A Short History of Rhyme in English

"And thou in this shalt find thy monument / When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent " (Shakespeare). Rhyme in English requires that two or more positioned words have the same vowel sound in the last stressed syllable: with different sound features preceding, the same sound features following that vowel. That last sentence is as much as a prosodic manual might want to say about the device, and yet there is more to say, albeit speculative, about the semantic relationship between rhyming units, about the early desynonymiza-

tion of language (no doubt a fiction) which the device seems to imply. The discovery of a rhyme argues, that is, the human limitation of language, its dispersal into separated sounds and meanings, and its lucky economies when, as J. S. Schütze said of rhyme in 1802, two meanings find the same sound.^[7] Might the rhyming words be related, somehow, in convergent meaning as well as similar sound? Some have wondered: Wimsatt, Hugh Kenner, and John Hollander have written on the phenomenon of semantic convergence of rhyme words; a linguist describes families of rhyming words; in a recent poem with rhymes of a planned randomness, Charles Tomlinson says that the chances of rhyme are "like the chances of meeting— / In the finding fortuitous, but once found, binding."^[8] That difference-in-identity of minimal pairs, batched at measurable intervals, creates a principle of cognitive eventfulness—except in rhymes like "proved-loved," Shakespearean, automatic, thereby strictly unworkable. (This is not to deny that "proved" and "loved" had a quite exact pairing of vowel sounds in the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time.) These extinct rhymes evoke not expectation but perceptual automatism in the reader, and I have called them Shakespearean as a rough way of suggesting that a poem's defeat of automatism—its making strange of theme and rhythm—is successful in cognition only because of a prior act of historical imagination. Bad rhyming comes of following routes closed off by literary history: not knowing what is prosodically possible in a given period, thus mistaking archaism for innovation. Examples follow in this chapter.

My study of device and modernity centers on the rhyming practice of the past quarter century in England and America. It hopes to subsume the knowledge of the whole history of the device which recent usage inevitably implies. (For the effective tradition at this moment is what we know of the tradition.) My version of recent poets' knowledge of tradition follows in this section; my aim in undertaking this history of

rhyme is to understand the origins of the present state of affairs where rhyme is no longer an appropriate synechdoche for the poetic fact. Richardson, Saintsbury, Lanz, and Pendlebury have performed the history of the progress of the device through traditionally defined period styles, usually associated with centuries.^[9] Now that we may rely on their valuable work, it is time for another history of the device. My survey describes a process that, within my own terms of reference (learned from such as Tynjanov and Shklovsky), constitutes literary innovation: namely, the era-by-era exposure of the device as a device. I shall not often describe how the device is abandoned, though that of course happens on occasion; rather I hope to show how a literary group or generation, or a single great writer in his or her work, regains the ability to use the device at will. Writers, so I argue, do this by unmasking the device, showing it to be merely what it is, and thereby dispensable. There is an objection to doing history in this fashion: it can be said that we find in the period previous to the epistemological-prosodic break evidences that prefigure an avant-garde intelligence, seeing thus, in the past, only ourselves. One response is that only after the epistemological break, and by virtue of its emergent historicism, are we able—with interpretive categories of some strength—to segment processes of change and variation before Romanticism.

Rhyme, a device of bold patterning, is an instance of that "shape as superinduced" Coleridge opposed to "form as proceeding." Its use in a given period will be a test of reigning conventions of traditional shapeliness. This has not always been recognized. The presence of a valid unrhyming verse since Whitman makes necessary, in fact, a form of history of the device which refuses to take the device as a neutral object.^[10] There is no time in the history of rhyme when this device was not a matter of contention, whether in practice or in prosodic theory. There are conflicting poetics of rhyming and rhymelessness, or of one type of rhyming as against

another. Usually the debate is between different sectors of a period's writers, but occasionally—as with Campion, Milton, Auden—one finds it in the work of a single writer. Incipiently the debate is present in any writer's work, and if one cares to look for them, there are hints of a fit of rhyme against rhyme in nearly every poet. Such contention seems necessary to the historical continuance of the device.

