Parts of Speech: Essays on English

“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.

Whether or not Spencer’s principle of Economy of Attention adequately explains our delight in rhythm, there is no doubt that it can easily be utilized to construct a theory of rime. Indeed, it is the one principle which provides a satisfactory solution to the problem propounded by Mrs. Browning. No one can deny that more or less of our enjoyment of rimed verse is due to the skill with which the poet satisfies with the second rime the expectation he has aroused with the first. When he ends a line with gray, or grow, or grand, we do not know which of the twoscore or more of possible rimes to each of these the lyrist will select, and we await his choice with happy anticipation. If he should balk us of our pleasure, if he should omit the rime we had confidently counted upon, we are rudely awakened from our dream of delight, and we ask ourselves abruptly what has happened. It is as tho the train of thought had run off the track. Spencer notes how we are put out by halting versification; “much as at the bottom of a flight of stairs a step more or less than we counted upon gives us a shock, so too does a misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable.”

So, too, does an inaccurate or an arbitrary rime give us a shock. If verse is something to be said or sung, if its appeal is to the ear primarily, if rime is a terminal identity of sound, then any theory of “allowable” rimes is impossible, since an “allowable” rime is necessarily inexact, and thus may tend to withdraw attention from the matter of the poem to its manner. No doubt there are readers who do not notice the incompatibility of these matings, and there are others who notice yet do not care. But the more accurately trained the ear is, the more likely these alliances are to annoy; and the less exact the rime, the more likely the ear is to discover the discrepancy. The only safety for the rimester who wishes to be void of all offense is to risk no union of sounds against whose marriage anybody knows any just cause of impediment. Perhaps a wedding within the prohibited degrees may be allowed to pass without protest now and again; but sooner or later somebody will surely forbid the banns.

Just as a misplaced accent or a supernumerary syllable gives us a shock, so does the attempt of Mrs. Browning to pair off remember and chamber; so may also the attempt of Poe to link together valleys and palace. The lapse from the perfect ideal may be but a trifle, but a lapse it is nevertheless. A certain percentage of our available attention may thus be wasted, and worse than wasted; it may be called away from the poem itself, and absorbed suddenly by the mere versification. For a brief moment we may be forced to consider a defect of form, when we ought to have our minds absolutely free to receive the poet’s meaning. Whenever a poet cheats us of our expectancy of perfect rime, he forces us to pay exorbitant freight charges on the gift he has presented to us.

It is to be noted, however, that as rime is a matching of sounds, certain pairs of words whose union is not beyond reproach can hardly be rejected without pedantry, since the ordinary pronunciation of cultivated men takes no account of the slight differences of sound audible if the words are uttered with absolute precision. Thus Tennyson in the ‘Revenge’ rimes Devon and Heaven; and thus Lowell in the ‘Fable for Critics’ rimes irresistible and untwistable. In ‘Elsie Venner’ Dr. Holmes held up to derision “the inevitable rime of cockney and Yankee beginners, morn and dawn”; but, at the risk of revealing myself as a Yankee of New York, I must confess that any pronunciation of this pair of words seems to me stilted that does not make them quite impeccable as a rime.

We are warned, however, to be on our guard against pushing any principle to an absurd extreme. If certain pairs of words have been sent forth into the world by English poets from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, then perhaps they may now plead prescription whenever any cold-hearted commentator is disposed to doubt the legitimacy of their conjunction. Altho the union is forbidden by the strict letter of the law,—like marriage with a deceased wife’s sister in England,—only the censorious are disposed to take the matter into court. In time certain rimes—falsely so called—“are legitimated by custom,” one British critic has declared, citing love and prove, for example, and asserting that “river has just got to rime with ever or the game cannot be played.” You must have forgiven or you will never get to heaven. “We expect these licenses and do not resent them, as we do resent Poe’s valleys and palace and the eccentricities of Mrs. Browning.” That there is force in this contention cannot be denied; but it must be remembered that those who urge it are necessarily lovers of poetry, or at least fairly familiar with a large body of English verse, or else they would not be aware of the fact that love and prove, heaven and given, have often been tied together. But even if these critics, who have been sophisticated by over-familiarity with poetic license, do not resent this pairing of unequal sounds, it does not follow that those who for the first time hear dove linked with Jove are equally forgiving or negligent. Even if these licenses are pardoned by some as venial offenses, there are others whose ears are annoyed by them and whose attention is distracted. In other words, we are here face to face with the personal equation; and the only way for a writer of verse to be certain that one or another of his rimes will not be resented by this reader or that is to make sure that all his marriages are flawless.

Thus and thus only can he avoid offense with absolute certainty. If his rimes are perfect to the ear when read aloud or recited, then they will never divert the attention of the auditor from the matter of the poem to the mere manner. On the other hand, it is only fair to confess that there are some lovers of poetry who find a charm in lawlessness and in eccentricity. A series of perfect rimes pleases them; but so also does an occasional rime in which the vowel is slightly varied. And the poet’s consolation for the loss of these must lie in the knowledge that he cannot hope to satisfy everybody. Consolation may lie also in the belief that any lapse from the perfect rime is dangerous, for even if there are some who enjoy the divergence when it is delicate,—that is, when the vowel sound, even if not absolutely identical, is sympathetically akin,—there are very few who are not annoyed when the difference becomes as obvious as in the attempt to link together dial and ball or water and clear.

