Allocation

In most rhyming poetry the device serves to articulate the major structural units; the "figure of sound" enables the "build up of the sequence." In composition and in the reader's developing comprehension of the text, rhyme, sentence, and line are mutually determinative. Rhyme, in gestalt terms, is figure on the ground of the sentence and the line, but at the same time it is ground for other prosodic or grammatical devices. Looking backward from the rhyme to its chiming word or words, the device is figure. Looking ahead to the different rhyme that follows next, unspecified and yet in form predictable on the basis of established pattern, the very same end word is in the cognitive sense a ground. From its line-end position the device can be taken either forward or back.

Considered as figure on the ground of the sentence and line, rhyme draws attention to its own prominence. Geoffrey Hart-man has studied the way the traditional device makes "poles" regress "to a line-end position . . . while the rest of the verse is inserted between these rhymed ends."^[51] In poetry, he says, the "elision of middle terms and overspecification of end terms" collapses the chain or sequence of the sentence. However not all poetry has the usual pattern, and in the time before free

verse "Milton's rejection of rhyme is related to Hopkins' freeing rhyme from its fixed terminal position and making the last first (in sound-shape, not merely line-place)." Even in that large body of traditional end-rhyme poetry—the corollary is crucial for Hartman—the strength of the end terms depends on our seeing or hearing the elided middle members of the chain. The poet will adjust the units of his lines, so as to arrive at the right time, metrically, syntactically, upon his rhyme sound. It means trimming, extending, attending to limits, thinking back from the end over the whole sequence, considering the device both as figure and ground. It is a commonplace worth testing that such "enabling restraints of formal bondage"^[52] help evoke the rest of the poem, developing compressed statement and linguistic innovation. In this section I inquire whether overdetermination at line end produces other sorts of overdetermination throughout line, stanza, and poem.

To return rhyme to its place in sentence and line will mean assessing the shape and strength of the middle terms. Some mild protest is in order against Victor Shklovsky's extreme statement about "filling the distances between rhymes with free phonic spots."^[53] He doubtless refers to the sense of randomness engendered by the clutter of words between the overleaping rhymes. The intervening words are free in the sense that they are exempt from the requirement to rhyme, and yet they are very much semantic-syntactic thralls unless the rhymes themselves are to be seen as detachable stubs or tags at line end. In fact, Mayakovsky seems right to speak of rhyme as the tightening nail, or even more strongly as the dynamite that explodes at the end of the line's fuse. Rhyme is a subeffect of poetic closure, and as such acts to resolve or reinforce other effects, metrical and syntactical, as the poem proceeds.

Linguists have devised a "depth hypothesis" to measure the amount of syntactical delay, or frustration, the ordinary auditor can withstand without losing the thread of the sen-

tence.^[54] Students of poetic devices may find this useful as they trace the distance back into line and stanza one has to go to find the syntactical justification for the word that rhymes. Within limits, it would appear that the further one has to go, the more fully justified the rhyme will seem. Such a method may be extended by correlating it with a notion of poetic register: the more meditative lyrical poems will usually push back the syntactical justification to the early part, even the first line, of a segment like a quatrain; while certain types of poems, such as comic verses, require less depth of syntactical regression in the justification of the rhyme. Here, the term "justify" may be understood in the compositor's sense as well as the logician's.

Poetry's figure of sound is recursive and involves a leading forward and back of recurring harmonies and significances. As the reader gets further into the sequence, more and more elements of the discourse become determined. The effects of chance are themselves diminished in the course of the utterance, as the types and limits of recurrence are settled. That, no doubt, is what Jiri^[*] Levy^[*] means when he says that the cause of rhyme's aesthetic effect is "unexpectedness of the specific sequences of sounds, based on a deviation from stochastic distribution."^[55] The chances of rhyme, that is, create a jolt in the reader when recurrent sound and significance interfere with the linear buildup of the sequence. Levy defines the three elementary principles of form in the art sentence, of value because they apply both to sound and to sense in the poem and because they are phrased as binary oppositions. These three principles are continuity-discontinuity, regularity-irregularity, and "regularity or irregularity in the arrangement of unequal units, i.e. a higher or lower entropy of the series . . ."; so defined, the three principles permit us to correlate the physical level of the text with the semantic level.^[56] The effective rhyme, defined in these terms, will confirm grammatical expectations, and yet, since homophony is impermissible in ordinary language, indeed indicates in that

context a kind of derangement, will at the same time frustrate semantic expectations. Teasingly, the device suggests a semantic link between words. Beyond the type of "reasonable rhymes" Wimsatt and others have discussed, this link can very likely never be proved, nor need it be.^[57] What counts is the way the device in its place will both confirm and unsettle expectations. Pushkin and his translator Walter Arndt, for example, know just what the reader likes and have their fun with him:

At last a crackling frost enfolded
Fields silvered o'er with early snows
(Alright—who am I to withhold it,
The rhyme you knew was coming—ROSE!)^[58]

The expected rhyme is given, despite its nonsense in context, and the poet shocks the reader out of his habitual associations of contrast, depriving him of the snows-rose cliché forever.

In admirable rhymed poems, there is a very high degree of unexpectedness in the intermittent shock when we discover a discourse, which seems natural, is in fact overdetermined by a line of devices of equivalence. How does the professional poet deploy these equivalences, hiding the labor as he crafts the line up to the rhyme, back from the rhyme? Consider the syntactical regression back from the final line in Robert Graves:

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
     Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
     Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.^[59]

This workmanlike stanza takes one risk, the placement of "sly" at line end, precarious after the comma. This is justified by the submergence of vocalic effects (i sounds in lines 1–2), the dropping of rhymes off the ends of lines 1 and 3, and by the way "passers-by" almost diffidently picks up the rhyme. Lines 3–4 are built of a long appositional phrase, equal to "sly" in adding one last piece of information to the list of ad-

jectives, yet unequal in length. The syntactical justification for the rhyme word goes back at least to "For"—but eventually, I believe, to the colon in the first line with the potentiality implied there for the list that follows. If the example is accepted as typical, we must substitute for Shklovsky's "free phonic spots" another description by Juri Tynjanov, who speaks of "the crowdedness of the poetic lines." The poet may achieve this compression of meanings by sheer stretch of naked grammar, but more often will employ a phrasal sentencing, with apposition, clots of phrase, stops and starts. Most poets, rhyming in fairly short bursts, partition the line and poem into smaller subsets by caesura, juncture, and various effects of breaking off.

I have been arguing that sound and sense in literary composition determine each other reciprocally, no place more evidently than in rhyming practice. I have tried to show this, up to now, by using examples from fairly simple verse forms. Before further examples, and in order to schematize the theory of allocation developed thus far, I would like to consider the case of Chinese poetry.^[60] My attempt here, too, is to try to slow down and space out the analysis of the composition process.

Chinese, because it is morphematic and not alphabetic, partitions the line by ideograms and not words, gaining thus a more clipped rhythm than Western languages. Its very difference from the English manner of proceeding makes it valuable as a theoretical model for allocation. The use of end rhyme is exactly the same as in English, but the system of constraints is otherwise revealingly different. One highly common form of the eight-line-regulated poem contains, in each line, five ideograms; each of these is either deflected or level in tone. The rule is that deflected-tone and level-tone ideograms must alternate along the line. If this first line is to rhyme (with lines 2, 4, 6, and 8), it must end on a level-tone ideogram. Then, working back from the rhyme position, ideograms 2, 3, and 4

in the line are strictly determined while the first remains optional and may be either deflected or level. The model of Chinese shows, in a clearer way than in English, that the line as an entity progresses from indeterminacy to determinacy. This holds true of the presumed act of composition and also in the reader's version of that act when the line is taken in perceptually. If the line is to rhyme, the whole thing is determined all the way back to the second ideogram; only the first ideogram may be taken with any freedom between the two choices, and even then we have a normal mode and a variant. The Chinese poetic line is a string of binary oppositions: once the decision to rhyme is made for the first line of the poem, a whole series of other constraint operations comes into play. To choose to rhyme shuts off other options, while the choice not to rhyme provides slightly more free option in line 1. As one gets further into line or into sentence or poem, constraints increase in quantity and determining power.

Apparently Chinese, with its rhythms and excitements different from ours, cannot achieve the special expectation of syntactical delay or the pleasurable frustration of the English periodic sentence. With ideograms as equal units, juncture and disjuncture are insistent, but Chinese will not display the specific track of feeling of the Western languages, which do not so strongly employ separation of the parts of the line. There are in English, that is, more units (words) in a given line; therefore more partitions; and therefore the line is more possessed of continuity. The more you partition down, the more continuity you achieve. What results from this process may, however, be a spurious or rhapsodic continuity, of the sort one finds sometimes in a writer like Swinburne. Thus when, as with Pound, a writer wanted the laconicism of the clumped phrase, he consciously imitated, in English, the Chinese mode.

Meaning and organization are processes that occur in a medium and depend on that medium's properties. The linear

character of writing obliges us to measure, if only subjectively in ourselves as readers, what information theorists call the channel capacity of the receiver. The spans of immediate and long-term memory impose severe limits on the amount of information we are able to receive and remember. As readers, we will have psycholinguistic limits, historically and personally determined, upon our matching responses to a given writer's strings of language. One writer on the psychology of communication has argued that human memory can span seven items, plus or minus two.^[61] Without declaring what such an "item" might be in prosody, but rather remembering length of lines or of distance between rhymes in traditional poetry, we can at least say that poetry in all languages will develop a line neither too long nor too short for the active memory to find its proper play. Except in poems of the extreme avant-garde, lines have enough "crowdedness" of equivalence to keep continuous interest, but they do not extend the pattern-response capacity very far beyond normal endurance. Rhymes will seem bolder in short-line poems, because, in Geoffrey Hartman's term, there is less middle to be "elided." But in lines of any length, the compositional value of rhyme will be its ability to introduce a cross pattern against the system of stresses: rhyme must, as Henry Lanz says, "be something apart from rhythm in order to assist us rhythmically."^[62] Since counting stressed syllables in not a habit of natural language reception, we require as line marker a type of equivalence which does not get heard because it is rhythmically prominent, but because it is melodically pleasing. Thus in traditional poems, the actual unit of construction becomes the rhyme-linked pair, broader in its sweep than the single line of verse. Free verse, deprived of such a sweep of pattern, can, if it wants, give the line and its parts a more distinct integrity than traditional verse. Then again, as Jan M. Meijer has affirmed, some structural principles are dynamic forces. Once set in motion, meter and rhyme can go on and