In a rhyme-rich language like Italian, there is perhaps too much that is unpardonably expected, so with major writers like Montale and Quasimodo, rhyme comes into very great disrepute. English is not rhyme poor: the code of the language permits and encourages rhyme, and yet imposes strict and conventional limits on the range of likely homophony. For example, it seems rhymes of the "prove-love" variety come into currency only by tacit agreement of writers needing the resource and willing to permit "eye rhymes" into the canon.^[11] Around this device, as around all others, there has developed a structure of convenient fictions which define its expressive capacities in a given period. These fictions can to some extent be specified. To compile a nearly complete record of prominent devices and their use in the present century would require voluminous quotation but would satisfy our craving for an explicit poetics. In the absence of such a document, and lacking any explanation from linguists as to why some literatures like Spanish or Old French can employ terminal assonance instead of rhyme, it seems imprudent to keep calling rhyme the differentia of prose and verse. This way of thinking is very likely another venerable convenience twentieth century practice has brought into doubt; and yet any account of the origin and use of rhyme in English must show the essential descriptive-normative role of such a concept up to the generation of Whitman, and indeed beyond. There are reasons for believing that far from being merely the "stub" of the line, as Vladimir Nabokov maintains,^[12] end rhyme since its first use has constituted the line and its meters. If in traditional verse,

rhyme and meter have in fact interanimated each other, it follows that without rhyme, lines will be built up and recognized by other methods, metrical and grammatical.

Though study of the sound systems of texts would yield good returns in any account of total meaning, we still lack a persuasive notation for the effects of sound which, even in mental performance, characterize the most intimate and speaking elements of a poet's verbal art.^[13] No wonder some still maintain seriously that rhyme is merely ornamental, an effect unrelated to meter, and that in any text sound is subordinate to sense. Again, because rhyme is still, in Harold Whitehall's words, "the most mysterious of all the sound patterns,"^[14] it is considered by many the unanalyzable quintessential feature—the most representative feature. Rhyme is seen both as absolutely detachable from and absolutely the essence of poetry. Such contradictory attitudes derive partly from the traditional mistaken notion that rhyme is not intrinsic to the line, an altogether simpler item than meter and therefore a diversion from the essentials of prosodic study.^[15]

In part, too, the difficulties are inherent in the device itself and its origins. Rhyme is, says Whitehall, "non-indigenous to most European literatures, and has apparently been acquired by us from some South Mid-Asian Semitic language by the process of acculturation."^[16] Rhyme was not a boldly prominent organizing feature in the ancient classical poetry of the West, and this fact conditioned its emergence in the modern vernaculars. The purely theoretical ictus of Greek and Latin quantitative prosodies was apparently a disincentive to rhyme. "As long as stress was ignored in verse, modern rhyme, which depends on it, was obviously impossible; it is recurrence of stress, not verse-ictus, which is needed for rhyme."^[17] The real beginnings of rhyme as we understand it, "harmonizing with stress-accent and supporting the rhythm of the verse, are to be found in the tenth century"^[18] —in Latin hymns, then vernacular hymns and leonine hexameters. So

the deep harmony of rhyme enters Europe at the same time as organized Christianity.

Since stressing and rhyming emerge in history at the same time, very likely in symbiotic relation, there is no prima facie reason to believe that rhyme has any less part in the constitution of the line than meter. "Nations who unite prose accent and arsis," according to one student of Latin hymns, "need to mark off their verses plainly. They do it by rhyme, the rhythmical repetition of letters."^[19] Now Georges Lote, the historian of French versification, says that rhyme in French as in Latin was "merely a means of helping syllabism by marking the end of the line."^[20] But even in a syllable-count measure like that of French, if rhyme marks the line's end, it must not merely help, it must constitute such a measure; meter, a principle of infinite expansiveness, cannot (in the period after classical prosody and before blank verse) brake itself . Lote admits as much, I think, when he remarks that in medieval hymns, rhyme "is a means of marking the end of the line in a way which would strike the ears of the hearers indifferent to quantity and to an accent of which the music took no account." If the hymnological hypothesis is correct, rhyme moves from Latin to the vernaculars in such a way as to implicate its end-marking function with the rhythm and syntax of the rest of the line. Perhaps, then, the end of the poetic line properly begins at the line's beginning.

Rhyme was destined to be more emphatic in English than in French because of its adding, upon the privileged position of last stress, the added prominence of harmonious sound. Perhaps with the lack of a regular principle of stress, French has from the start been less able to justify, or at least to emphasize, its rhymes; poetry in French reacted far more decisively than poetry in English to the early modernist war on devices, and now the fifty-year ban on rhyming and on syllable-counting measures seems to have become a simple condition of creation. From the language of Racine, of Baudelaire, rhyme

has more or less faded away as a literary device—perhaps for cultural reasons, perhaps because of the lack of a supporting principle of metrical stress. The device has been more tenacious in the language that received it as the result of French conquest.

