Lieutenant Derby was a humorist; but is his tying together of incompatible vocables much worse than one offense of which Keats is guilty?
Then who would go
Into dark Soho,
And chatter with dack’d-haired critics,
When he can stay
For the new-mown hay
And startle the dappled prickets?
This quotation is due to Professor F. N. Scott, who has drawn attention also to an astounding quatrain of Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’:
Or in a clear-wall’d city on the sea,
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
An angel look’d at her.
Professor Scott declares that he hesitates “for a term by which to characterize such rimes as these. Certainly they are not eye-rimes in the proper meaning of that term. Perhaps ... they may be called nose-rimes.”
Just as every instance of bad grammar interferes with the force of prose, so in verse every needless inversion and every defective rime interrupts the impression which the poet wishes to produce. There are really not so many in Pope’s poems as there may seem to be, for since Queen Anne’s day our language has modified its pronunciation here and there, leaving now only to the Irish the tea which is a perfect rime to obey, and the join which is a perfect rime to line.
Perhaps the prevalence in English verse of the intolerable “allowable rimes” is due in part to an acceptance of what seems like an evil precedent, to be explained away by our constantly changing pronunciation. Perhaps it is due in part also to the present wretched orthography of our language. The absurd “rimes to the eye” which abound in English are absent from Italian verse and from French. The French, as the inheritors through the Latin of the great Greek tradition, have a finer respect for form, and strive constantly for perfection of technic, altho the genius of their language seems to us far less lyric than ours. Théodore de Banville, in his little book on French versification, declared formally and emphatically that there is no such thing as a poetic license. And Voltaire, in a passage admirably rendered into English by the late Frederick Locker-Lampson, says that the French “insist that the rime shall cost nothing to the ideas, that it shall be neither trivial, nor too far-fetched; we exact vigorously in a verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do not admit the smallest license; we require an author to carry without a break all these chains, yet that he should appear ever free.”
In a language as unrhythmic as the French, rime is far more important than it need be in a lilting and musical tongue like our own; but in the masterpieces of the English lyrists, as in those of the French, rime plays along the edges of a poem, ever creating the expectation it swiftly satisfies and giving most pleasure when its presence is felt and not flaunted. Like the dress of the well-bred woman, which sets off her beauty without attracting attention to itself, rime must be adequate and unobtrusive, neither too fine nor too shabby, but always in perfect taste.
(1898-1900)