2—
Rhymed Treason:
A Microlinguistic Test Case

Syntactically seditious, lexically anarchic: an arc of echo across unbonded, nonconfederate syllables—contaminating in the process that bastion of conservative poetics, the regularized forms of metered rhyme. Without in the least backing off from the claims of Chapter 1, we should now be able to watch certain of the verbal operations examined there as they get mobilized in a unique sort of rhyme, one engaged just fractionally before an echo is usually thought to set it. In play at such moments is the phonetically rough left edge (rather than merely typographically ragged right) of the rhyming cluster, an edge abrasive and absorbant: a lexical edging back. To move from the "unwritten" cross-lexical biplay in Chapter 1 to one of the most canonically inscribed of poetic features—end rhyme—should get the discussion, if only temporarily, back on common "stylistic" ground. But as the classic touchstone of poetic surplus, rhyme will also serve here as a test of phonemic surfeit, of segmental overflow.

We may begin with a radically unorthodox and entirely "modernist" rhyme, one that does not even adhere to the protocol of line endings. In Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Wreck of the Deutschland ," the line "She drove in the dark to the leeward" finds a rhyme for its last syllable, ward , only across the enjambment of the two subsequent lines: " . . . night drew her / D ead to the Kentish Knock."^[1] This is a leeward as much as a wayward rhyme, one that will go any way the prevailing wind takes it. Driven here to the point of morphological mayhem is a dismembering rhyme that treasonably betrays both lexical and metrical borders, resting on what might be termed a double enjambment: first between words, "w=[h]er," then between whole lines, "er/=D." A rhyming cluster edging or lurching backward is common enough, as we shall see, but an echo toppling forward like this is rare indeed.

To begin with the spectacular exaggeration of the latter is meant to throw into relief the overlooked frequency of the former.

It happens that three of the most important contemporary essays on the question of rhyme—William K. Wimsatt's "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," Hugh Kenner's "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," and John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason —all highlight the logic behind the nonincidental coincidence of sound, the variable semantic overtones that rhyme sends into reverberation.^[2] I certainly do not mean to discount the possibility of thematic links afforded and forwarded by rhyme, even though I will not here be pressing such points. This chapter is designed, rather, to register a break at times with rhyme's authorized grooves or tracks. Implied by "rhymed treason" is the kind of lexical insurrection that results from the overlapping, and so undermining, of word boundary in certain transgressive—namely, transegmental—rhymes. There are, it thus seems, more echoic constellations than normally admitted which need not be seen to be heard, nor even intended in order to be read. As a matter of fact, the whole argument from intentionality goes by the board if, within the undeniable return of acoustic material, we hear not only more than ever bargained for but more than can plausibly be absorbed within a given prosodic economy. Rhyme, that is, turns traitor to its own expectations, revolts against its own formulas, when its acoustic mass disturbs into recurrence more phonemes than the apparent verse contract requires. Rhymes generated by such systemic excess may be accidental, even counterproductive, but there nonetheless, audibly, they are. Thrust into the foreground by the force of echo, detached from the sole authority of syntax, such loosening through recurrence creates a fractional backsliding in a given line. Rhyme, in short, does not always toe the line ends.

More Than Meets the Eye

For the present purposes, the truancy of certain rhymes will help delimit by contrast a primary normative locus of phonological attention in the study of poetry, one too narrowly restricted to the regularities of meter and lineation. Then, too, rhyme offers an inviting experimental field on which to explore the sometimes discrepant work of graphemes and phonemes in literary (e)locutions—precisely because of its own long-acknowledged division of labor, at times, between eye and ear. From the "new"/"true" rhyming couplet of Shakespeare's sonnet 15, for instance, down through Yeats's rhyme in "A Prayer for my Daughter"—"yet not"/"distraught" (ll. 17–18)—there is a kind of rhyme that honors only the requirements of the ear, not the recognition of the eye. At the other extreme, of course, is the hypertrophy of lexically complete homophonic rhyme—called, after its more common French occur-

rences, rime très riche . An example from Chaucer, in whose Middle English such effects proliferated, is the homophonic and all but homographic echo in "The Legend of Cleopatra" of "liven may " with "rose in May " (ll. 612–13). By contrast, the nature of English orthography often prevents the instant recognition—unless pronounced—of such a subsyllabic homophony as Yeats's "not "/"distraught ." There is another way, as well, in which the graphic can mask or occult the phonic; homophony may go unnoticed in its full sweep because of lexical format itself, regardless of spelling. Certain phonic recurrences thus slink between ortho/graphic units as a surreptitious link. With the previously discussed tension between graphic and phonic signification in mind, consider now the common denominators of the following rhyming couplets, distributed across seven centuries of English verse:

For thus saith Salomon that was ful trewe,
'Werk al by conseil and thou shalt nought rewe.'
(Chaucer, The Miller's Tale,  ll. 421–22)

KNOWLEDGE. Your Five-Wits as for your conselors.
GOOD DEEDS. You must have them ready at all hours.
(Everyman,  ll. 663–64)

Sans-foy his shield is hang'd with bloudy hew:
Both those the lawrell girlonds to the victor dew.
(Spenser, The Faerie Queene,  1.5.5)

And lovers' houres be full eternity,
I can remember yet, that I
(Donne, "The Legacie," ll. 4–5)

Sees by degrees a purer blush arise,
And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.
(Pope, The Rape of the Lock , 1.143–44)

Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
There was no recognition in those orbs.
(Keats, "Lamia," ll. 259–60)

Came tamely back in front of me, the Drover,
To suffer the same driven nightmare over.
(Frost, "Our Singing Strength," ll. 44–45)

There are rhymes more or less apparent to the eye in every pair of lines except those from Everyman, where the imperfect mating (almost slant rhyme, even by contemporaneous standards of pronunciation) remains in a sense true to the eye only by being visible as a near miss. At first glance, the rhyming matter of these couplets would run as follows: "trewe "/"rewe, " "counselors "/"hours, " "hew "/"dew, " "eternity "/"I, " "arise "/"her eyes, " "absorbs "/"orbs, "

"Drover "/"over ." As such, the phonic consorts are not more exact than those in Shakespeare's "new "/"true " rhyme, for instance—just more visibly so.

But they are something more as well, something in addition, in lateral (and not immediately visible) accretion. They produce a different difference, as it were, between eye and ear. Rather than defying the eye, they simply offer more than meets it: a broader band of rhyme than appears at first glance. No handbooks or commentaries on rhyme pay any notice whatever to this accretive swath of rhyme, this magnetic force that pulls into its field stray phonemes. Yet it would surely seem that the audible—or, if unspoken, at least the aural—effect of these rhymes should properly be reschematized as follows: "trewe "/"nought rew, " "counselors "/"all hours " (or even "counselors "/"all hours "), "bloudy hew "/"dew, " "eternity "/"that I, " "arise "/"her eyes, " "absorbs "/"those orbs, " "Drover "/"nightmare over ." All but one of the rhyming pairs (where dy =hue actually "predicts" dew ) happen instead to begin with a lexeme that is answered by a transegmental phonemic cluster never gathering to a new semantic or lexical unit—but nevertheless urged upon the ear (even though unusable by syntax) by the preceding lexical model. Broadened from the rhyming minimum, these transegmental accords do not in any way render a more "perfect" rhyme—just a more dispersed one. They are not simply to be grouped with the condensed repetition of that rime très riche on "may" and "May" noted before in Chaucer's "Legend of Cleopatra." In that same tale from The Legend of Good Women, we also find examples of the more common rime riche . Such rhyme adds an initial consonant to the mere sufficiency of the closing vowel (or vowel-and-consonant) cluster, as in the parallel syllabic rhyme "usaunce "/"obeysaunce " (ll. 586–87) and even the subsyllabic recurrence of "atones " in "stones " (ll. 638–39). Between such "rich"—such fully invested—echoes and the minimal return of ordinary rhyme falls an additional accord—one unidentified in scholarship but detectable in the reading act. It falls there by falling between words, a richness whose enhancement comes by way of an extract from the adjacent term: a lexical lending as blending. In "The Legend of Cleopatra," as it happens, we do find such a compromise or median rhyme when mention of the queen's "purple sayl " is sounded against the "strokes" of the oars "whiche that wente as thikke as hayl " (ll. 654–55). This rhyme also includes a semantic redundancy capable of functioning in the larger sense of the line—as if, for instance, the oar strokes were exactly as rapid in their flailing as is the flapping of her windswept sail. Semantics aside, this cross-lexical echoism has passed beyond the formulaic densities of either ordinary or rich rhyme by falling between (as well as overshooting) them. It boasts a richness in excess of the minimal accord without being constrained by the delimited syllabic envelope of rime riche proper. It generates in this

way a destabilizing excess born of phonemic subtraction from the lexical precursor. Such a rhyming pattern, intended or not in a given case, is often nevertheless inevitable, given the nature of English "word processing." Or call it a rhyme only if it is taken as an intended aesthetic effect, an inadvertent echo otherwise: there it remains, between words, between them and the reader. There it is, after all, in Chaucer's "liven may "/"rose in May ."

The aesthetic acceptance of rime riche in both French and English poetry of Chaucer's day would in fact tend to encourage the sort of transegmental or assimilative echoes—as active rhymes—found in Chaucer's "for age "/"forage " ("The Reeve's Prologue," ll. 3867–68), where the charm of rhyme is not dependent on the avoidance of direct echo. This may in turn argue for the intentional force of Chaucer's "sayl "/"as hayl ." Aesthetically validated rhyme or not, however, the echo would be no less operable in the phonotext if the same line endings were found in Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats, poets in a modern English tradition not inclined to the symmetries of rime riche . Whether such later poets would have noticed these marginal phonemic assimilations and settled for them regretfully, or whether—in certain cases, from poet to poet and verse to verse—writers from Shakespeare to Tennyson, say, would have actively courted the increased textural possibilities provided by such a drift of acoustic iteration, this question need not escape the realm of sheer conjecture to justify consideration of the effects themselves. In roughly the place of rhyme, they offer more of the same, even if the same as different: formal rhyme lapsed (backward) to irruptive chime. It might be argued that such cross-lexical slippage is merely an aleatory offshoot of English morphophonemic structure, a risk of word division that has no formal place in English poetics between Chaucer and the modernist extravagance begun, roughly speaking, with Hopkins. Still, the inevitable slack within that locus of heightened phonemic sensitivity induced by rhyme might well serve to detect, once again, the roots of modernist disruption long before its systematic and canonical practice.

