The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

As to the descriptions of these layouts, well, that is simple enough. There are four very common forms. There is the COUPLET…So long as men can breathe and eyes can seeSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

…and the TRIPLET:

In the poetry of the Augustan period (Dryden, Johnson, Swift, Pope etc.) you will often find triplets braced in one of these long curly brackets, as in the example above from the Prologue to Dryden’s tragedy, All For Love. Such braced triplets will usually hold a single thought and conclude with a full stop.

Next is CROSS-RHYMING, which rhymes alternating lines, abab

etc:I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;

Finally there is ENVELOPE RHYME, where a couplet is ‘enveloped’ by an outer rhyming pair: abba, as in the first eight lines of the Donne poem, or this stanza from Tennyson’s In Memoriam.The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,No wing of wind the region swept,But over all things brooding sleptThe quiet sense of something lost.

You might have noticed that in the cross-rhyme and envelope-rhyme examples above, Wordsworth and Tennyson indent rhyming pairs, as it were pressing the tab key to shift them to the right: this is by no means obligatory. Larkin does indent with ‘Toads’, perhaps gently to nudge our attention to the subtle consonance rhyming:Lots of folk live up lanesWith fires in a bucket,Eat windfalls and tinned sardines–They seem to like it.

While in his ‘truly rhymed’ poem ‘The Trees’ he presents the envelope-rhymed stanzas without indentation:The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said.The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Naturally, there are variations on these schemes: Wordsworth ends each cross-rhymed stanza of ‘Daffodils’ with a couplet, for example (abbacc). The world of formal rhyme-schemes awaits our excited inspection in the next chapter, but without delving into neurolinguistics and the deeper waters of academic prosody I really do not believe there is much more we need to know about rhyming in the technical sense. We have 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’.