Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

X
AN INQUIRY AS TO RIME

“I have a theory about double rimes for which I shall be attacked by the critics, but which I could justify perhaps on high authority, or, at least, analogy,” wrote Mrs. Browning to a friend not long after the publication of one of her books. “These volumes of mine have more double rimes than any two books of English poems that ever to my knowledge were printed; I mean of English poems not comic. Now of double rimes in use which are perfect rimes you are aware how few there are; and yet you are also aware of what an admirable effect in making a rhythm various and vigorous double riming is in English poetry. Therefore I have used a certain license; and after much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers have ventured it with the public. And do you tell me—you who object to the use of a different vowel in a double rime—why you rime (as everybody does, without blame from everybody) given to heaven, when you object to my riming remember to chamber? The analogy is all on my side, and I believe that the spirit of the English language is also.”

Here Mrs. Browning raises a question of interest to all who have paid any attention to the technic of verse. No doubt double rimes do give vigor and variety to a poem, altho no modern English lyrist has really rivaled the magnificent medieval ‘Dies Iræ,’ wherein the double rimes thrice repeated fall one after the other like the beating of mighty trip-hammers. There is no doubt also that the English language is not so fertile in double rimes as the Latin, the German, or the Italian; and that some of the English poets, clutching for these various and vigorous effects, have refused to abide by the strict letter of the law, and have claimed the license of modifying the emphatic vowel from one line to another. Mrs. Browning defends this revolt, and finds it easy to retort to her correspondent that he himself has ventured to link heaven and given. Many another poet has coupled these unwilling words; and not a few have also married river and ever, meadow and shadow, spirit and inherit.

Mrs. Browning is prepared to justify herself by authority, or at least by analogy; and yet, in bringing about the espousal of chamber and remember, she is evidently aware that it is no love-match she is aiding and abetting, but at best a marriage of convenience. She pleads precedence to excuse her infraction of a statute the general validity of which she apparently admits. The most that she claims is that the tying together of chamber and remember is permissible. She seems to say that these ill-mated pairs are, of course, not the best possible rimes, but that, since double rimes are scarce in English, the lyrist may, now and then, avail himself of the second best. An American poet of my acquaintance is bolder than the British poetess; he has the full courage of his convictions. He assures me that he takes pleasure in the tying together of incompatible words like river and ever, meadow and shadow, finding in these arbitrary matings a capricious and agreeable relief from the monotony of more regular riming.

This forces us to consider the basis upon which any theory of “allowable” rimes must rest—any theory, that is, which, after admitting that certain rimes are exact and absolutely adequate, asserts also that certain other combinations of terminal words, altho they do not rime completely and to the satisfaction of all, are still tolerable. This theory accepts certain rimes as good, and it claims in addition certain others as “good enough.”

Any objection to the pairing of spirit and inherit, of remember and chamber, and the like, cannot be founded upon the fact that in the accepted orthography of the English language the spelling of the terminations differs. Rime has to do with pronunciation and not with orthography; rime is a match between sounds. The symbols that represent these sounds—or that may misrepresent them more or less violently—are of little consequence. What is absurdly called a “rime to the eye” is a flagrant impossibility, or else hiccough may pair off with enough, clean with ocean, and plague with ague. The eye is not the judge of sound, any more than the nose is the judge of color. Height is not a rime to eight; but it is a rime to sight, to bite, to proselyte, and to indict. So one does not rime with either gone or tone; but it does with son and with bun. Tomb and comb, and rhomb and bomb are not rimes; but tomb and doom, and spume and rheum are. The objection to the linking together of meadow and shadow, and of ever and river is far deeper than any superficial difference of spelling; it is rooted in the difference of the sounds themselves. In spite of the invention of printing, or even of writing itself, the final appeal of poetry is still to the ear and not to the eye.

Probably the first utterances of man were rhythmic, and probably poetry had advanced far toward perfection long before the alphabet was devised as an occasional substitute for speech. In the beginning the poet had to charm the ears of those whom he sought to move, since there was then no way by which he could reach the eye also. To the rhapsodists verse was an oral art solely, as it is always for the dramatists, whose speeches must fall trippingly from the tongue, or fail of their effect. The work of the lyrist—writer of odes, minnesinger, troubadour, ballad-minstrel—has always been intended to be said or sung; that it should be read is an afterthought only. Even to-day, when the printing-press has us all under its wheels, it is by our tongues that we possess ourselves of the poetry we truly relish. A poem is not really ours till we know it by heart and can say it to ourselves, or at least until we have read it aloud, and until we can quote it freely. If a poem has actually taken hold on our souls, it rings in our ears, even if we happen to be visualizers also, and can call up at will the printed page whereon it is preserved.

This fact, that poetry is primarily meant to be spoken aloud rather than read silently, altho obvious when plainly stated, has not been firmly grasped by many of those who have considered the technic of the art, and therefore there is often obscurity in the current discussions of rime and rhythm. In the rhetoric of verse there is to-day not a little of the confusion which existed in the rhetoric of prose before Herbert Spencer put forth his illuminating and stimulating essay on the ‘Philosophy of Style.’ Even in that paper he suggested that the principle of Economy of Attention was as applicable to verse as to prose; and he remarked that “were there space, it might be worth while to inquire whether the pleasure we take in rime, and also that which we take in euphony, are not partly ascribable to the same general cause.”

This principle of Economy of Attention explains why it is that any style of speaking or writing is more effective than another, by reminding us that we have, at any given moment, only so much power of attention, and that, therefore, however much of this power has to be employed on the form of any message must be subtracted from the total power, leaving just so much less attention available for the apprehension of the message itself. To convey a thought from one mind to another, we must use words the reception of which demands more or less mental exertion; and therefore that statement is best which carries the thought with the least verbal friction. Some friction there must be always; but the less there is, the more power of attention the recipient has left to master the transmitted thought.

It is greatly to be regretted that Spencer did not spare the space to apply to verse this principle, which has been so helpful in the analysis of prose. He did go so far as to suggest that metrical language is more effective than prose, because when “we habitually preadjust our perceptions to the measured movement of verse” it is “probable that by so doing we economize attention.” This suggestion has been elaborated by one of his disciples, the late Mr. Grant Allen, in his treatise on ‘Physiological Esthetics,’ and it has been formally controverted by the late Mr. Gurney, in his essay on the ‘Power of Sound.’ Perhaps both Spencer and Gurney are right; part of our pleasure in rhythm is due to the fact that “the mind may economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each syllable,” as the former says, and part of it is “of an entirely positive kind, acting directly on the sense,” as the latter maintains.