Surprised by Sound

Rhyme's Inner Workings

Roi Tartakovsky

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175439
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en poésie

In Surprised by Sound, Roi Tartakovsky shows that the power of rhyme endures well into the twenty-first century even though its exemplary usages may differ from traditional or expected forms. His work uncovers the mechanics of rhyme, revealing how and why it remains a vital part of poetry with connections to large questions about poetic freedom, cognitive and psychoanalytic theories, and the accidental aspects of language.As a contribution to studies of sound in poetry, Surprised by Sound takes on two central questions: First, what is it about the structure of rhyme that makes it such a potent and ongoing source of poetic production and extrapoetic fascination? Second, how has rhyme changed and survived in the era of free verse, whose prototypical poetry is as hostile to poetic meter as it is to the artificial sound of rhyme, including the sound of rhythmic thumping at the end of every line? In response, Tartakovsky theorizes a new category of rhyme that he terms "sporadic." Since it is not systematized or expected, sporadic rhyme can be a single, strongly resounding rhyme used suddenly in a free verse poem. It can also be an internal rhyme in a villanelle or a few scattered rhymes unevenly distributed throughout a longer poem that nevertheless create a meaningful cluster of words. Examining usages across varied poetic traditions, Tartakovsky locates sporadic rhyme in sources ranging from a sixteenth-century sonnet to a nonsensical, practically unperformable piece by Gertrude Stein and a 2007 MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times. With careful attention to the soundscapes of poems, Surprised by Sound demonstrates that rhyme's enduring value lies in its paradoxical and unstable nature as well as its capacity for creating poetic, cognitive, and psychic effects.

1
Hearing and Listening to Rhyme

If negotiating with linguistic constraints and literary conventions comes with the territory of writing poetry, rhyme occupies a great part of that territory. Certainly, in the case of English, it is difficult to overstate the association between rhyme and poetry, or the significance of rhyme to poetry. This association is attested to in rhetoric by rhyme’s synecdochic or metonymic substitution for poetry itself. Rhyme-as-poem is a prevalent trope throughout much English-language poetry and is nowhere more evident than in William Shakespeare’s ending of Sonnet 17: “You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.”

In practice, rhyme’s prevalence is attested to by the overwhelming number of rhymed poems written by generations of poets. Of course, rhyme is not the only sound device, nor the earliest in the history of English poetry. A perfect or full rhyme is, in fact, one of numerous poetic sound devices, including assonance, alliteration, consonance, and many forms of partial rhymes. But it is the more encompassing member among most of these weaker or partial sound relations because full rhyme typically requires a correspondence of both the vowel and the following consonant sounds of the last stressed syllable of each word.¹ Assonance was never used systematically in English verse, partial rhyme is best appreciated as a subset of full rhyme, and alliteration, while carrying its own historical connotations of Anglo-Saxon prosody, seems, at least in poetic consciousness, more distant and dimmed today than rhyme.² Rhyme, both historically and phonetically, is set up to stand out in the soundscape of the poem or of poetry.

As prevalent as rhyme is (or was—a question I will get to momentarily), it is easy to forget that rhyme’s entry into English poetry was a gradual process and one that—in spite of scholarly interest—remains somewhat murky. Murkier yet is the larger question of the historical origin of rhyme itself. Henry Lanz details some of the theories and approaches, concluding that though “speculations on the historic origin of rime have been numerous and sometimes highly ingenious,” the history ultimately is quite impossible to pinpoint, for “there is no first rime, as there is no first word uttered by man” (106, 131).

One approach to the historical question is to try to trace the route of rhyme from elsewhere into English, with Chinese, Arabic, and old Irish usually included with Latin as potential candidates. Since Latin is of such strong influence on English in this respect, the history of its own relationship with rhyme is particularly relevant. Arthur Melville Clark traces the emergence of rhyme in Latin within the context of relaxing the quantitative prosodic rules that were, from the beginning, “an alien imposition on Latin which had naturally strong accents,” as well as the emergence of Christian Latin literature that for various reasons employed rhyme (156–57). In particular, the Christian hymn, which came to rely more and more on rhyme, is widely considered to be a major contributor to the dissemination of rhyme. Michael McKie notes the “seductive power” of the early hymns, and their creators’ desire to appeal to the uneducated, and remarks that “the reasons for rhyme’s adoption by the Church (its popularity, ease of use, and emotive appeal) in part explain the recurring hostility to rhyme, from the Renaissance onwards, owing to its supposed ‘vulgarity’” (“Origins” 824, 831). And M. L. Gasparov tells the story of the emergence of rhyme in medieval Latin verse as, at least in part, a gradual migration of like endings from rhetorical prose, where they had always been used to emphasize parallel syntactic constructions, since these tend to end in identical flexions (97). Hence, what was an ornamental and occasional component of some prose becomes a required and rigid part of verse.

There also is a linguistic, structural explanation of what is accepted as a prerequisite for the deployment of rhyme as a significant device in a given language. William Harmon writes that “proper rhyme is impossible, as a rule, in a synthetic-suffixal language and will not emerge as a stylistic device of any importance until the language has migrated far enough toward being analytic-prefixal to yield a robust stock of important words that either end with a stressed syllable or are simply monosyllabic” (367). Note that Harmon is talking not just about any rhyme but about rhyme that acts as a stylistic device of importance, rhyme that is able to fulfill a prosodic, structural function in verse. With regards to timing, Harmon says, “no Indo-European language reached such a condition before AD 1000” (367). McKie writes that, in English, “only by the time of Chaucer did rhyming approach the exactness of the early modern period,” though “Middle English verse from the later thirteenth century onwards was regularly rhymed” (“Origins” 821).³ Indeed, as a look at any poetry anthology will show, from Geoffrey Chaucer onward, rhyme reigned supreme in English poetry, and one would be hard-pressed to find a major English poet from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries who did not employ rhyme.

The employment of rhyme in English verse rests on (or participates in the creation of) the psychological reality of rhyme, or rather rime—the part of the syllable that includes the vowel and the subsequent consonant. The three components of a syllable made up of an initial consonant, a vowel, and a final consonant (C-V-C) are experienced as divided or grouped together in a specific way, namely C and V-C (the latter is the rime). When English speakers are given a series of nonword syllables and then asked to repeat them, the errors they tend to make in the repetition reveal the division within the syllable. Thus, speakers will sometimes take the initial C and combine it with the V-C of another nonword, but the V-C unit tends to remain glued together and will only rarely be divided into its parts (Treiman and Danis).

The syllable in English is thus understood to be coded as onset (C) and rime (V-C), and there is now evidence to suggest that this is not the case for all languages. For example, in a series of experiments with speakers of Korean, researchers have found that, for them, possibly because of the difference in the availability of consonants at the beginning and end of syllables, a C-V-C syllable is actually experienced as divided into C-V and C. The rime is therefore “not an integral psychological unit, as far as (real) native speakers of Korean are concerned,” and in this regard the researchers bring up the fact that Korean, like quite a few other languages, does not have a tradition of poetic rhyme (Yoon and Derwing 229–31).⁴

Syllabic perception, linguistic changes, and literary history all coincide to prime English for rhyme. Of course, this is not to suggest that rhymeless poems were not being written, some by major poets. John Milton’s strong position against rhyme (specifically the heroic couplet), expressed in the note attached to the blank verse Paradise Lost, is perhaps the most famous example of antirhyme sentiments in English. I discuss Milton’s position and that of others later, but it is worth noting here that in spite of his misgivings about rhyme for epic poetry, Milton not only used rhyme extensively elsewhere but also had to defend his position of not using rhyme when he made such a choice. Walt Whitman is a marked American counterexample, but the early resistance to accepting his writing as poetry at all attests to the defining position that rhyme, together with meter, held throughout a long period of English verse history.

The advent and tremendous expansion of free verse challenged rhyme in significant ways but, as I hope to show, did not at all eliminate the use of rhyme. Though it is an issue of heated debate and controversy, implicated in cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns, it is safe to say that the vast majority of English poets have employed rhyme vastly.