The issues raised by all such lateral play within rhyme begin in well-established theory and quickly move to test its limits. According to Jakobson's definition of the poetic function, rhyme shows forth as the most visible form of the "poetic" in a structural sense. To be sure, rhyme markedly projects equivalence from the axis of comparability ("profound," say, in its likeness to "resound") into that of combination (the sequence that laces them together as part of the same syntactic progression). Further, rhyme serves to activate the dead metaphor of axis itself as a real graphic figuration. The imagined horizontal armature of combination appears broken-down, pieced out, and stacked up, length upon length, metrically calibrated, until the vertical axis becomes visible (for the reading more than the seeing eye) at the right margin.

Granting that end rhyme thereby graphs equivalency as a vertical line of descent, at right angles to metered lineation, what then happens when this stacked axis of visible (or sometimes only phonic) accord becomes just slightly staggered, terraced, or tiered? Such variously telescoped echoes are certainly to be distinguished from the mere rhyming of a two-syllable word with the complete sound elements of two parallel monosyllables (usually called "polysyllabic" rhyme). The effect of a tiered rhyme, instead, is enhanced by the interlocking of two adjacent words at their border, whether for the augmentation or the concentration of the rhyme. The result is usually to widen the rhyme by attracting the closing phoneme(s) of a bordering lexical unit, by ligature; alternately, by elision, a contiguous phoneme may draw off its phonetic double (exact or approximate) in a way that isolates the rhyming matter into a more discrete node of echo. The linkage of words is performed, that is, either through an aural ligature—an acoustic holding over of one sound—or, instead, through a knotting up that bonds (in effect, by shortening) the phonemic span. In either case, a related musical term, the tie, would seem adaptable to poetic scansion as an invisible notation that overlaps and blurs words at their edges. Echoes generated in this way are the most purely phonic of all rhymes, defying even the intervals of script in order to forge an equivalence from the graphically discrete increments of combination.

Derrida's expansion of the category of rhyme to cover all the contingencies of iteration in poetry begins with a grammatological perception very close to the tenets of Jakobsonian structuralism. "Rhyme—which is the general law of textual effects—is the folding-together of an identity and a difference."^[3] Jakobson might rather stress the unfolding, the displacement of identity into difference along the track of the consecutive. But from Derrida's perspective, rhyme is certainly an exemplary codification: an identity within difference that derives from the simultaneous orchestration of chance and design, of randomness and rule, precipitating from its first term a difference never predictable in advance, a deferral of return along the axis of advance. But a crucial aspect of all this eludes Derrida's comment, if not always his notice as a "practical" critic. The axis of syntactic sequence, whether subdivided into metrical lineation or not, also involves another crucial difference within sameness: the homophonic ambiguities of junctural distribution. In tie rhymes, the axis of contiguity becomes the axis of perpetual recombination, a lexical successor recruited in part as adjunct or increment rather than merely neighbor of the word before. Difference is thus generated from within the sameness of the lexicon itself (a word's or syllable's supposed acoustic identity with itself). The options of rhyme are transformed (whether widened or compressed) whenever the boundary matter of one lexeme is recruited in this way for a new morphological combination, whenever it is invisibly con-

scripted into the phoenmic mass, but not graphemic integrity, of an adjacent word—regardless of whether any new semantic melding results. With a single word failing in this way to retain its phonic matter untainted by acoustic contamination, its role as rhyming unit may well be either to annex or to exile a phoneme or two in order to maximize its sameness in recurrence. The differential shifts within the increments of a syntactic sequence are thus, in short, projected as the sameness-within-difference of a rhyming play capitalizing on just such fraying segmentation.

Shakespeare's verse deploys or exploits—or permits, or at least fails to prevent—such drifting rhymes in both initial and echoing slots. When "In the old age black was not counted fair" is rhymed two lines later in sonnet 127 with "But now is black beauty's successive heir," the closural adjective of the first line predisposes the third to a homophonic (nongraphic) rhyme not just on "fair"/"heir" but on "fair"/"successive heir, " the latter possibility based on the suballiteration of f and v. Shakespearean rhymes also frequently work in reverse, anticipating across two words a spread of sound heard only in retrospect as pattern, here again at the added distance of an alternating rather than couplet rhyme: "Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue, / . . . And therefore art enforced to seek anew " (82). In sonnet 3, the expressed desire that the young man should reproduce so that his face should "form another" is contrasted in rhyme to that selfishness which would "unbless some m other." In this case, the transegmental drift of the rhyme is subtractive rather than accretive, signifying alternatively in the process—by way of that most loaded of psychological puns—both the woman he should inseminate and the genetic other and double he would sire. The arguable presence elsewhere in Shakespeare of that first example of a rhyming increment, that fricative adjunct in "fair"/"successive hair, " is entertained in a recent article by Debra Fried that offers one of the first signs in Anglo-American criticism of a willingness to surrender (at its edges) the hegemony of the word as a stylistic unit.^[4] This is the case even though in her essay, "Rhyme Puns," Fried nowhere discusses the implications for rhyme at large of that poststructuralist "overdetermination, indeterminacy and phonemic play" (99) to which she is so steadily alert. On the subject of old age in sonnet 68, Fried seems at first simply to agree with Booth in an instinct "to audit 'hair'" as well as "heir" in "signs of fair" (97), but it is her own gloss on his remark that further identifies the mechanism of "elision" (97) by which this audition is encouraged. To the catchall category of elision (rather than liaison) she also attributes her most striking later example of a rhyme pun, the "stroke of eight" that clangs against "wait" in Housman's poem about a hanging, A Shropshire Lad 11, only to knell further with overtones of the "stroke of fate" (97).

The guiding thought of this chapter is that the demonstrated presence of

even semantically un motivated and irrelevant rhymes will provide a stronger phonotextual basis for assessing and theorizing the effects of those lexicosyntactic "puns" and other combinational duplicities more decidedly foregrounded in the reading of literary writing. This chapter is thus designed as the laying of a groundwork—but precisely in order to demonstrate the shakiness of the textual foundation, the indeterminacy of graphemic shape when phonemically processed. From line to line, the unchecked match of rhyme in the paradigmatic axis can unlatch the syntagmatic, unfastening the locks of juncture from word to word. As it happens, traditional phonological structuralism appears to converge with deconstruction upon just such eccentric echo—that special case of rhyme which begins in departure from itself before projecting its difference elsewhere for iteration. The particular usefulness of these tandem rhymes in following out such lines of convergence between formal patterning and aleatory free play—following them straight into the previous impasse of stylistics, into questions of "voicing"—is that these (like all) rhymes speak, as it were, for themselves. They isolate the phonotext in operation. The cross-lexical slippages in Chapter 1 often had to be subsumed to meaning in order to emerge at all from the undulation of English phonemes. In the case of transegmental rhymes, however, meaning need not be invoked for the effects to be functional. Their randomness is thus dependent on no referential or thematic likelihoods except the undeniability of phonemic recurrence itself. What the ear hears in rhyme requires no surplus of meaning: this is the general rule. If transegmental effects can thus be readily admitted in association with already rhyming syllables, where no syntactic or semantic demands constrain the ear's acceptance of such phonic transformations, then their wider existence outside of rhyme, latent at least, must be allowed. The following chapters will elaborate on this corollary proposition after the present chapter lays the necessary groundwork. It must do so by situating its specialized demonstrations against the larger backdrop of received opinion about both the phonetic routine and the semantic machinations of rhymed verse.

Echonomics

Rhyme's reach, its breach, its treason: an accord syllabically heretical, (s)cryptic in the sense of being suppressed by writing. Such an echo is experienced only by voicing, either on waves of audibility or in the echo chamber of the mind's ear. In all his extensive scholarship on verse echo, including "polysyllabic rhyme," John Hollander tends to disregard, outside of comic verse, what we might term polyphonemic rhyme, operating as it does without syllabic check.^[5] The closest his own evidence draws him to such a phenomenon is with the off-rhyming couplet from Geoffrey Hill taken up in an

important recent essay: "Patience hardens to a pittance, courage / unflinchingly declines into sour rage."^[6] Quite apart from echo, the interest of the first two lines for Hollander rests with the way in which they implicitly develop a linguistics of their own generation through those "fabulous etymologies" by which poetry often operates: what he closes his essay by calling "chronic synchrodiachronosis" (133). Just as the ablauting of "patience" into "pittance"—with "forbearance shrivelling into its own pit"—has a metaphonetic dimension, so with the "diachronic" implications of "courage" as it "declines" to "sour rage," as if the adjective-noun phrase "were a suffixed, /au/- grade form, as it were, reflected in some latter day satem language" (129). Nothing, however, is said by Hollander about another (at least as likely) transegmental anti-pun—or antiphone—of "sour rage": the slightly less assimilative but semantically operable "sour age."

Hollander's own rhymes in the self-exemplifying verses of Rhymes's Reason do incline to such transegmental effects. After reading dedicatory verses that rhyme "I fill a " with "ancilla, " we later encounter Hollander's explicit attitude toward polysyllabic rhyme in a reflexive pronouncement: "A serious effect is often killable / By rhyming with too much more than one syllable" (14)—as in "This dimeter / Would limit her, " or in such later rhymes as "So pure a "/"caesura " (18), "seem a "/"ottava rima " (17), "a dime "/"paradigm " (18), "upon it "/"sonnet " (20–21). In extreme form, "polysyllabic" rhyme tends toward what Hollander refers to in The Figure of Echo as rime équivoquée (from the French tradition of the rhétoriqueurs ).^[7] Illustrated by Hollander with Théodore de Banville's "perfectly punning" lines, "Dans ces meules laques, rideaux et dais moroses, / Danse, aime, bleu laquais, ris d'oser des mots roses" (32), this is what Walter Redfern in Puns calls "holorhyme," the complete homophonic nexus—again illustrated from the French: "Gal, amant de la reine, à la tour Magne, à Nîmes / Galamment de l'arène alla, tour magnanime."^[8] Redfern adds in further demonstration a triple rhyme from Hugo—"mémorable "/"même au râble "/"mais mort, hâble "—along with the risible polysyllabism of Byron's "pukes in"/"Euxine" (100). Short of the drastic equality of the equivocating echo or holorhyme, the drifting or sliding rhymes that play to ear over eye—or, rather, that play off eye against ear—may be said to span a gap in two directions, down and across . They are thus found bracketing the horizontal as well as the vertical axis, cutting loose from the syllabic paradigms of standard rhyme as they break with the lexical modules of the syntagmatic sequence.

