The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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

Most words rhyme on their beat, on their stressed syllable, a weak ending doesn’t have to be rhymed, it can stay the same in both words. We saw this in Bo Peep with find them/behind them. The lightly scudded ‘them’ is left alone. We wouldn’t employ the rhymes mined gem or kind stem. Beating rhymes happily with meeting, but you would not rhyme it with sweet thing or feet swing. Apart from anything else, you would wrench the rhythm. This much is obvious.

Such rhymes, beating/heating, battle/cattle, rhyming/chiming, station/nation are called feminine. We saw the melteth and pelteth in Keats’s ‘Fancy’ and they naturally occur where any metric line has a weak ending, as in Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet:A woman’s face with Nature's own hand paintedHast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquaintedWith shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

And we saw feminine and masculine endings alternate in Kipling’s ‘If’:If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;

It is the stressed syllables that rhyme: there is nothing more you need to know about feminine rhyming–you will have known this instinctively from all the songs and rhymes and poems you have ever heard and seen.

As a rule the more complex and polysyllabic rhymes become, the more comic the result. In a poem mourning the death of a beloved you would be unlikely to rhyme potato-cake with I hate to bake or spatula with bachelor⁵ for example. Three-syllable rhymes (also known as triple-rhyme or sdrucciolo⁶) are almost always ironic, mock-heroic, comic or facetious in effect, in fact I can’t think of any that are not. Byron was a master of these. Here are some examples from Don Juan:But–oh! ye lords and ladies intellectualInform us truly, have they not hen pecked you all?He learn’d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,And how to scale a fortress–or a nunnery.Since, in a way that’s rather of the oddest, heBecame divested of his modestyThat there are months which nature grows more merry in,March has its hares, and May must have its heroine.I’ve got new mythological machineryAnd very handsome supernatural scenery

He even manages quadruple rhyme:So that their plan and prosody are eligible,Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible.