Here the rime evades us unless we read the last word libertee. But what then are we to do with the same word in the second quatrain of the first stanza? To get his rime here, the poet insists on our reading the last word libertie:
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.
Lovelace thus forces us not only to give an arbitrary pronunciation to the final word of his refrain, but also to vary this arbitrary pronunciation from stanza to stanza, awkwardly arresting our attention to no purpose, when we ought to be yielding ourselves absolutely to the charm of his most charming poem. Many another instance of this defect in craftsmanship can be discovered in the English poets, one of them in a lyric by that master of metrics, Poe, who opens the ‘Haunted Palace’ with a quatrain in which tenanted is made to mate with head:
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the one poem of Walt Whitman’s in which he seemed almost willing to submit to the bonds of rime and meter, and which—perhaps for that reason partly—is the lyric of his now best known and best beloved, in ‘O Captain, My Captain,’ certain of the rimes are possible only by putting an impossible stress upon the final syllables of both words of the pair:
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.
And again:
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths, for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.
In all these cases—Lovelace’s, Poe’s, Whitman’s—we find that the principle of Economy of Attention has been violated, with a resulting shock which diminishes somewhat our pleasure in the poems, delightful as they are, each in its several way. We have been called to bestow a momentary consideration on the mechanism of the poem, when we should have preferred to reserve all our power to receive the beauty of its spirit.
It may be doubted whether any pronunciation, however violently dislocated, can justify Whittier’s joining of bruised and crusade in his ‘To England,’ or Browning’s conjunction of windows and Hindus in his ‘Youth and Art.’ In ‘Cristina’ Browning tries to combine moments and endowments; in his ‘Another Way of Love’ he conjoins spider and consider; and in his ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister’ he binds together horse-hairs and corsair’s. Perhaps one reason why Browning has made his way so slowly with the broad public—whom every poet must conquer at last, or in the end confess defeat—is that his rimes are sometimes violent and awkward, and sometimes complicated and arbitrary. The poet has reveled in his own ingenuity in compounding them, and so he flourishes them in the face of the reader. The principle of Economy of Attention demands that in serious verse the rime must be not only so accurate as to escape remark, but also wholly unstrained. It must seem natural, necessary, obvious, even inevitable, or else our minds are wrested from a rapt contemplation of the theme to a disillusioning consideration of the sounds by which it is bodied forth.