Before Hollander's Rhyme's Reason, Wimsatt's influential essay had also consigned polysyllabic rhyme to the category of humorous extravagance, to the "double or triple rhymes of a Butler, a Swift, a Byron, or a Browning." His interest lay instead with rhymes more subtly "logical." Building on Wimsatt's

approach, Hugh Kenner, in "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," distinguishes between "incongruous rhymes" and those "normal rhymes" that seem more indissolubly "mated."^[9] Kenner argues that in early Pope the former are reserved for satiric effect, the latter for "the realm of law" (82), asserting those "banal congruities" (83) that carry the force of received truth. One might take as an exception the early satiric passage from The Rape of the Lock, which Donald Wesling, in The Chances of Rhyme, has singled out as a supreme example of "chiastic rhyme."^[10] The disarray of the pandemonium described is nevertheless organized by close semantic correlates. "Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive," it is inevitable that "Beaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive" (1.101–2). The semantic distinction between purpose and sheer impetus implied by strive versus drive is parodically blurred within the rhyming format by the reciprocity of a sibilant elision—"s=(s)trive"—and a sibilant liaison—"s=drive." This interplay is then reechoed two lines later with the summarizing "Sylphs contrive it all," subordinating the crisscross purposes of Pope's preceding couplet to a nucleus of first cause in "contrive "—the "hypothetical morpheme" (Hollander's useful concept), or homonymic root, of drive and strive together.

Pope, master of the rhyming couplet, is the recurrent test case in criticism for interpretations of semantic and phonic accord. From the present vantage, when such transegmental slippage serves to inflect a rhyming pattern with some kind of referential bonus, questions of intentionality seemingly ruled out by the contingencies of English phonemic structure return intriguingly to the fore. Yet all one needs to allow is that the active lexical ambiguity and thematic force of such a tiered rhyme in the following example from Pope's "Essay on Criticism," for instance, is produced in the phonotext as we read, however the words that allow its lateral play may have come to be there on the page in the first place. The subject is Homer as source of inspiration: "Thence form your judgments, thence your maxims bring" (1. 126). From Homer take your lead: this is the imperative logic organizing both halves of the chiastic line, with the second half inverting the placement of verb and object after the adverb. The result is a plosive transegmental ambiguity across the drift of sibilance: "thence your maxims (s)p/bring." The suspicion that what is being described is a spring or fountainhead, a fluent source, a wellspring of wisdom, is soon confirmed by the fulfillment of this cross-lexical hint in the rhyming line: "And trace the Muses upward to their spring" (1. 127).^[11] Furthermore, if this undoubted tier rhyme between "s=bring" and "spring" is allowed by double grammar to supplant effect with cause even in the reading of the first line (the sense of "flow [from]" replacing "draw [from]"), then it would only ratify—at the level of rhyming logic—that very aesthetic "maxim" later to be articulated by Pope: "Men must be taught as if you taught them not, / And things

unknown proposed as things forgot" (ll. 574–75). Forgetting is here the very sign, in reception, of what is partly suppressed in the written text. The rhyming word that merely repeats the implicit by surfacing it—that spells out the unwritten vocable cloaked by its preceding scriptive alternative—can therefore be read to reverse the combined letteral forgetting of both an entire hidden "matrix" (a cliché like "the well of inspiration") and in particular the verb itself, "springs," that connotes such a source phrase. When that forestalled verb actually emerges into the letters of the text for the next line's rhyming slot, it is, like wisdom itself in the formula of that later precept, inculcated as if merely recalled to mind. It appears, in other words, as something we full well knew to—but immediately forgot to—expect, something we might well have deduced from the phonetic as well as the didactic context. Upon its arrival, we take it as given, given already by the phonic uptake of the preceding terminal wording. Pope's transegmental rhyme thus instances here—yes, whether he knew it or not—the whole didactic logic of his rhyming style.

Recurrent Tendings

In retreat from a premature and compromising semantics of the transegmental, however, in which only those echoes would be heard that are put to work, let us return now to the formative stages of that rhyming tradition in English out of which Pope develops his more systematic and masterly effects. In the "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, portraying the cumbersome headgear of the Wife of Bath, matches the mention of this burden with the described red of her stockings. He does so in such a way that the transegmental anticipation makes her costume seem all the more of a piece, the finery "upon hir heed " suited to the "hoosen" of "scarlet reed " (ll. 457–58). Of the Miller, along with the fact that "he hadde a thombe of gold, pardee, " we hear that "a blew hood wered he " (ll. 565–66). Moving into "modern" English, we find several kinds of transegmental rhymes in Spenser. There are those, like the already mentioned "bloudy hew "/"dew, " that seem like a phonetic analysis by decontraction, among which should also be included "brood "/"were wood " and "be (h)ealed "/"concealed " from The Faerie Queene (1.5.20, 29). Other transegmental rhymes can of course entice us with a semantic evocation. In The Shepheardes Calender, for instance, there is the hint of a "rhyme pun" in the way that "lyftes him up out of the loathsome m yre" (1. 92), though anticipating the rhyme word "admire," looks back to "so hie" at the completion of the preceding (and, we now see, incremental) couplet, which yields to the new rhyming pair by the addition of an /r/ to its recurrent vowel sound. The effect on the transegmental instability of the succeeding couplet is to suggest that "the loathsome" can operate as a generic noun for that out of

which one can only be raised "(h)igher": lifted, that is, "out of the loathsome (m)yre." Again we confront a semantic appropriation of syntactic form, managed by transegmental adhesion or assimilation even while motivated by rhyme: an anti-pun sprung by eccentric recurrence.

One inevitable result of this chapter's collection of evidence is to suggest how often, how inevitably, this will happen. Transegmental rhymes in Donne, for instance, can be as inconsequential as "doth us / thus " from "A Valediction: Of the Book," but we move closer to an active semantic drift in "A Fever." Beyond the title's homophonic overlay of a single adjective, afever, the speaker's "persever" rhymes with his insistence that he would rather "owner be" for "one hour" of his beloved "than all else ever " (ll. 26–28). What needs primary emphasis here is that, quite apart from any functional lexical severance and regrouping, the ligature of the s, permitted by the elision of the e, at once widens and tightens the rhyme. It does this regardless of whether we hear the phantom repetition of the word sever . Neither does the effect (given the transitional and not entirely regularized status of then and than in early seventeenth-century comparatives) depend upon whether one hears a functional double grammar in the expressed wish to own her an hour, and then (thereafter) to sever all else, all other ties. If the transegmental audition of rhyme seems to open the floodgates of such syntactic as well as phonemic rearrangements, to trigger major ambiguities by the least pull on a single word, this no more certifies than it denies the existence of the widened rhyme in the first place. It needs only to be heard to be believed, not recovered by meaning (any more than does rhyme in general). Precisely because the undisputed existence of rhyme in no way depends upon thematic correspondence, we are approaching the problematic operation of the transegmental drift within precisely this area of overdetermined (but not semantic) stress, the manifest (but not necessarily meaningful) sound play between lines.

To be sure, following Jakobson again, we can acknowledge that rhyme is merely a special case of the poetic function in this regard. Phonetic recurrences do not respect syllabic—even lexical—boundaries, since even the simple matter of alliteration is, in its own way, the cryptic anagrammatizing of a line. Returning to Donne with the stylistic work of David I. Masson in mind,^[12] we find that certain not uncommon pararhymes, often associated with a more immediately perceived terminal rhyme, approximate the "circumsyllabic sequence" noted by Masson in a paronomastic shift like Pope's "Why feels my h eart its long forgotten h eat ?" Related to the "circumsyllabic" paronomasia—or accord riche intérieur (170)—explored by Masson in such a quasi-anagrammatic bracket rhyme as Donne's "give "/"prerogative " ("A Valediction: Of the Book," ll. 44–45), or the more complex example from his Holy Sonnet 6, "purgd of evil "/"devil " (ll. 13–14). In such tercet rhymes as we find

in the preceding century in Herbert's "The Sacrifice" or Crashaw's "Wishes," the strain on invention and variety leads, as one might expect, to an unusual ingenuity in the recruitment—or felicity in the accident—of proximate phonemes within the rhyming span. An obvious ligature in Herbert's text gains hold on the phonic orchestration of "on high "/"to die "/"companie " (ll. 233–35). In Crashaw's "Wishes," one notes such transegmental augmentations (followed by dilutions) as "lye "/"mortal Eye "/"Destiny " or the more obvious phonemic declension of "grows "/"Morning Rose "/"being owes " (ll. 34–36), with the homophonic bond between the first and second lines reduced to a circumphonemic bracket in the third. Again, this density of syllabic and phonic overlay can obviously spill over into semantic play. In Crashaw's "Wishes," rhyme enters the semantic field almost by way of a tautological circle:

Life, that dares send
A challenge to his end,
And when it comes say  Welcome Friend .
(ll. 85–87; Crashaw's emphasis)

In the interplay of liaison and elision, one can hear—even see—the reduplication as either "dares send "/"his end " (allowing for the slight difference of the s of his as a voiced /z/) or "dares send "/"his end ." In the latter case, especially, the reflexive gauntlet thrown down by life to its own death is captured by the sense that our "daring to end" is the be-all and end-all of the circumlocutionary notion of "daring to send" an invitation to one's own death in the first place.