And not just vastly but also systematically. At least from Chaucer onward, we find rhyme as a prosodic device in English verse. Rhyme is found in innumerable poetic forms and genres, where its use is replicated and often defines the form itself, whether that form was imported from elsewhere, was modified, or was created in English. Reading any number of Alexander Pope’s long works in heroic couplets, one comes quickly to expect the rhyming pairs at the end of the line. Reading a Shakespear-ean sonnet, one knows or learns to expect where the rhymes will fall, the rhyme scheme scheming the logic of the entire sonnet, as is the case with Petrarchan and Spenserian sonnet forms and their respective rhyme schemes. The reading of the quatrains of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam is accompanied by the recurrence of the envelope rhyme /abba/, just as the reading of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam’s quatrains, is accompanied by the recurrence of the /aaxa/ scheme. Similarly, the reading of most realizations of what Derek Attridge (Rhythms of English Poetry) has called the “underlying four-beat rhythm” (nursery rhymes, ballads, hymns) is accompanied by the recurrence of /aabb/, /abab/, or /xaxa/ schemes.

In each of these cases, and in so many others, rhyme is systematized, appearing at the end of the line and following a discernible, often predictable, often repeated, pattern. Either within the poem or within the genre or poetic form, rhyme recurs and is institutionalized. Already in 1589, George Puttenham is able not only to list different rhyme schemes but also to start assigning differential effects to each of them, one being “vulgar,” another “pleasant” (84–91). Rhyme’s systematic employment marks one of rhyme’s central functions, the schematic or organizational function—in Puttenham’s terms, “a band given to every verse in a staffe, so as none fall out alone or uncoupled,” like the band provided by a mason to fasten the bricks of a house (89). Even today, thinking about rhyme defaults to its systematic variant or schematic function: “rhyme” generally means end rhyme that one finds forming a discernible gestalt or rhyme scheme.

Returning to the historical narrative, it is no less significant to note that the era of systematization was preceded by an era of sporadic use. Though rhyme’s dissemination into English verse in a systematic way is viewed as starting in 1400, McKie notes “the sporadic but slowly increasing use of rhyme in Old English verse over three centuries” (“Origins” 821), and specifically describes how the rhyme in Latin church hymns affected Anglo-Saxon versifiers, who at first used it “for merely ornamental purposes,” and then increasingly more, though still occasionally rather than prosodically (829). This occasional use preceded the Norman Conquest, which itself encouraged rhyme because of the linguistic changes it introduced into English.⁵

A similar situation has been described in other languages too. For example, Benjamin Hrushovski (Harshav) shows that systematic rhyme has been in existence in Hebrew verse for more than 1,500 years, but he finds rhymes that lack a structural function as early as in the Bible (722, 738). Rhyme may thus long precede its systematic employment, and the process of its gradual migration into the prosodic system depends on outside influences and the characteristics of the language. When rhyme is outside the prosodic system and occurs sporadically, it does not fulfill an organizational function, and this kind of rhyme is oftentimes seen favorably as benign ornamentation, or negatively as a dangerous distraction to be avoided, two characterizations that resonate in responses to much later manifestations of rhyme as well.

RHYME LOSES (OR LOOSENS) ITS FOOTING?

Before it became systematic and prevalent, rhyme was sporadic. But what about after it became systematic and prevalent? Has rhyme all but disappeared today? Had it disappeared with the advent of modernism?

It is easy to equate modern and contemporary poetry with a rejection of meter and rhyme, but while this is not entirely wrong, it is not exactly correct, either. Certainly the practice of systematic rhyme has diminished in tandem with the advent of free verse. But to the systematic stage of rhyme abundance one needs to add the postsystematic one. Contrary to popular belief, free verse and rhyme are not mutually exclusive. Looking at modern European poets of various languages, Gasparov, for one, finds not a unanimous elimination of rhyme but rather “a competition between renewed rhyme and complete rhymelessness” (280). One trend, shared by both English and Russian (but not French and German) poets, is to accept as legitimate more kinds of rhyme based on consonance (English) and assonance (Russian), rather than just full rhyme, with Emily Dickinson’s slant rhymes a precedent (Gasparov 279–80).⁶ Loosening the phonetic exactitude of rhyme is certainly one avenue open to poets who wish to rely on the power of rhyme while lessening its rigidity, and it has been used by poets as varied as Dickinson and William Butler Yeats, though I am more interested in another possibility: changing not the rhyme but its mode of use; employing full rhymes but in a different way.