There is not, as the result of Norman invasion, of change in the culture and language of England, of church domination of Europe, of the rise of vernaculars, any contention over the device of rhyme: this is the time of its establishment. Yet rhyme is very much an issue between the existing alliterative poetries in the native tradition and the end-rhyming poetries on the French-Italian model, which are emulated in the dominant dialect by Chaucer, for of course rhyme had existed in fraternal forms before the tenth century. In Old Saxon, Icelandic, and Anglo-Saxon, alliteration was structural, other rhyme incidental. Possibly the frenchification of English meant a movement of accent toward the end of words, or at least a diminishing of initial accent, making words more suitable for terminal-syllable rhyme. Despite the use of alliteration till the end of the fifteenth century in the North and West, rhyme on the last syllable of the last word becomes the norm in English since Chaucer. Assuming a social and literary superiority, Chaucer at least once mocks gently the alliterative verse of the provinces, and yet he also supplies in "Sir Thopas" a whole tale that exhibits the full range of ineptness in tail-rhyme verse (rime couée ).^[21] Chaucer once explicitly complains about the "scarcity of rhyme" in English, and elsewhere admits that now and then his lines "fail of a syllable." A recently deflectionalized language must sometimes have been difficult to rhyme into, and not even Chaucer could give English a display of virtuosity like the Provençal canzon or an intricate carrying metric like Dante's terza rima .

By writing in dominant-dialect English, with the end rhymes of Jean de Meun and Dante, Chaucer set the pattern of urbane literature for centuries. And yet end rhyme was but

one of several possibilities when Chaucer had just begun writing. The more various rhyme—rhyme in other places than the line end—seems to have been lost from the homegrown European literatures after end rhyme became the norm. Henry Lanz, a historian of this period's rhymes, rightly says that rhymes "gravitate toward rhythmically important places,"^[22] but he overemphasizes the line end as the line's critical spot. Beginnings and middles can be "ends" too, when they are breaking points of rhythm and syntax. Before the consolidation of end rhyme in the vernaculars, rhyming effects seem to have been more various and inventive than at any time since. The variegated usage of the past fifty years in English raises some doubt, at least, whether end rhyme is really the evolved and predestined highest form.

I am describing a moment of paradigm crisis and uncertainty. A poetic device fostered by the church in its hymns, and brought from France, is gaining influence over a strictly indigenous related device. For a time the two overlap, until the insurgent device takes over. The coexistence is also a form of debate, though never aggressively argued. Indeed so cordial are the relations between the differing prosodies, that on occasion they are employed in the same poem—either in the same line, as in Pearl , or in different parts of the same alliterative stanza, as here in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1350–1390):

An oper^[*]  noyse full newe nezed^[*]  biliue,
pat^[*]  pe^[*]  lude myzt^[*]  haf leue liflode;
For vnepe^[*]  watz pe noyce not a whyle sesed,
And pe fyrst cource in pe court kyndely serued,
per^[*]  hales in at pe halle dor an aghlich mayster,
On pe most on pe molde on mesure hyghe;
Fro pe swyre to pe swange so sware and so pik^[*] ,
And his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete,
Half etayn in erde I hope pat he were,
Bot mon most I algate mynn hym to bene,
And pat pe myriest in his muckel pat myzt ride;

For of bak and of brest al were his bodi sturne,
Both his wombe and his wast were worthily smale,
And alle his fetures folzande^[*] , in forme pat^[*]  he hade,
    ful clene;
  For wonder of his hwe men hade,
  Set in his semblaunt sene;
  He ferde as freke were fade,
  And oueral enker-grene.^[23]

The long lines in the body of the stanza are alliterative, but these modulate into the clipped lines of the closural "bob and wheel," also alliterative but rhymed as well. This wonderful stanza makes special use of its rhymes: the huge knight is first introduced and described here, making his entry into the poem; his most startling attribute, his color ("hwe"), reserved for the last word of the last line, clinched in with a startling rhyme ("oueral enker-grene," "entirely bright-green "). These intermediate forms of great beauty, as reinvented in the alliterative-rhyming verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, suggest that certain prosodic resources remain in our stock of forms, genuine but dormant.