And as it is only a sophisticated ear which enjoys the mating of valleys with palace, for example, so the attempted rime of this type is to be found chiefly in the more labored poets—in those who are consciously literary. The primitive lyrist, the unconscious singer who makes a ballad of a May morning or rimes a jingle for the nursery or puts together a couplet to give point to a fragment of proverbial wisdom, is nearly always exact in the repetition of his vowel. Where he is careless is in the accompanying consonants. As is remarked by the British critic from whom quotation has already been made, “we may observe that in all early European poetry, from the ‘Song of Roland’ to the popular ballads, the ear was satisfied with assonance, that is, the harmony of the vowel sounds; hat is assonant to tag, and that was good enough.” So in the proverbial couplet,

See a pin and pick it up,
All day long you’ll have good luck.

So again more than once in the unaffected lyrics of the laureate of the nursery, Mother Goose:

Goosy, goosy gander,
Where do you wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,
And in my lady’s chamber.

Leave them alone
And they will come home.

This assonance is visible in the linking of wild wood and childhood, which many versifiers have proffered as tho it was a double rime; it is to be seen again in Whittier’s main land and trainband; and it is obvious in Mr. Bret Harte’s ‘Her Letter’:

Of that ride—that to me was the rarest;
Of—the something you said at the gate.
Ah! Joe, then I wasn’t an heiress
To the best-paying lead in the State.

Altho this substitution of assonance for rime is uncommon in the more literary lyrics, which we may suppose to have been composed with the pen, it is still frequently to be found in the popular song, born on the lips of the singer, and set down in black and white only as an afterthought. It abounds in the college songs which have been sung into being, and in the brisk ballads of the variety-show—which Planché neatly characterized as “most music-hall, most melancholy.” In one dime song-book containing the words set to music by Mr. David Braham to enliven one of Mr. Edward Harrigan’s amusing pictures of life among the lowly in the tenement-house districts of New York, there can be discovered at least a dozen instances of this use of assonance as tho it were rime:

De gal’s name is Nannie,
And she’s just left her mammie.

He can get a pair of crutches
From the doctor, it’s well known,
And feel like the King of Persia,
When he goes marching home.

One husband was a toper,
The other was a loafer.

’T is there the solid voters
Wear Piccadilly chokers.

On Sundays, then, the ladies
With a hundred million babies.

To the poor of suffering Ireland:
Time and time again;
We thank you for our countrymen,
And Donavan is our name.

When these lines are sung, rough as they are, the ear is satisfied by the absolute identity of the final vowel, upon which the voice lingers—while the final consonant is elided or almost suppressed. It may be doubted whether one in a hundred of those who heard these songs ever discovered any deficiency in the rimes. In more literary ballads only an exact rime attains to the sterling standard; but in folk-songs, ancient and modern, assonance seems to be legal tender by tacit convention. When Benedick was trying to make a copy of verses for Beatrice, he declared that he could “find out no rime to lady but baby, an innocent rime”—a remark which shows us that Benedick’s theory of riming was much the same as Mr. Harrigan’s.

Probably, however, the attempt to substitute assonance for rime would be resented by many of the readers who are tolerant toward such departures from exactness as heaven and shriven or grove and dove. That is to say, the unliterary ear insists on the identity of the vowel while careless as to the consonant, and the literary ear insists on the identity of the consonant while not quite so careful as to the vowel. And here is another reason for exact accuracy, which satisfies alike the learned and the unlearned, and is also in accord with Herbert Spencer’s principle. It is true, probably, that such minor divergencies as the mating of home and alone and of shadow and meadow—to take one of each class—are not generally conscious on the part of the poet himself. Nor are they generally noticed by the reader or the auditor; and even when noticed they are not always resented as offensive. But just so long as there is a chance that they may be noticed and that they may be resented, they had best be avoided. The poet avails himself of his license at his peril. That way danger lies.

It is in the ‘Adventures of Philip’ that Thackeray records his hero’s disapproval of a poet who makes fire rime with Marire. Even if the rime is made accurate to the ear, it is only by convicting the lyrist of carelessness of speech—not to call it vulgarity of pronunciation. But Dr. Holmes himself, sharp as he was upon those who rimed dawn and morn, was none the less guilty of a peccadillo quite as reprehensible—Elizas and advertisers. Whittier ventured to chain Eva not only with leave her and receive her, which suggest a slovenly utterance, but also with give her, river, and never, which are all of them wrenched from their true sounds to force them unto a vain and empty semblance of a rime. A kindred cockney recklessness can be found in one of Mrs. Browning’s misguided modernizations of Chaucer:

Now grant my ship some smooth haven win her;
I follow Statius first, and then Corinna.