Rhyming Pares

No doubt the most widely recognizable example of such subtractive, reductive, or distillant rhyme, where phonemic matter progressively falls away to expose the homophonic core, is George Herbert's famous tercet rhyming in "Paradise." From the first stanza forward, the poem blatantly capitalizes, so to speak, on the sublexical increments of its rhyme. Announces the persona in gratitude to God, "I GROW" like those trees "in a ROW" that thus to "thee both fruit and order OW." The remaining triadic, eroding rhymes go as follows: "CHARM"/"HARM"/"ARM," "START"/"TART"/"ART," "SPARE"/"PARE"/"ARE," "FREND"/"REND"/"END." In Vision and Resonance, John Hollander terms this process "metonymic" echo, which would seem to imply the synecdochic detachment of part from whole. Herbert's poem makes "typically brilliant use of metonymic rhyming sequences to stand for the conceptual sequences they describe, the central device being one of seeming to extract each rhyme of a tercet from its preceding one, the corresponding trope in the poem being one of pruning" (130). Hollander stresses "phonetic

derivations" but admits as well the presence of "graphemic or scribal ones," since the reader "cannot audibly chop c from a ch cluster any more than he can prune w down into v by removing half of it" (130). What, on the other hand, the ear can do (though Hollander does not mention this) is actually to register the ampersand joining "hand & ART" in the central stanza: "I START"/"and TART"/"& ART." This would serve not only to vocalize it (silently) as and but also to soften the extracted "art" into a more nearly homophonic rhyme with the preceding line: d=tart/d=art . In resistance to this, one might well imagine that the conjunction, unlike its appearance in the preceding line (or in two later instances), is here rendered nonalphabetically, nonsyllabically, to avoid just that dental accretion which would spoil, by overcrowding, the clean descent of the rhyme.

Elsewhere, however, the de-escalation of the rhyme is not so strictly policed. A ligature may indeed, though rendering slippery a single rung in the contracting ladder, work to highlight its governing structure. In the move from "judgments S PARE" to "prime and PARE" in the next stanza, for instance, the elision institutes the pruning back of the verb, the paring away of its lexical excess, even before the compound verb "prune and pare" is dropped into the rhyming slot. And the elision operates in such a way that the "metonymical" link emerges almost as an etymological association—synchronic and diachronic at once—as if paring were the slowly disclosed first cause of anything spare . In the closing lines of the poem, another transegmental augmentation of the end-stopping "end" (as in Crashaw's "Wishes") also subserves rather than subverts the logic of the poem:

Such sharpness shows the sweetest FREND:
Such cuttings rather heal than REND:
And such beginnings touch their END.

Read phonotextually as well as visually—in other words, read rather than glanced at—the last line's opening "And" touches its own "END" by the diacritical variation of a single letter. Further, the closing evocalized rhyme "REND"/"theiR END" returns the last verse to the already mistaken idea of rending (actually a nurturing). Lexical slack becomes spiritual lapse: the transegmental overtone of the phonotext staging here, at the poem's metalexical climax, a miniature ritual of resurgent doubt exorcized by a prelapsarian faith in God's spiritual gardening. The idea of rending, that is, returns only as a phantom antiphone, denied at the lexical level by the visible or graphic logic of the whole poem, itself a teleological model of paradisal ordering and destination. Such is the return of a repressed religious doubt under the erasure of formal coherence. It is a spiritual hesitation put in its place by the last

fluctuant move of a grand, malleable, and pervasive design, a Creation in little.

Whether paring away to a phonic module or modulated by adjacent matter into a broader base of rhyme, such jointures are a recurrent, an irrepressible feature of rhyme—not only down through Pope but on into the next century, where the hegemony of rhyming verse begins to give way, regular echoes becoming marginalized as comic or satiric extravagance. Well before the Romantic decline of neoclassic rhyme, however, between Herbert's extreme experiment and the regularization of rhyming couplets in the eighteenth century, falls Milton's masterly variety in verse forms and acoustic schemes. In "Il Penseroso," for instance, the thematized acoustics of the rhyme "noise of folly / most melancholy" (ll. 61–62) seems to justify the phonemic self-consciousness of the elision of fricatives, purifying the rhyme to "of (f)olly "/"melancholy ." Even the blank verse lines of Paradise Lost do at one point happen to incur an exact lexical recurrence—though not a rhyme, exactly. The moment is also acoustically thematized in a way that releases a transegmental irony. Hollander's The Figure of Echo contains a fine extended gloss (43–44) on this passage in which Sin cried out "Death " as proper name in one line and two lines later, by inversion, "back resounded Death " (2.787–89; Milton's emphasis). Writes Hollander: "Hell's return of the word is the sound of revulsion from caves whose hollowed emptiness" becomes "a physical locus of echo," no longer pastoral and affirmative. The sonic contours of the scene capture all this and, I think, more. The resounding caves, filling their void with the name of all mortal voiding, do not register solely in the exact chiming of "Death "/"Death ." Taken as exposition, this is the sign of echo more than its work, but Milton in fact gives both within the immediate sound play of his phrasing—even if we don't hear the potential ricochet of "dead" in "resounded ." Given the dental assimilation in both halves of the rhyme ("out D eath" and "resounded D eath"), the second, answering phrase begins to stutter with its own inward echo. What we may well finally hear is the rumbling and ungrammatical resound-d-deth, a formal if garbled present tense (as in Shakespeare's "debateth with decay") for the eternal re-verb-eration of the abstract substantive Death, its deafening process in and across time.

Echoic Cleavings

As we move forward from Donne, Milton, Dryden, and Pope—each authorial surname merely the place-name here for the site of certain phonemic contingencies—into the frequently comic or satiric echoism of Romantic poetry, we come upon the exemplary syllabic ingenuity of Thomas Hood's light verse. There is the overt polysyllabic and cross-lexical spread of "dishonour "/"left on her " or "pitiful "/"city full " from "The Bridge of Sighs." In reverse, the

rhyme word in Hood can of course be anticipated by a collision of two predecessors: "morning c loud / so sweet and loud" ("False Poets and True," ll. 8–9). By means of ligature, the conflation of the voiced and unvoiced stops produces a covert emergence of the adjective from its denominated source. Oppositely, by elision, the abab rhyme in "Queen Mab" captures, partly through such sonic dispersion and recurrence, the ubiquitous magic upheaval of earth, sea, and sky: when "raging flames comes scorching round " and, two lines later, "serpents crawl along the ground " (ll. 30, 32). The first rhyming cluster could genuinely be heard—in its semantic, its syntactic, context—as a homophonic alternative for its actual scripted form; as verb phrase, that is, "come scorching ground" would fall into place in the larger grammatical frame. No less suggestive, even though not passing through any such moment of semantic availability, is a tiered rhyme from one of Hood's noncomic poems, "The Workhouse Clock: An Allegory," in which the persona wishes "that all the Good and Wise / Could see the Million of hollow eyes " (ll. 73–74). The contrast between the blinkered vision of complacent morality and the emptied stare of malnutrition and despair seems actually to hollow out the rounded first phoneme of "wise" on the way to the contrasting "w=eyes." In a graphic play between signifier and signified, these "eyes" thus appear visibly severed on the page from the w of the supposed "wisdom" that might appreciate and help appease their deprivation.

Byron's rhymes are often deployed in such a comic mode, whether in the explicit self-reference of Beppo, with its polysyllabic rhyming of "person" and "for rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on " (st. 52), or in Don Juan, with the proleptic rhyme of "all ears! " with "some leers " (9.78).^[13] Wordsworth would not seem to be this sort of poet, and he isn't, nor even a poet particularly inventive in his manipulation of rhyme, and yet a similar anticipatory echo haunts—there is no other word for it—a late sonnet, "The Column Intended by Buonaparte for A Triumphal Edifice in Milan." As the attentive soul "hears combats whistling o'er the ensanguined heath," the couplet is rounded off only by an eye rhyme in "What groans! what shrieks! what quietness in death!"—a rhyming pair that nonetheless reveals the very sign of "death" fluttering visibly across the windswept "ensanguined (h)eath ."

According to Donald Wesling's account, in The Chances of Rhyme, of the rise of modernist poetics, Romantic writers are situated at the irreversible crossroads of the rhyming enterprise. Opposed (like many of the Romantics) to the notion that "rhyme is the whole being of poetry" (132), Wesling nevertheless studies it as a signal ingredient of poetic transformation over time, a limit case for euphonic recurrences and regularized schematic patterns. Wesling's is as much an essay on modernism as it is on rhyme, using the latter as a touchstone for the more dispersed and experimental forms of

"markedness" in the poetry of the last two centuries. If, on Wesling's showing, rhyme is most productively understood as a special case of literary "defacilitation," then it may well appear that transegmental echoes—where the text is roughened to the point of lexical disjunction, retarded to the point of double take (when the effect is noticed at all, that is)—is a special case of defamiliarized devising. Transegmental accords expose the whole manufactured fabric of rhyme by drawing upon the phonemic additions or subtractions always incident to it—but rendered more graphically extreme in such cases across the zeroing out of the scriptive space between words. By being less overt than ordinary rhymes, by being in fact mostly invisible to the unaided (the unauditing) eye under the normal constraints of syntagmatic or lexical expectation, the echoic recurrence based primarily on liaison or elision thus lays bare the entire machine of rhyme's artifice. Since Wesling's book deploys rhyming practice as an index to modernist ferment, its commentary does indeed naturally gravitate to Romanticism as a watershed moment for the "chances," both local accidents and historical fortunes, of rhyme. If in Romanticism rhyme gradually loses its definitive hold on the poetic imagination, the transegmental drift further loosens the syllabic autonomy itself upon which rhyme has usually, in principle, been centered. The tendency in transegmental rhyming, more than in its polysyllabic cousin or even in certain rare forms of rime équivoquée, is to denaturalize the lexeme itself, even the syllable—to disperse both into their phonemic minims, their linguistic constituents. This microstructure of echoism thus falls into line with the other eccentric and elaborately reticulated sonorities of Romantic practice.

Keats's Lamia , one of the handful of self-conscious Romantic experiments in rhyme, was written under the immediate influence of Dryden's rhyming couplets. Though most of the paired rhymes sound more neoclassic, more cleanly paced and clipped, the following couplet precipitates a curious transegmental ambiguity; it describes the supernatural dispensation by which Lamia's beauty is "unassailed," in her invisible doings, by "the love-glances of unlovely eyes / Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs" (1.102–3). In the grammatical scattering of the second line, the intended sense is probably that Lamia is safe from the stares of such unlovely eyes as those of satyrs and fauns, as well as being spared the sighs of the drunken Silenus. Yet the misleading serial grammar of this line—along with the strong association of blurred or bleary vision (as well as of dull-witted drunkenness) in the adjective "blear'd"—encourages, at least subliminally, an elision of sibilants resulting in the extraction of a more exact echo: "eyes "/"Silenus' sighs ." This tautological echo, after all, would only operate to establish cause for the graphically stated effect, since it is the escape from all eyes that liberates Lamia from the insult of anyone's lecherous sighs. In a famous passage from Keats's earlier attempt

at rhyming couplets, Endymion, the rhapsodic and rather vaporous description of the "Cave of Quietude"—

O happy spirit-home! O wondrous soul
Pregnant with such a den to save the whole
In thine own depth.
(4.543–45)

—is redeemed by the telescoped sibilance ("wondrous s oul") that releases the transegmental rime riche (or its near miss) on oul and (wh)ole . Hearing this right off as a kind of redundant homophonic pun reveals from the start the sense of totalizing fecundity (or "whole"-ness) infused within the spiritual term "soul."