After a time when Skelton's exuberant chain rhyming of short lines seems the most interesting usage, if not the most characteristic, the device of rhyme is exploited in many of its possibilities.^[24] Wyatt and the English Petrarchans of the early sixteenth century take special interest in rhyme as a tool for weaving together different lengths and quantities of lines. Now enters in prosodic theory, on the basis of an already remarkable achievement since Chaucer, the belief by Puttenham and Sidney and others that English "before any vulgar language . . . is fit for both sorts" of poetry, quantitative and accentual, unrhymed and rhymed (Sidney, Apology for Poetry ). Rhyme was, in fact, the one sweet new form of equivalence which the vernaculars had added to poetry (though Puttenham, searching precedents, recalls that some literatures before the Greek employed rhyme). So it was argued, except by those diehards who wished to expose the de-

vice because it had no classical sanctions and because, so they felt, it went against the very grain of the language. The antagonism against rhyme was in its origins a theoretical position, a nobly conservative and classical scholasticism in such writers as Theodore Drant, Roger Ascham, Spenser's correspondent Gabriel Harvey, and Richard Stanyhurst in his perverse translation of Virgil (1582). But the antagonism was also local and contemporary, in the sense that Elizabethan opponents of rhyme wanted to raise the dignity of English by shaping verse in elevated quantitative measures and were embarrassed at the pinchbeck chiming of rhymed verse. Yet after the 1570s antirhyme sentiment persisted into the era of the most magnificent flowering of rhymed poetry: deep dissatisfaction with rhyme was manifest in the development of dramatic blank verse and in the antirhyme essay and unrhymed lyrics of Thomas Campion. That Campion was, like Milton, a masterly rhymer, is not to the point. What interests is the need to expose the device and the polemical practice of the exposure, for these by an irony of history make a classicizing scholar-poet, Campion, one justification for prosodic experiment in the twentieth century. William Carlos Williams, especially, has admired Campion's pugnacious example, his search for rhymeless measures.^[25]

In the next phase of this history, the quarrel shifts from quantitative verse against rhyme to blank verse against rhyme. The curious violence of Milton's famous preface to Paradise Lost and his development of a flexible medium of blank verse for Christian drama and epic are the most notable features of the period after Campion. Yet others in different ways are plainly dissatisfied with the rhyming poetry of the period 1603–1660. Ben Jonson has "A Fit of Rime Against Rime":

He that first invented thee,
May his joynts tormented bee,
             Cramp'd forever;

Still may syllables jarre with time,
Still may reason warre with rime,
              Resting never.^[26]

The metaphysical poets, from Donne through Marvell, arrange unpredictable rhymes on taut, uneven-length lines; Abraham Cowley writes carefully asymmetrical stanzas in his influential Pindar translations of 1656; and we have in Richard Crashaw an amazing scheme of pet rhymes, where the poet exposes the device by working up his own system of rhyme-word associations, reusing rhymes as personal symbols.^[27]

The success of Shakespeare and Milton, both as rhymers and unrhymers, became for later generations a dilemma. The rhymed poetry was so various and rich as to make it strictly inimitable, while the great unrhymed achievement was in itself a sustained critique of rhyme. ("Milton, the unrhymer, / singing among / the rest . . . / like a Communist," shows William Carlos Williams identifying with yet another prosodic rebel.)^[28] Those conscious latecomers, the English Augustans, found a solution of authority and elegance. For forty years and more on either side of 1700 there was agreement that, thenceforth and forever, literary innovation meant repetition and correction of existing forms and genres. This was, of course, part of a project to fix the language of all communication: vocabulary, orthography, prosody. Exposure of literary devices, like all innovation, is now defined as correction; and the device of rhyme, used so wantonly by Elizabethans, will now be tamed and resolved into couplets. By that form of selective history which enables all poets to evoke their talent and protect a literary identity, the new style finds its precedents not in Donne or Shakespeare or Milton, but in Denham and Waller. Rhyme itself is not abolished, but merely renovated by regulation.^[29] In the first (and perhaps last) explicitly written poetics which has legislative force,

