Rhyme in English

When English first emerges in the written record, the earliest surviving poetry uses rule-bound and obligatory alliteration, not rhyme. English alliterative verse persists as a continuous tradition right up to the later fifteenth century.¹

Regular rhyme comes into use in English poetry around the end of the twelfth century. It lasts as the dominant (but not only) ornamental system from the thirteenth century to the start of the twentieth. Today, though, rhyme in poetry risks sounding comic. We accept rhyme in light verse; not everyone will buy it when the tone is serious.

I think some writers still make it work for weighty topics. You're not required to enjoy Thom Gunn's elegies (I do), but we probably ought to admit that there is a there there in 'em.

In general, though, poets steer away from rhyme, or are steered away from rhyme by conscientious mentors. Something offends modern ears when not-wholly-comic verse links, through sound, two words which might have nothing to do with each other semantically.

Plus, English will give you a hard time if you try to rhyme in it. Present-day English has only a few inflections. In my previous post, I mentioned Dante's Comedy. Italian supplies poets with many inflected words, whose inflections may assist rhyme. English does not.

Rhyme already presented problems in the later Middle English period. Chaucer rather showily makes a point of this at the end of his 'Compleynt of Venus', a rhyming poem he's translated into English from a rhyming French original by Otto de Graunson:

And eek to me hit is a greet penaunce,
Sith rim in English hath such scarsitee,
To folow word by word the curiositee
Of Graunson…

(And it's a great hassle to me--since rhyme is so rare in English--to follow word-for-word Graunson's intricacy…)

Matters have worsened for English rhyme since Chaucer's lifetime. Poets writing in English have (I think?) begun more and more to prefer blunt (or 'masculine') rhymes over rhymes which are pendant (or 'feminine'—this is not a gendered distinction, just an old way to distinguish them!). Here is a blunt rhyme: bright:despite; here is a pendant rhyme blunder:wonder. Rhyme is, crudely, the matching of the heart of a beat syllable and anything that follows; in pendant rhyme the 'anything that follows' includes one or more further syllables.

Modern English rhymes do not exclude pendant rhymes absolutely: Gunn's 'The J Car' pointedly uses cheerful:fearful. But 'The J Car' strongly favours blunt rhymes, as have, I think, most serious rhyming poems in English for a long time. I've a suspicion that you can detect this as early as Wyatt and Surrey, but I'm not sure.

If you eliminate pendant rhymes and only use blunt rhymes, your options narrow yet further! And, for better or worse, I do prefer blunt rhymes over pendant rhymes in present-day English.

Since it doesn't work so well now, what made rhyme work in the past? Chaucer did, after all, rhyme throughout the 'Compleynt of Venus'. Since he eschewed alliterative verse, he had to. Rhyme might've been scarce, but it was also required.

Rhyme probably worked better in part because audiences heard poetry rather than reading it much more often than most of us do today. Chaucer and many of his predecessors didn't have an oral literary culture, but they had an aural literary culture.

Rhyme probably worked better in part through habituation. Today, many of us only hear English rhyme in pop music, light verse, advertising jingles, and mnemonics. I used to experience the jocular quality that many listeners find in rhyme. Then I spend years professionally obliged to consume hundreds of thousands of lines of rhyming verse, in all kinds of tones and registers. I no longer experience that jocular quality as an automatic reflex. There are at least hints (e.g.) that those used to rhyme might process it differently.

Why did I decide to rhyme in Deep-Step and Twice-Mortal?

In part, for the challenge of it. Though two books of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright use rhyme royal stanzas, they make up only a small proportion of the whole---something like a ninth, taken together. I'd never written one sustained rhyming poem before. It seemed like something to try.

In part, to pursue a different style. I wrote Kin-Bright in a high style. As I outline in that post, I made my high style up, but I suspect that that might be true of all high styles. I wanted to write Deep-Step in a middle style, flexing up to high formality at points, but saving room for comedy and aspects of what used I suppose to be called fairy story. Rhyme seemed to me to suit the task.

My previous post, on terza rima, discusses how I decided to rhyme.

Deep-Step also contains alliterative verse. My next post will describe how I linked that alliterative verse into its terza rima surroundings.