There is a more dramatic, and more typically Keatsian, threading of such effects in the "Ode to a Nightingale," turning on a rhyme that has been much debated in Keats criticism without any account of its transegmental dislocations.^[14] The knelling of "forlorn" that works to "toll me back from thee to my sole self " serves in the process to defy the fancy as a "deceiving elf " (ll. 71–74). In the transitional context of "magic" and "faerylands" from the preceding stanza, one may (half) hear "soul's elf" for "sole self." Echoing this, the exact belling rhyme in "deceiving elf"—that castigated and excluded alternative—both endorses such a directly polarized anti-pun and at the same time rectifies it in a single stroke of denounced imaginative escapism. Against the sensuous drifts of the ear, the inscribed rhyme may be taken to reconsolidate a genuinely sole or solitary "self" as antonym of "elf." The speaker's asserted subjectivity is construed as an integral being rescued from the invasive—here homophonically obtruded—threat of a preemptive double, phantasmatic and deceptive. Such an audition of the phrase explores in effect the underside of just the sort of critique leveled by Donald Reiman at "repetition of sounds" in even the "greatest poems" of Keats and Shelley. In a chapter on Shelley's style, Reiman alludes to Keats's alliteration in "sole self," quite apart from any hovering pun on "soul," as "a bit heavy-handed."^[15] Such heaviness is, on my hearing too, exactly the first impression created by the phrasing—and not just by its written sibilants but also by the heft of another s in the gap of homophonic transformation between the words. This is an extra burden that works to fracture the collocation under its own phonic weight—and by shearing force to generate a momentarily ambiguous slippage.

When Wesling moves forward from the Romantics, the lack of attention paid by his overview of rhyme's "chances" to such elusive phonemic displacements prompts the unqualified historicizing of a sentence like this: "The offkey consonant rhymes of Dickinson, Owen, Auden, and the later Yeats are clearly deliberate dishevelments, attempts to cut the sound sweetness of most

high Victorian rhyme, except Browning's" (120). Browning, however, cannot so easily and singly be exempted from the post-Romantic nostalgia for euphonic chiming, partly because of the phonemic mutations his prosody shares with the other more stately or harmonious Victorians. In "Youth and Art," Browning rhymes—or his text does, arranging the echo without authorial veto—"rankles" not just with "ankles" but with "her ankles " (ll. 42, 44), a rime riche obstructed only by juncture. The same ear—ours, if not Browning's—for the embedding of one lexeme within the span of another has, two stanzas before, generated a rather more Keatsian word play. Reminiscent of the manipulation of lexical subclusters in "Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd" from the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is Browning's "For spring bade the sparrows pair," as if—beneath the transegmental alliteration here—the natural imperative of such creatures were the homophonic verb form instinct in their name. So, too, Browning's colloquial dexterity with bold polysyllabic rhymes may be enhanced by a transegmental nudge, as in this from "A Grammarian's Funeral": "what it all meant "/"by installment " (ll. 106, 108).

Such tactics—or accidents—readily lend themselves to the contrapuntal harmonics of a high Romantic legacy, even while they afford a different sense, and a broader history, of "deliberate dishevelments" than Wesling intends when he lists Browning as a modernist forebear. There is a phonic disarray, a discord within lexical sequencing itself, that is (paradoxically enough) native to rhyming metrical accords. It is to be detected, as we have been seeing, from Chaucer through Pope to Byron and Keats—and beyond. We find it in simple form, semantically neutral and unobtrusive, forming no gratuitous new lexemes in process, in a rhyme like Arnold's "smoother reed "/"shall heed " from Thyrsis (ll. 78–79). The elision of the liquid r and the suppression of the aspirated h smooth the very strain of the rhyme to a purer homophonic core. In American verse of the period, Dickinson's irregular rhymes can readily tap into this phonemic instability. In "My life closed twice before its close" (J 1732), her text mounts, or at least permits, such an effect in portraying those mortal separations that, when they "twice befell, " are "all we need of hell, " that last portentous noun seeming to yawn from within the verb of simple occurrence, "befell," while making good on its inactive etymological underside of plummet. So can Tennyson, "sweetest" of the high Victorians, demonstrate this vein of phonic shifting, even within the regularizing constraints of the In Memoriam stanza. Tennyson's persona subscribes there to the belief of Hallam, that former poet of "divers tones, " that "men may rise on stepping stones " (ll. 1–3). Beyond the already "rich" echo beginning with the consonant t, the special aptness of this rhyming tie (or tiered rhyme) rests with the lingering, though entirely nonmorphemic, hint of "tone" in "stones"—apt, because the

very agency of human betterment in this elegy is allegorized as the surviving inspiration of the dead poet's "silent-speaking" voice.

Lines like this suggest why any periodization of rhyme should be pursued cautiously. Certainly it is too easy to limit the notion of "dishevelment," as Wesling tends to do, to a modernist aesthetic—or even to exclude the poets of high Victorian sonorities from textual disturbances incident to inevitabilities in the language itself. Tennyson rhyming may at times sound like T. S. Eliot avoiding it, or Shelley like Stevens. The Romantic energies of oblique rhyme are much in evidence as they inflect the complex scheme of the second stanza of Adonais, which unfolds from an interrogation (addressed to Urania) about the conditions of death: "where was lorn Urania / When Adonais died?" (ll. 12–13). The answer is conveyed by a set of rhymes that seem so deeply contaminated by the matrix verb "die" that they proceed almost involuntarily to reveal its third-person singular form, first by means of a transegmental adjustment of juncture and then by a syllabic disintegration of the lexeme. Urania sits "with veiled eyes, / 'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise " (ll. 13–14), and there, a line later, "Rekindled all the fading melodies, " with rhyme an aural form of such rekindling. Two centuries before, Donne's "Who though from heart, and eyes / They exact great subsidies " ("A Valediction: Of the Book," ll. 43–44) displays a similar ligature securing a widened spread of rhyme. It does so, however, with none of the semantic charge that Shelley's lines manage at once to bury and to detonate in those echoes from Adonais, when the past tense "died" seems to saturate the transegmental rhyme scheme with supernal traces of a still present dying.

Even more crucial to the thematic resolution of its text is the closing aberrant rhyme of "Mont Blanc." In the speaker's apostrophe to the absconded power source of the mountain, the title's potential pun on "Mon Blanc" (for the imaginatively impregnable blank of nature when received into the mind) is at last thematically—and transegmentally—foregrounded:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
(ll. 142–44)

Even before the rhyming word, the emptiness that threatens is felt in the lurking specter of "dearth" in the first juncture, "and earth. " Adducing the final echo to illustrate how the highly irregular and displaced rhymes throughout "Mont Blanc" subserve the thematic emphasis on that "sound no other sound can tame," those voices issuing from the heights and recesses of power, William Keach, in Shelley's Style , asks whether the trisyllable "vacancy" can

"belong in the rhyming sequence with 'thee' and 'sea.'" His answer: "It both does and does not: the '-cy' suffix rhymes with 'thee' and 'sea', but imperfectly because it is rhythmically unstressed and because it is attached to the root vacan(s) ."^[16] The poem's last word thus "seems both to yield to and to resist the rhyming power of the compositional will" (200). The "imperfect" rhyme might on this account be said to introduce a dissonance into the whole consort of rhyme, a precarious reverberation from its own subjunctive fear ("What if?") of a spiritual nonaccord with the physical universe. But Shelley's closing lines are framed as a question, to which one possible response is that the mind does indeed rhyme with the universe. And so does "vacancy" rhyme in its own way as well. Keach characterizes it simply as "unstressed," unlike "and sea," a trisyllabic word that would get no terminal emphasis in the normal (nonversified) pronunciation of its last syllable. But more than the imposition of an iambic measure helps to secure Shelley's final accord, perhaps the single most arresting transegmental echo in the whole Romantic period. In the first of the two would-be rhyming lines, that is, there is an encroachment not just from phoneme to phoneme across an ambiguous syllabic break but from word to whole word. Emerging there—from within the very vacancy of spacing as transcended alone by reading —is, after all, the full, the overfull, rhyme of "stars and sea "/"vacancy ."

Though this effect may sound closer to a polysyllabic rhyme out of Byronic satire than to lyric high seriousness, it is deployed by Shelley as part of the unsettling urgency of the closing question. Neither the textural nor the metatextual resources of rhyme are exhausted in elevating the imperfect of one word to a metaphysical crux, to a problematizing of language in its power to order phenomena. Since the problem is itself bipartite, concerned with the interrelation of mind and nature, that component of the rhyme which establishes the ground of the latter ("earth, and stars, and sea") should be given equal weight with the noun of potential subjective decimation ("vacancy"). Phonemic undecidability has thus located the crisis, rhyme courting the danger the text's fluctuations can move to cure. It is in this sense that the topography of the rhyming phrase describing the natural landscape enters upon the inscribed metadrama of the closing rhyme. A disjunction between sight and sound privileges yet again the power of unseen harmony in the poem. In so doing, it anticipates the unorthodox rhyme word to follow ("vacancy") by exercising the lexical blank ("and-sea") for meaning. And it is precisely the graphonic force of this syllabic play, the intervallic transformations of its phrasing, that makes Shelley's largest metaphysical point for him. In the sweep of the mind over "stars, and sea," the very syntactic interval or break—requiring "conjunction"—rules out the facile fusion which would chime too closely with an imaginatively impoverished "vacancy." It is thus in

Shelley that we come to hear how Mon(t) Blanc remains perpetually available to be filled in by imagination's various engagements with the gap. Blanks represent hiatus, not void, a secret source in nature mated to a waiting hollow in the mind, a source imagined yet again as fecund, reverberant, eternally renewed.

