying together of
incompatible vocables much worse than one offense of which Keats is
guilty?
Then who would go
Into dark Soho,
And chatter with dack’d-haired _critics_,
When he can stay
For the new-mown hay
And startle the dappled _prickets_?
This quotation is due to Professor F. N. Scott, who has drawn attention
also to an astounding quatrain of Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’:
Or in a clear-wall’d city on the sea,
Near gilded organ-pipes, her _hair_
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
An angel look’d at _her_.
Professor Scott declares that he hesitates “for a term by which to
characterize such rimes as these. Certainly they are not eye-rimes
in the proper meaning of that term. Perhaps ... they may be called
nose-rimes.”
Just as every instance of bad grammar interferes with the force of
prose, so in verse every needless inversion and every defective rime
interrupts the impression which the poet wishes to produce. There are
really not so many in Pope’s poems as there may seem to be, for since
Queen Anne’s day our language has modified its pronunciation here and
there, leaving now only to the Irish the _tea_ which is a perfect rime
to _obey_, and the _join_ which is a perfect rime to _line_.