In each of these cases the poet takes out a wedding license for his couplet, only at the cost of compelling the reader to miscall the names of these ladies, and to address them as Marire, Elizer, Ever, and Corinner; and tho the rimes themselves are thus placed beyond reproach, the poet is revealed as regardless of all delicacy and precision of speech. Surely such a vulgarity of pronunciation is as disenchanting as any vulgarity in grammar.

Not quite so broad in the mispronunciation that makes these rimes are certain of Mr. Kipling’s, as to which we are a little in doubt whether he is making his rime by violence to the normal sound or whether his own pronunciation is so abnormal that the rime itself seems to him accurate:

Railways and roads they wrought
For the needs of the soil within;
A time to scribble in court.
A time to bear and grin.

Long he pondered o’er the question in his scantly furnished quarters,
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin’s daughters.

I quarrel with my wife at home.
We never fight abroad;
But Mrs. B. has grasped the fact,
I am her only lord.

Far less offensive than this wilful slovenliness, and yet akin to it, is the trick of forcing an emphasis upon a final syllable which is naturally short, in order that it may be made to rime with a syllable which is naturally long. For example, in the exquisite lyric of Lovelace’s, ‘To Althea from Prison,’ in the second quatrain of the second stanza we find that we must prolong the final syllable of the final word:

When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

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.

“Really the meter of some of the modern poems I have read,” said Coleridge, “bears about the same relation to meter, properly understood, that dumb-bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.” A master of meter Browning proved himself again and again, very inventive in the new rhythms he introduced, and almost unfailingly felicitous; and yet there are poems of his in which the rimes impose on the reader a steady muscular exercise. In the ‘Glove,’ for example, there not only abound manufactured rimes, each of which in turn arrests the attention, and each of which demands a most conscientious articulation before the ear can apprehend it, but with a persistent perversity the poet puts the abnormal combination first, and puts last the normal word with which it is to be united in wedlock. Thus aghast I’m precedes pastime, and well swear comes before elsewhere. This is like presenting us with the answer before propounding the riddle.

In comic verse, of course, difficulty gaily vanquished may be a part of the joke, and an adroit and unexpected rime may be a witticism in itself. But in the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ and in the ‘Fable for Critics’ it is generally the common word that comes before the uncommon combination the alert rimester devises to accompany it. When a line of Barham’s ends with Mephistopheles we wonder how he is going to solve the difficulty, and our expectation is swiftly gratified with coffee lees; and when Lowell informs us that Poe

... talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,

we bristle our ears while he adds:

In a way to make people of common sense damn meters.

But the ‘Glove’ is not comic in intent; the core of it is tragic, and the shell is at least romantic. Perhaps a hard and brilliant playfulness of treatment might not be out of keeping with the psychologic subtlety of its catastrophe; but not a few readers resentfully reject the misplaced ingenuity of the wilfully artificial double rimes. The incongruity between the matter of the poem and the manner of it attracts attention to the form, and leaves us the less for the fact.

It would be interesting to know just why Browning chose to do what he did in the ‘Glove’ and in more than one other poem. He had his reasons, doubtless, for he was no unconscious warbler of unpremeditated lays. If he refused to be loyal to the principle of Economy of Attention, he knew what he was doing. It was not from any heedlessness—like that of Emerson when he recklessly rimed woodpecker with bear; or like that of Lowell when he boldly insisted on riming the same woodpecker with hear. Emerson and Lowell—and Whittier also—it may be noted, were none of them enamoured of technic; and when a couplet or a quatrain or a stanza of theirs happened to attain perfection, as not infrequently they do, we cannot but feel it to be only a fortunate accident. They were not untiring students of versification, forever seeking to spy out its mysteries and to master its secrets, as Milton was, and Tennyson and Poe.

And yet no critic has more satisfactorily explained the essential necessity of avoiding discords than did Lowell when he affirmed that “not only meter but even rime itself is not without suggestion in outward nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray, strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, Nature’s triumphant vindication of proportion, number, and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rime who has seen the blue river repeat the blue o’erhead; who has been ravished by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary vault below?... You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fiber by your own sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought.”

Here Lowell is in full agreement with Poe, who declared that “what, in rime, first and principally pleases, may be referred to the human sense or appreciation of equality.” But there is no equality in the sound of valleys and palace, and so the human sense is robbed of its pleasure; and there is no consonance, visible or audible, between woodpecker and hear, and so we are suddenly demagnetized by our own sensibility, and cannot feel what and how we ought.

So long as the poet gives us rimes exact to the ear and completely satisfactory to the sense to which they appeal, he has solid ground beneath his feet; but if once he leaves this, then is chaos come again. Admit given and heaven, and it is hard to deny chamber and remember. Having relinquished the principle of uniformity of sound, you land yourself logically in the wildest anarchy. Allow shadow and meadow to be legitimate, and how can you put the bar sinister on hear and woodpecker? Indeed, we fail to see how you can help feeling that John Phœnix was unduly harsh when he rejected the poem of a Young Astronomer beginning, “O would I had a telescope with fourteen slides!” on account of the atrocious attempt in the second line to rime Pleiades with slides.

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.