Rays of Iteration

Hopkins's rhyming practice, as part of his larger system of grammatical torque and lexical strain, may be taken to mark one point of transition from nineteenth-century sonority, or its comic opposite, to a more irregular modernist texturing of the line. In a literary history conceived apart from influence, Hopkins leads through the early poetry of Joyce to the gyrating phonotext of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . At the same time, in a way that recalls the starting point of these chapters in a Shakespearean "hearing with eyes," James Milroy's study of Hopkins introduces "gradience," its most comprehensive term for the poet's concatenated sound effects, at the conclusion of a chapter entitled, with a phrase borrowed from Hopkins, "Read with the Ear."^[17] The term "gradience" is accompanied by an example directly pertinent to the transegmental effect, both in rhyming patterns and elsewhere. Its subsequent exposition, however, offers an unusually compact example of the artificial limits imposed, even in linguistically oriented criticism, upon hearing with the ear. The example, from stanza 26 of "The Wreck of the Deutschland, " is "The down-dugged / ground-hugged / grey," and Milroy uses it to illustrate his claim for "gradience" as "a kind of extended 'rhyming'" (148), the later term including internal as well as terminal echoes—assonance, consonance, and so forth. If a potential auditory recurrence actually threatens the lexical integrity of the graphic sequence, if it operates out of phase with the lettered sense, it is regularly suppressed. Hence the second hyphenated phrase, "ground-hugged," is said by Milroy to "abandon" (148) the d alliteration, when precisely what seems most Hopkins-like about the mounting sequence and its gradient escalation is the alliterative identity-within-difference, the incremental variance, provided by the ligature between d and the consequently less aspirated h in "groun-d=hugged."

Only in Hopkins would one tend to find such a phrase in a syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic relation to its alter ego, each collocation the phonic paragram—or internal slant rhyme—of the other as actively manifested in the text. In the case of "leeward / drew her / D ead," the dismembered rhyme with which this chapter began, Milroy is enticed only by the expectancies, the exigencies, of rhyme to find congruence around the acoustic edges of the scripted lexemes and lineations that produce this perverse (transegmental) enjambment. By contrast, supplemental rhyming matter at the other end of

terminal phrases—that is, occurring between lexically banded terminal syllables and the preceding phonemic (but sublexical) material of a given line—slips past Milroy without comment. Such effects thus miss their chance, in Milroy's hands, to illustrate a larger phonic principle of Hopkins's verse. In a mode of "gradience" reversing the manner of Milroy's previous example, there is a typifying internal rhyme in "The Starlight Night." From the two words "diamond d elves!" is thereby generated the possessive collocation "elves' eyes," where the internal echo is either precipitated by the former phrase or "delved" from within it. Either way, it is produced by an elision at the double d juncture—as if the "inscape" (Hopkins's famous term for the inner contours of both language and things) of "delves" is discovered as the very haunt of elves, playing phantasmatically within its verbal borders—Keats's "s/elf" in a new and pluralized phonemic habitat. The effect in linguistic terms remains a transegmental slippage between, however, rather than an inherence within: a swallowed d here, as above a forwarded d in "ground-hugged." Hopkins's end rhymes, as well as such internal echoes as we have just examined, also benefit from a similar phonemic motility, including the bidirectional drift from "The Escorial" where "Gothic grace " rhymes with "engemming rays ." The assimilative liaison of c with g releases "race" to a closer slant rhyme with "rays," while at the same time the preceding g from "engemming" slides both out from under its velar bond in ng (/h /) and across the lexical hiatus to expand ("enrich") the rhyming nucleus just distilled. It is again as if the radiance of "rays" were somehow part of the inscape of "grace" to begin with.

The metaphysical suggestion there is achieved by precisely that auditory physics which Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist, will call the "rays of rhyme" (218)—and which he will exploit by means of transegmental ingenuities from his early poems through to the embedded rhymed verses in Finnegans Wake . The satiric passage in Ulysses in which Bloom compares Shakespeare's ingenuity to the routine rhymes of ordinary poets, who in effect gull us with such dull rhymes as "gull"/"dull" (Ulysses, 125), exemplifies a negative standard for Joyce's own less prepackaged rhymes. In "A Flower Given to My Daughter," Joyce's early text sets in echo to "Frail the white rose and frail are " the line "Whose soul is sere and paler ."^[18] This tendency has mutated by the time of Finnegans Wake into such full-blown polyphonic rhyming in his italicized verse inserts as "philosopher "/"top of her " (47.1–2), "from on Hoath "/"upon Oath " (175.14–16), "story ends "/"orience " (418.29–30), or the more blatantly false rhyme "red her"/"feather" (383.12–13). At one point in the Wake, the semantic pressure of rhyme actually triggers a phonemic slippage just before the terminal syllable, when "At Island Bridge she met her tide " is answered a line later with "The Fin had a flux and his Ebba a ride " (103.1, 3), the latter inevitably eliding to "his ebb a ride."

In between Joyce's early poetry and the late interpolated verses of the Wake comes the famous villanelle in the Portrait, its preparation laid in the younger Stephen's earlier bursts of compositional free play and phonemic progression. From the first, Stephen interrogates his own half-conscious effusions. In a daydreaming manner he has concocted some doggerel lines: "The ivy whines upon the wall / And whines and twines upon the wall " (179). But immediately he asks himself, "Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall?" The reader "hears" more than this, however, and hears it in a literary-historical context that expands our sense of the verbal dispensation within which Stephen's inchoate word-spinning is to be understood. Hopkins's poetry had not yet been published, so there is thus no question of direct influence. Along with Lewis Carroll, however, Hopkins is the great forerunner of the Joycean portmanteau term. As with the transegmental logic behind Hopkins's portmanteau wording from "Inversaid," the phrase "turns and twindles " arranged to reveal its appropriate overtone of "dwindling," so too with Stephen's "And whines and twines upon the wall ." Beyond the probable free association of "whine" with the "vine" of ivy, dental ligature parallels dental elision to generate across the combinatory logic of syntax, and even of lexical articulation, the approximate equivalence of "d=whines" with "d=twines."

It is the same ear for covert phonic accords beneath scripted patterns that culminates in Stephen's morning composition of his villanelle, including the tandem rhyme of "will of him " with "seraphim " (217; Joyce's italics). Stephen's self-consciously shaped exercise in rhyming schemes is characterized in its final rendition by what his accompanying stream of consciousness prose calls "liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery" that "flowed forth over his brain" (223). The contradictory signals of "letters" and "speech" track the graphonic play not only of the villanelle but of Stephen's whole verbal imagination—half incantation, half inscription—as it is captured here in its transit from mental conjuration to the act of transcription. It is in this way that his poem "sent forth its rays of rhyme: ways, days, blaze, praise, raise" (218). That last word is heard circling round in its own homophonic rhyme to the very metapoetic trope of "rays" initially devised to figure the echoic process itself. It is, moreover, this same radiation of a sounds (ai, a, ai ) that seems finally to lie behind the transegmental paring back (through elision) of that rhetorical question four times refrained: "Are you not weary of enchanteD Days? " The poem's self-examined array of rhyme is one mark of a poetic indulgence whose overcoming in the later style of Joyce is here virtually glimpsed—for a split second, a split monosyllable—in the technique of its own phonic deconstruction. Not for later Joyce the measured luxurious recurrences of such lapidary rhymes, with their enchanted and enchained string of incantatory a 's.

As early as the Portrait, Joyce steps back from the celebratory securities of this aesthetizing view, even while he employs the transegmental mechanism that foregrounds it in the elision of "enchanted (d)ays." His text manages, if momentarily, the play between graphic and phonic signification, between typography and sonority, that begins to expose and unravel the over-schematized rhymes of the villanelle. His junctural ingenuity serves at the same time, in a passage of more mysterious mellifluity yet, to offer a liquefied lettering of speech in a covert vocalization: "A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters" (225–26). Here are the rays of an interior slant rhyming that has naturalized the strained phonic gradience of Hopkins within the lyricism of a distended modernist syntax. It is in a prose-poetic passage like this, rather than in the anachronistic finesse of the villanelle, that Joyce begins to cut those stylistic grooves that will produce the graphonic cacophony of his later works.

"A Matter of Nice (S)pacing"

The great follower of Joyce in this phonemic hypertrophy of verbal texture is not Beckett, his heir in so many things, but Nabokov. There is the character (and novel) whose name is a telescoped phonetic transcription of the metalinguistic account of his very conception: punning (punnin') as Pnin . And the subtitle of a later novel blends transegmentally with the main title in a manner that summons in advance the mirror wor(l)ds of the plot: Ada; or, Ardor, as if the first two words together, name plus conjunction, spelled the verb form "Adore." In the text of Pale Fire —half poem, half novelistic gloss—a phrase like "limp blimp"^[19] plays less obviously, but no less functionally, with a collapsed junctural irony. Beyond the internal echo of the phrase, its abutting rhyme, is the reciprocal (and transegmental) subtraction of immediately adjacent phonemes, which in their very articulation can be said to take some of the plosive air out of this "limp (b)limp" of a phrase.

The closeness of this collocation, for instance, to the quasi-onomatopoetic word chains in Hopkins—as might be continued, say, with simp, skimp, pimp, primp, pimple, dimple , and so on—begins to suggest a common denominator between the two writers (along with Joyce) in their sense of textual increments. James Milroy relates the manifold devices of Hopkins's internal accords and "complex phonetic play," including "alliteration, vowelling-off, skothending , assonance and internal rhyme," to "the old word-game whose object is to progress from one word to another . . . through a series of words formed by changing one letter of the previous words" (105). Sometimes called "metagram" (to borrow the term we will find Raymond Roussel adopting in

allusion to just such games) and related to classical rhetoric's "metaplasm" (the transformation of a word by addition or subtraction of a letter), this is exactly what Nabokov in Pale Fire calls "word golf," illustrating it by the challenge to transfigure "live" into "dead" in just five moves, passing through "lend" (262). This is not only a metalinguistic allegory for that easing over from life into death which guides the novel's whole plot trajectory, nor in addition simply a parable of the "lending" and borrowing of letters that indeed negotiates the transformation between these monosyllables, but also a deeper-going reflexive commentary on the textual conditioning of any thematically momentous transit: as always, in some sense, a mere play on words, a cumulative interchange of signifiers lent out within the economy of difference.