A close examination of some of the pronouncements about rhyme around the time that free verse was being debated reveals a nuanced approach. First, without a doubt, one can identify resistance to rhyme, never less ambiguous than in William Carlos Williams’s words: “Very early I began to question whether to rhyme and decided: No” (26). In 1917, T. S. Eliot said that “excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the modern ear” (“Reflections” 188). Ezra Pound, too, in “Affirmations: As for Imag-isme,” writes that “emotion is an organizer . . . also of audible forms,” but he is quick to leave rhyme out: “Emotion also creates patterns of timbre. But one ‘discards rhyme,’ not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet, but because there are certain emotions or energies which are not to be represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns; just as there are certain ‘arrangements of form’ that cannot be worked into dados” (354–55).

For Eliot, Pound, and others, systematic rhyme is no longer a viable option because of a desire for newness and a rejection of artificiality, sweetness, overfamiliarity, and mechanical rigidity, which—though inherent in rhyme always—were salient in the ways they understood it to have been used in the past. But unlike Williams, Eliot was unwilling to advocate a simple wholesale rejection of rhyme. Eliot’s vision of free verse, so the story goes, was inspired by French vers libre and specifically by Jules Laforgue, whom he was reading as an undergraduate at Harvard. Laforgue, in turn, was inspired by the free verse of Whitman, whom he was translating just as he was developing his vers libre. (In 1886, Laforgue published both his translations of Whitman and his first free verse poems.)⁷

Rhyme is an interesting element in this cross-linguistic influence. While Whitman’s Leaves of Grass showed an avoidance of rhyme, Laforgue’s example showed the possibility of “rhymed free verse,” a verse that takes liberties with rhyme (for instance, ignoring the traditional requirement to alternate masculine and feminine rhymes, or rhyming singulars with plurals) but does not necessarily forego rhyme altogether. Rhymes can still come at the end of lines, but rhyme schemes are no longer “the sole source of stanzas”; rather, they are “as much in search of definition as other structural elements” (Scott 176–77, 204–5). Perhaps by way of Laforgue’s example, then, Eliot, makes the following assertion: “And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed” (“Reflections” 189).⁸

Eliot thus opens the door not just to rhymes that are more phonetically flexible (partial rhymes) but also to phonetically perfect rhymes that will be dispersed in strategic places within the verse. Donald Wesling adds to this idea and claims that free verse “displays modernity’s exposure of the rhyme device in the fullest way” (Chances of Rhyme 51). Especially promising for anyone interested in rhyme in its postsystematic stage is Wesling’s claim that if we “listen for rhyme and rhyme-related parallelism in much free verse, we will be amazed at the richness and variety of what we hear” (95–96). Naturally—and this is the point of Wesling’s historical perspective—rhyme has changed: “In an age like the present, which distrusts teleological effects, rhyme, as affording the ring of authority and conclusiveness, will be felt inappropriate; other, less emphatic types of rhyme will be revived or invented” (129). Rhyme, I contend, has not disappeared, but its mode of employment has changed. Our somewhat impoverished habits of listening to the poem’s sound, coupled with this change, have by now rendered rhyme less audible, though not less crucial.

Rhyme’s bad rap, the hostility to rhyme which one associates with Pound and Williams and Charles Olson (but which far predates them), has endured well beyond the early days of modernism. In 1972, X. J. Kennedy proclaimed, “To write in meter and rime these days is to give yourself a permanently suspect credit rating” (206). And in 1979, Paul Fussell scrutinized three anthologies of modern poetry, published in the 1960s and 1970s, and found “an attitude toward rhyme as a formal device which can be described only as a programmatic hostility” (150).⁹ There is significant resistance to rhyme today, too, and it seems safe to say that by an overwhelming margin, mainstream written contemporary poetry is not rhymed. But, again, this is only true if we take “not rhymed” to mean “not systematically rhymed.” There are many other formations of rhyme, in use today and also in the past, that can be uncovered if listened to carefully and sympath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Hearing and Listening to Rhyme
• 2. Rigid and Pleasurable: Rhyme’s Imprisoning Allure
• 3. Organizing and Disrupting: Rhyme’s Schematic Duplicity
• 4. Accidental and Motivated: Rhyme’s Semantic Trap
• 5. Progressive and Regressive: Rhyme’s Traumatic Kernel
• Conclusion: A Defense of Rhyme
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index