The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

On that head. Should you use a rhyming dictionary? I must confess that I do, but only as a last resort. They can be frustrating and cumbersome, they can break concentration, they offer no help with assonance or consonance rhymes and are too crammed with irrelevant words like multicollinearity and cordwainer and eutectic (something to do with melting points apparently) or types of Malayan cheese and Albanian nose-flutes which are never going to be of the least use to one’s poetry. I prefer first simply to chant the sound to myself in the rhythm the word needs to fit. If that doesn’t bear fruit I will write all the letters of the alphabet at the top of a page and then go through the permutations one by one. It is easy enough to find monosyllabic masculine rhymes, they get harder to pop into your mind when you try to think of their compound versions, the various syllables that can precede the word. For boy, words like joy, toy, soy, cloy, coy, ploy slip into the mind quite quickly. Employ, deploy, alloy, annoy, destroy and enjoy might take a little longer. Decoy and convoy have just occurred to me (although they would need careful use as there is a little more stress on their first syllables) and now I am going to turn to the dictionary. Hm. I’ve missed buoy, but that’s a silly rich-rhyme (besides, it doesn’t rhyme for Americans, who pronounce it boo-ey). McCoy is there (as in ‘the real’ I suppose), Hanoi, savoy and bok choi (strange to find two different types of cabbage). Envoy, carboy, borzoi and viceroy are there, though I would argue that they are usually stressed on their first syllable. There are compounds of words we have already found: redeploy and overjoy. I’m very cross that I failed to find corduroy for myself and I would like to think that given enough time saveloy, hobbledehoy and hoi polloi might have come to me unaided. The assonance rhymes void, Lloyd, Freud, hoik, foil and so on are naturally not shown. By all means invest in a good rhyming dictionary, there are several available from the usual publishing houses and they are all much the same so far as I can tell. If it is musical lyrics you are thinking of then I would recommend Sammy Cahn’s The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary; the lyricist who gave us ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’ is full of excellent and affable advice. There is no index, however, so it will take a bit of getting used to. There are also software rhyming dictionaries available either as stand-alone applications or as online resources. Personally I feel that a poet’s words are better mumbled out or scribbled on paper. Words have colour, feel, texture, density, shape, weight and personality, they are–I have said this before–all we have. Deeply dippy about most things digital I may be, but when it comes to poetry I want the words to have been uttered with my breath and shaped by my hand¹² I am writing this now on my computer, but even the most frivolous sample lines of verse I have composed for you have been sketched on paper first. You may feel differently and no doubt some reader yet unborn who chances upon this book in an antiquarian bookshop of the future will marvel at such distinctions. I send you greetings from the grave: I do trust the sun hasn’t exploded yet and that The Archers is still running.

Poetry Exercise 10

Your task now is to discover as many rhymes as you can for the word girl (my rhyming dictionary offers twenty-four, many of which are absurd dialect words). As many syllables as you like, but obviously it is a masculine rhyme so the ‘url’ sound will terminate each word you find. When you’ve done that, you have to do the same for the feminine-rhyming martyr (the dictionary offers twenty-eight, many of which are again farcically weird). This is not Scrabble: proper nouns, place names, foreign words and informal language of any description all count. Ten for each would be an excellent score, but don’t worry if you can’t manage it. Facility and speed in the hunting down of rhyme-words is hardly a sign of poetic genius.