More explicit play with juncture—not just with such eroded borders as in "limp blimp," but with the actual segmentalizing and recombining of terms—might be called a metaplasm of the blank itself, a plasticizing of the lexical gap. By such means, for instance, the obscure word "grimpen" becomes in the course of a given line the textual tool itself, a "Grim Pen" (l. 368). And for a latter-day instance of Hopkins-like "gradience," we find on the first page of Pale Fire "the gradual and dual blue / As night unite s the viewer and the view" (ll. 17–18). Phonemic play is there doubly thematized as the graduation of visual tonality in one line and as unison through nondistinction in the next. Such is the inscape of coincidence (of lexical coincidings) in Nabokov's anything but fortuitous chiming. It is related to the prose play in the preceding novel, Lolita , on one word differentiated into two, a game that deconstructs the very psychoanalytic model of the erotic situation: "The rapist was Charlie Holmes. I was the therapist—a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction" (2.1)—or for that matter, of nice distinction in the way of spacing.

In Pale Fire Shade and Kinbote, the poetic and editorial genius initially bifurcated for analysis, seem ultimately to converge—at least to the extent that each aestheticizes the verbal accident, the happy fault, the balletic slip. Both revel in a delectation of the verbal weft which is "based upon / A feeling of fantastically planned / Richly rhymed life" (ll. 968–70). The allusive twist here on rime riche notwithstanding, the actual rhymes of Shade's poem evoke something more subversive and unconstrained than "Echo's fey child" (l. 968). There is a weird fatalism as well as whimsy at work, which turns reading itself into a kind of paranoia. It is an apprehensiveness curiously matched by Kinbote's replotting of the poetic text as his own prolonged flight from death into textual immortality. To submit to the text as an occasion of paranoia is no longer to trust your senses. Words can't be relied on to stay in their scripted place. Their constituent phonemes may at any moment contract new allegiances, forge new words, or if not words, then unprocessed but palpable new sound configurations that subtend or overarch the lexical bound-

ary without stabilizing any alternative phrase. Single rhyme words in the poem of Pale Fire may extend themselves backward in this way, in tandem rhymes reminiscent of Hopkins—though with less mannerist contortion, more comic snap. Nabokov's approach to the mystical coincidence latent in rhyme or echolalia is primarily through a transfiguration of the mundane. His rhyming inscapes are for the most part vernacular rather than baroque. Both phonetically overdetermined and liberated at the same time from the predictable boxing off of the prescribed syllabic unit, such treasonous rhyme quickly puts the reader on nervous alert. A given rhyme may already be upon us, so to speak, before we realize it, as in the thematized paranoia of an erotic snare when Shade, confronted with an unknown woman's "freckled hands, that rapt / Orchideous air," immediately "knew that I was trapped " (ll. 771–72). The context is of course heightened by that portmanteau "orchideous," a parodistic coinage by which the effect of revulsion is recognized as inextricable from its hideous floral cause. Otherwise thematized, the complex echo can be timed to a scene of mirroring in which the slippage between words is reciprocal, impossible to pin down: "the mirrors smiled, / The lights were merciful, the shadows mild " (ll. 361–62). The rhyme gets the better of itself coming or going. Either an elision extracts "mild" from "smiled," or, if a liaison is instead felt to thicken the sibilant in the first line, then another liaison may work to extend the rhyme backward in the second. Such undecidable phonic drifts are only the more pertinent in this case for rendering ambivalent the exact dimensions of the echo, since smiling is simply a metaphor in the first place for the ameliorated mirror image in soft light.

Less perfect thematic matches may also result from interlexical phonemic slippage. These may destabilize further the reading effect, given that their phonetic overdetermination is neither confirmed by the scripted letter nor possible to shake off altogether. In the following pair of examples—"dance "/"its stance " (ll. 913–14); and "stress "/"woman's dress " (ll. 951–52)—the closeness of dental phonemes connives respectively to extend and contract the rhymes (and in both cases to intensify them—in the first case, by elision; in the second, by liaison) across adjacent but gaped sibilants. In another place, a dental sound may itself provide the shifting piece of the subliminal phonemic puzzle: "no doubt, "/"left out " (ll. 307–8). A minimal ambivalence of dental sounds can elsewhere abet a classical instance of what Wimsatt, Kenner, or Hollander might all agree to call rhyme's reason, despite its unorthodox procedures. To wit, the question about "what dawn, what death, what d oom / Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?" (ll. 175–76). In another ambiguity of dental articulation, again associated with death, a drifting t functions in a lexically seditious mode in Shade's false "syllogism," the contention that (his italics) "other men die but I / Am not another; therefore I'll not die " (ll.

213–14). At such loaded moments, the very otherness of language—every signified sliding into the signifier of yet some other referent—betrays the self into exactly the excision it would protest against. The couplet following this serves to gloss such a metalinguistic condition more directly than might at first appear, unless one is reading already with an unnerved ear:

Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears. In this hive I'm
Locked up.
(ll. 215–17)

With that threefold repetition of the I sound (or /ay/ diphthong) in the preceding syllogism, Shade might well be punningly implying that the space of identity is "a-swarming in the I's," just as time is "a-singing in the ears." Given the stress on first-person pronouns, there is also, with "In this hive I'm," the momentary phonemic expectation of "In this I've . . ."—what, come to believe? This to one side, though (as, indeed, it is in the horizontal axis of syntax), there follows that last contraction into the monosyllable "I'm," a phrasing dislodged by elision from its antecedent rhyme: the actual predication of identity thus drawn forth from the enforced conjunction of time ("and t IMe") with space. By the very trope of rhyming inscape, as it were, the self is herewith imaged as enhived by the joint envelope of space and time, shape and duration. The textual self is similarly localized by the specific linguistic processes of eyed shape and heard duration—in short, by the graphonic nature of textual manifestation.

This habit of phantom lateral play finds a phonemic free agent ready (as the text's own anagrammatic formulation phrases the movements of a ghost at one point) to "sidle and slide" (l. 554) at will. The penchant for transegmental edgings and dodges comes to a climax marked by rhyme at exactly the pivotal moment of Shade's strangely displaced elegiac poem, in which the poet himself dies momentarily in the course of mourning his daughter. In so doing, Shade confirms his metapoetic instinct that the cosmos is not chaos but organized, rather, along the lines of those verbal differentials and hidden echoes that make for life's "contrapuntal" poetry (l. 807). On the brink of extinction, his is an epiphany of "topsy-turvical coincidence" (l. 809), of sameness within difference, a reticulated "web of sense" (l. 810) that makes "ornaments / Of accidents and possibilities" (ll. 828–29). Precisely at this turn, this recognition of interlinked contingencies, Shade's poem dips into its only illicit polysyllabic rhyme. With "possibilities," that is to say, the poet rhymes "Sybil, it is / My firm conviction," setting up a testament of faith whose declaration is interrupted and unfulfilled. Its point is nevertheless obliquely made in this self-instancing happenstance of artificially cohering

rhyme. In the strained lexical disrespect of such farcical rhythm, Shade has fortuitously achieved what he has evoked a few lines before as "Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game" (ll. 812–13). His radically cross-lexical and low-comic rhyme on "possibilities" merely exaggerates into the open—into the multiple syntactic openings it bridges—those sly elidings that have intermittently characterized his rhyming habits and that are now erected into the logopoetic microcosm of a world to which, after almost leaving it, he finds himself restored.

It is left to his clinically paranoid commentator, Kinbote, to enter upon a closer analysis of cross-lexical effects, here those found in a variant manuscript passage of Shade's poem framed on a canonical Popeian rhyme of mortal imperatives. It is a traditional rhyme as seasoned and deep, if not as closely homophonic, as doom/tomb . "Do objects have a soul," he wonders, "Or perish must / Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?" (231). Though Kinbote does not mention it, there is yet another dental elision in "an (d T)anagra " that helps foreground all the more clearly the "anagra mmatic" consciousness at work in his subsequent decipherings. Reshuffling this very line, Kinbote targets instead the next lexical juncture to find the name of the assassin buried in the subsyllabic ash heap of "Tanagra dus t?" Mocking the "pedestrian reader"—one slavishly dedicated to metrical feet?—who may balk at this over-reading, Kinbote wonders rhetorically "how many such combinations are possible and plausible," offering two that are not: "'Leningrad us ed to be Petrograd?'" Or the trisyllabic: "A prig rad (obs. past tense of read) us? " (231). Neither work, the one because its phonetic form (the long u of used ) does not submit to metamorphosis of this sort, the other because the requisite a in rad appears in a word no longer in the langue and, hence, unsoundable in any parole . Like the Nabokovian text itself, whose surface tension Kinbote's dementia is established to travesty, his paranoia does set certain limits to its provocations.

Even the editor and anagrammatical exegete who finds Gradus lurking in the syllabic modules of "Tanagra dust" is bested by the bizarre alphabetical transcriptions of the poet's daughter, Hazel. She has spent time in a haunted barn engaging in coded conversations with a "roundlet" of light (188) that answers intermittently to her recitations of the alphabet, selecting out an apparently random sequence of letters. "The barn ghost," writes Kinbote, "seems to have expressed himself with the empasted difficulty of apoplexy"—some kind of lexical dysfunction?—"or of a half-awakening from a half-dream slashed by a sword of light" (189). In Nabokov's version of The Wake, this language of dreams, its condensations and displacements, is reduced to an alphabetic shifting and regrouping, a mass of "meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect . . . in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple

letter groups." They are given by Kinbote as follows: "pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told" (188). We can find intact lexemes like "lane," "pad," "not," "old," "wart," "tale," "far," "rant," and "told," though in context they don't register as units of signification, as words; they are contaminated by the nonce syllables around them. In explicitly linguistic terminology, Kinbote insists: "Divisions based on such variable intervals cannot but be rather arbitrary" (189). He does, however, sense that "some of the balderdash may be recombined into other lexical units making no better sense (e.g., 'war,' 'talant,' 'her,' 'arrant,' etc.)." The urge to "seek a secret design in the abracadabra," with its echo of "seek" itself in the adjective "sec ret"—the admitted need, one might say, for the phonic to submit to the symbolic Law of the Father as "pa data" (rather than "pad ata")—is followed by the confession that "I abhor such games; they make my temples throb with abominable pain," an admission which involves not only the frontal rhyme of "ab hor" with "ab ominable" but an additional part-echo based on the intervalic redivision—the transegmental drift—of "throb with ab ominable."