Edward Bysshe's Art of English Poetry (1702), permissible homophones are described, and, as an aid to writers, the appendix consists of one of the earliest rhyming dictionaries. Also the distances between rhymes, both of sound and position, are prescribed. Sound repetitions are to come at stated intervals, like perfect chimes: any unpredictability of sense or sound would be "harsh," or "rough," an uncivil prosody. Rhyme has of course its illogical, bardic or gothic element, perhaps most evident when it is used as the vehicle of a laughing irony. So for the Augustans there is all the more reason for controlling a device that—they perceived with restrained regret—was not present in the classical poetries they loved and translated. They had this dangerous device by precedent and it was not to be expunged, and so on the one hand they pretended rhyme was completely natural, assuming couplets were the mind's true order and discouraging other styles; on the other hand they controlled the device with the constraints of number and elision in the syllable-counted heroic line, avoiding similar parts of speech at rhyme position. Couplet rhyme, until the death of Dr. Johnson is, then, a peak of achievement gained by determined restriction. It is the emblem of vanquished difficulty and controlled violence.^[30]

The period style of English neoclassicism, from the start, was challenged in its uniformitarian prosody by Miltonic writers (Thomson, Cowper), Pindaric writers (Cowley, West, Gray), biblical writers (Smart), bardic writers (Gray, Blake), Spenserians (Shenstone), and balladeers (Percy, Chatterton). In the final quarter of the eighteenth century the heroic couplet seems a trick used by all, but used badly. No one comes to rescue the form or, after Johnson's death in 1784, to defend it in theory. The couplet seems increasingly inappropriate for the new meditative, topographical, or lyrical modes, and its decline, relative to the flourishing of the insurgent types just mentioned, helps to force a major prosodic break just before 1800. With the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads , the couplet

is devalued, and rhyme becomes one among several prominent devices, no longer the central device. So just when emphatic accent comes to modify strict syllable counting in the meters of poetry, rhyme loses its priority—and loses accordingly all blame for illogical, punlike disturbances of the semantic table of values. Very few explicit statements about rhyme are made by the Romantics, who accept it as part of a vast, complex inheritance. But they accept it on their own terms, since unlike their immediate predecessors they actively register the conventionality of the convention. Accepting the truth that rhyme is soaked in usage, their practice stipulates that, so far as possible, rhyme must express the very speaking tones of the writer. One thinks of the complexity of feeling in Coleridge's simple ballad stanzas; or one remembers the exuberant sound repetition, unthinkable a generation before, of Southey's poem imitating (through rhyme) "The Falls of Lodore"; or Shelley's decision to go for speed in terza rima, Keats's density in the sonnet or in the richly worked Spenserian and ode stanzas. Realizing that rhyme is a product of history, not of nature, the Romantics reinvent existing forms with a fine sense of how the device is limited and enabled by previous work: Keats goes to Dryden to get the sort of couplet he wants in "Lamia," Byron to Pope for the slangy tones of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." After the break at 1795, such a reinvention of the device, like its avoidance or its use in experiments, will of necessity express some degree of personal meaning. An unconscionable demand is made on the device, but one our major poets can tolerate: for over 180 years they have produced a highly conscious poetry in accordance with this demand.

In philosophy the historical break meant a shift from uniformitarian to diversitarian thinking, in critical theory a shift from mimetic to organic theories of the poem. In prosody the couplet gave way to a reshuffling of genres and to stylistic pluralism. After Wordsworth, and increasingly after Whitman, rhyme and rhymelessness coexist. In the work, for

example, of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, Lowell, Ted Hughes, rhymeless verse is abundant, yet these poets are best known as rhymers. Roy Fuller, a scrupulous rhymer for over thirty years, has published New Poems (1968) without a single rhyme, apparently seeking alternative constraints; while Edward Dorn, a poet very different from Fuller, whose early work is unrhymed in the school of Whitman and Charles Olson, has written wittily deformed rhyming quatrains as part of his long poem, Slinger (1975). Like the editorial decision to divide the poems of D. H. Lawrence by outer form into rhyming and nonrhyming sections, these are typical events in a period of pluralism. Poets now know that only when conventions are recognized as historically developed devices can they be used to the fullest extent as personal language. For these reasons, free verse, which displays modernity's exposure of the rhyme device in the fullest way, has by no means abandoned rhyme; free verse of merit has perhaps used rhyme as densely as many types of more traditional writing. Charles Olson has denounced rhyme in his essay "Projective Verse" (1950), but often in poems he relies on calculated deformations of the device. In fact, since Wordsworth, rhyme is not consciously a fighting issue on the part of those writers who have given it over as a legislative convention. Disputes will arise only when those who wish to prescribe rhyme for all poetry encounter the Romantic need to use poetic devices to throw a light on the conventionality of devices. We have seen how earlier eras have felt a similar need, but never so intensely, never as an organicist premise at or near the center of a whole literary culture.