Despite this "pain," and the apparently contagious sound play of Kinbote's own retrospect, "I have braved it," he writes, "and pored endlessly, with a commentator's infinite patience and disgust, over the crippled syllables in Hazel's report to find the least allusion to the poor girl's fate. Not one hint did I find," nothing at all "that might be construed, however remotely as containing a warning, or having some bearing on the circumstances of her soon-coming death" (189). She in fact dies exactly midway through the poetic text by drowning in a partly frozen lake, "a crackling, gulping swamp" (l. 500), whose very designation would require, if orally rendered, either elision or a gulping exaggeration of the repeated g sounds. Moreover, the lake in which Hazel dies is located (by way of an aural rebus) in the alphabetic void—not even a functional lexical gap—between the towns of "Exe" and "Wye" (l. 490) when pronounced as the phonetic names of adjacent alphabetic characters. The "variable interval" guiding Kinbote's researches into the ghost's code is thus in and of itself the clue to Hazel's fate, and precisely in its semantic contingency, its nonsignifying mobility. The "certain sounds and lights" (l. 346) that the young girl tried to parse into an articulate message, calling up perhaps the auditory and visual collaboration of ordinary language, thereby offers a clue to the textual allegory of her end. She has suffered a vanishing into and between script, a death by letters—merely because of their phonemic and graphic constituents, shifting and imponderable as they may be. The clue was there in the impenetrability of the alphabetic code itself. Suicide or not, her death as represented is made to depend on the sheer accident of phonemic sequence. Whatever stabs we may take at it—as, for instance, when thinking that we perhaps hear an admonitory "do not go" or "not to go" in "pad not ogo,"

or finding by elision the closural note of "tale all told" in "tale . . . lant tal told"—remain undecidable.

Even if we suspect that this fateful message is a premonition not of her own death but of her father's, by Gradus's bullet in Shade's own neighborhood lane—"Pa da ata lane pad not ogo "—we are still responding to a carefully staged allegory of textual excision. In something of this sense the unevenly numbered last line of the poem, "Trundling an empty barrow up the lane," passes away into absolute blank—unless, as the textual notes suggest for different reasons, we return again to begin rereading the 998 lines leading up to it. It is, to be sure, a Joycean circular echo like Molly's "Yes " looped back to "S tately" or, in the Wake , "the" attached back to "riverrun." But the circularity of Shade's poem defies all rules of proximate rhyming accord, so that "lane" carries us back to the poet's projective identification with the death of a bird against his window in the opening line:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;

The false "azure-in" is what gives false "assuran(ce)" to the bird so slain. Other such phantom mirror words hover over this passage as well, including the grand homophonic accident that allows us, in the antiphone "waxwingss lain," to hear pluralized the designation of the species (as well as the waxen "wings" for which it is synecdochically named). This same sibilant drift also releases by elision (and grammatical license) the past participal of "lie," as in the wings of a flying body having "lain" against the windowpane upon fatal impact with it—with the additional passing suggestion, in an anti-pun on the participial form of "lay," of the wings as s/laid out. In the retrospective rereading urged by Kinbote, this transegmental displacement of "waxwings (s )lain" would thus only free up a more perfect rhyme with the long-deferred closing "lane."

This is again the "division" of "variable intervals" which was the real secret message of the barn ghost's code, its cryptogrammatology of the scriptive break. And as with daughter, so with progenitor: an author's "issue" or product (represented partly by Nabokov's own brainchild in Shade himself) passes from supposed existence into textual sequencing, from living voice to the material processes of graphic and phonic succession. In lateral play here is the "interval" (Nabokov), or, as we will see, brisure (Derrida), or signifying gap (Lacan), that floats meaning over the void—the void between words—and listens there for the voice of the other, surfaced in permutation. It is in this Nabokovian sense that literature and the self it enshrines, whose doom it seals, whose immortality it assures, is merely so many marks aswarming before the

eyes, marks whose traces are at the same time singing upon the inner ear—a silent singing variably assigning its notes to meaning.

In something of a Nabokovian reflexive mode, poet-phonologist John Hollander, in the twelfth stanza of his recent poem, "Summer Day,"^[20] offers an exemplary instance of what we might designate as a "phonemic trope" in rhyme—otherwise, his "figure of echo"—a braiding of end rhyme by which "Twilight and meaning, darkness and rising hope," having "Stretched out across my path a twisted rope," are followed, after a night of sleep, by a day in which "I trip over last evening's trope." The peculiar twist of such a "rope," beyond the proleptic etymology of troping as turning (as well as the etymologically false association of "twilight" with "twist" or "twill") is that, by liaison of the preceding participial /d/, the word's original appearance phonemically prefigures—as if by the logic of a midsummer night's dream—the dentalized alternative t = rope .

With dozens of examples gathered behind us, we can begin to recognize the full leverage offered by graphonic eccentricity upon the whole structural logic of rhyme. In this light, the linguistically as well as thematically "ironic" rhymes of Hopkins, Joyce, and Nabokov may be read all but explicitly to dismantle the artificial protective barrier in the previous English tradition, at least after Chaucer, between the low comedy of polysyllabic recurrence (Byron, Hood) and the lyric sanctity of tastefully restrained echo (the Shakespearean "line"). In turn, we can finally arrive at a definition of rhyme itself, in its play of discrepant matings and matched divergences, that actually includes, at its lower limit, the category of transegmental dislocation. The peculiarities of cross-lexical rhyming may in this way be found to reenact the general nature of terminal accord across the intervals within , rather than between, phrases. Implicit in this understanding, to begin with, is the nature of rhyme as an exemplary, even definitive, case of the poetic function. Taking the term "rhyme" in the broadest sense of recurrence and symmetry, phonic included, one could well characterize poetry, indeed literature as a whole, as "rhymed discourse." On this view, transegmental reading, insofar as it reads a certain (telescoped) logic of rhyme, might carry with it a rather pointed understanding of the literary condition itself as a reading effect.

All traditional rhyme, as normally conceived, puts difference at a safe and stabilizing distance, removes the recurring syllable or phonemic cluster at least as far away as the next line, and often farther. Rhyme thus plots either partial echo or phonic ambiguity, both aural factors, as graphic ones. It inscribes linguistic similarity and difference so that, up and down the page, gaps loom; the very loom of the text gapes; distances need to be crossed, convergences secured. For rhyme to work along this vertical axis, the ear

must overcome the compartmentalizations of the eye. So, too, with the horizontal axis in the event of transegmental rhymes, as well as the case of transegmental drifts per se as a liminal variety of "self-rhyme." That is, in graphonic slippage apart from end rhyme, lexical rather than linear spacing—prone to Nabokov's "variable intervals"—is defied and finessed by new hearings of a phrase, evocalizations that construe divergent vocables from the visible given of script. When the structure of terminal echoism draws on such transegmental effects, then, it does not just enhance or spread out the possibilities of phonic accord; it explicates the very mechanism of rhyme within a single reading span. When, for instance, an isolated word(ing) rhymes vertically with another, and then some , that something more, that overplus, that increment borrowed by lateral proximity, accrues to a rhyming difference within the lexical structure of either phrase—a difference from itself as written.

To hear how this works is to encounter the physical medium of rhyme: that median field which provides the space of transference between one line and some next (or later) one by which—not in which—the chiming effect is to be activated. For chiming is after all an effect, not a fact. Rhymes are not read; rather, rhyming is a way of reading. This second chapter has hereby progressed to the point where we are thrown back upon the question that preceded even the first: Where do we read? Rhyme makes the answer unusually clear. It is not found on the page but, rather, founded through the activity of the inner ear. Rhymes are less induced upon than produced within our "reading," where such reading is taken to be a process and not a received text. In a word, a double one: reading effects . Part of that process, in the processing of any kind of literary text, involves our passive auscultation, a listening in on our own latent articulation. Treasonous one may say, certainly transgressive, offbeat—if transegmental rhymes (by any other name: tie rhymes, tier rhymes, terraced or tandem rhymes) operate apart from or beyond visible repetition (as in mere "eye rhymes," say), then they prove the rule of the ear once again. But of the inner ear, the decoding and remembering ear—as the instrumentation of a sequence rather than the organ of a unified perception. What end rhymes prove first of all, then, is the differential linguistics of all textuality. No single inscribed word can rhyme in and of itself. It must appeal (rather than peal) across a distance defined by difference even when processed under the sign of similarity. That distance, however, though visible as space, is essentially blank as text: it is merely the space between lines. In the vertical axis of the textual plane, the line one might draw between two rhyming termini may best be thought to inscribe the base of a triangle whose apex lies above the text at the site of reading. This is a reading which therefore only exists through the

differential relation between these two points, separated cleanly by the space of lineation.

Less cleanly, because overlapped upon the same space, appears the contracted auto-echoism of the transegmental drift. Rhyme's constitution by difference—by the relation of one grapheme to its close phonic alternative—is intensively played out in the miniaturized compass of the transegmental effect, whether as part of a larger rhyming pattern or not. The relation of "rover" to "drover," "drive" to "strive," "end" to "send," "round" to "ground," "eyes" to "sighs," "rays" to "grace," "rapt" to "trapped"—to reconvene a few of the terminal densities scanned in this chapter—would amount to much the same relation as obtains in rhyme even if only the first of each pair were actually to appear (as graphism) anywhere in the text, the other left to an overtone contingent on some impinging phoneme. With enunciation thus encumbered by contiguity, such an adjacent, dislodged phoneme—catalytically activated at the level of the phonotext in the generation of a new though unwritten word—could therefore be said to precipitate the rhyming of a single lexeme with its own silent, layered evocalization. Alongside the traditional modes of end rhyme and internal rhyme, then, is the additional category of interstitial, or intervalic, rhyme: sprung to begin with from a word's resounding off itself in the slack—become play—between it and its neighbor. Such is the word in play with that difference from itself imposed by phonetic—become phonemic—context.

Mediating between two such hearings of a single phrase, negotiating their indeterminacy, triangulated by them as site, is again the reading body, medium of textuality as a phonic if not auditory phenomenon. Such triangulation resembles what Chapter 6 will borrow from Joyce to call "polysyllabax." In sum, reading alone voices rhyme, including that always imperfect but no less rich rhyme instituted between inscribed and evocalized signifiers in the same phrasing. The task of the next chapter is to work away at the conceptual objections to just this sense of text production, this "heretical" reintroduction of phonism (not, to be sure, phonocentrism) into the differential traces of textuality. Hearing reading voicing would otherwise have to take place over and above the distracting murmur of theoretical dissent.