on: "It is a structural principle other than rhyme that puts an end to the process."^[63] Meter wants rhyme to demarcate line ends, while rhyme craves some principle of substantive plot to halt the poem. The aesthetic structure absolutely requires the cognitive structure in order to realize itself: medium depends on meaning.

A highly developed constraint system can be shown to operate in texts whose form is prescribed, and whose very vocabulary is determined by arbitrary rule before the poem begins. In New Stateman Weekend Competition No. 2,213, "competitors were asked to compose a Shakespearean sonnet containing the following words or phrases: gentian, charisma, cradle, burgeon, cri de coeur , investment, helpless, alopecia, run of the mill, allocate, devices, runcorn."^[64] So length and number of lines, as well as disposition of rhymes into one kind of sonnet, is fixed. Roughly one-quarter of the poem's language is already specified: seventeen words in all, none rhyming. The best two solutions were:

When Runcorn's gentians first refused to burgeon
And what divided it from fuming Widnes
Flowed thick with chemicals instead of sturgeon,
Helpless to filter as nephritic kidneys,
Only some dotty poets really got
The sense of England's coming alopecia—
Trees allocated to the villa's plot,
To little rooms of glass and vine and freesia.
Most others, swayed by the charisma of
Investment, simply raised their  cri de coeur
For the still freer run of the mill. Their love
Of cash and devices made whole skies a blur.
Cradle of ugliness and muck, the North:
Why do I cherish all that you put forth?

Pope mocked Belinda on whose helpless nape
Her lover bold, despite the sylph's devices,
Committed with his scissors such foul rape
As should be starred with Coma Berenicis.

I sing a Runcorn Lady of the Game
Her charms her sole investment. Gentian eyes
Lured lovers; her charisma called; some came,
Run of the mill types; she'd been no great prize

From cradle days. But, when hair ceased to burgeon,
She allocated cash from funds not big
To have her cri de coeur  heard by a surgeon.
Bald patches? Alopecia! Buy a wig.

So should Belinda, shorn of crowning glory
Have born a Whig, not suffered Pope, a Tory.

In the first sonnet the octet is a single sentence. This sentence is a series of right-branching, or dependent, clauses. Every sentence unit is a subdivision of the next-higher unit. The length and complexity of the sentence is gained by embedding of clauses. In turn, this embedding is related to, perhaps caused by, the constraint introduced by the rhymes.^[65] Embedding of clauses is one of the phenomena of the intruded middle; the clauses fall like continual parentheses of thought, a recoil of the sentence upon itself to catch a detail or nuance before progressing forward.

We are either, it seems, running with the eyes and mind up to the rhymes, or away from them along the next line. Rhymes exert attraction toward themselves, then once past, repulsion; or propulsion along the ensuing line toward the next rhyme. I am describing the reader's experience of that elision of middles which interests other disciplines than literature.^[66] The couplet is the most memorable rhyme form, because of its maximal closure and its more regular arrangement of words as units of unequal length. Eighteenth-century rhyming tried with the strict couplet to revise all devices by multiplying, so far as possible, the elements of predictability. One difference between Pope and writers since 1795 lies in post-Romanticism's enormously expanded tolerance for effects of chance and the reader's frustration.

One of the less convincing solutions to the New Statesman task has this ending:

How can this metre—tell me, if you will—
Accommodate the phrase "run of  the mill"?

A good trick to perform what one claims is impossible, and that, in the act of claiming: it is of genuine metrical interest that the "of" in the last line gets emphasis by position and italics, and achieves the curious effect of seeming stressed and scudded at once. And yet the rhyme on "if you will" seems stitched onto the end of the line. Apparently rhymes are seamless only when the syntax leading up to them does not include effects of apposition or of parataxis or of interpolated parenthesis. The further back in the line or stanza one can trace the syntactic justification for the rhyme word, the easier it will be to afford the necessary slight shock of the unfamiliar. Here, as in the example from Robert Graves, the chances of rhyme involve our continually encountering in discourse the improbable effects of equivalence at regular or fairly regular intervals. These effects signal the aesthetic function.

By rhyming French or Latin terms with English ones, the two sonnets quoted in full create even more dissimilarity than in the case of mere grammatical unlikes; so the effect is still wittier ("coeur-blur"; "devices-Berenicis"). Other types of equivalence reinforce meanings in these sonnets:

Only some dotty poets really got
(internal rhyme)

The still freer run of the mill
(internal rhyme; imitative phrasing in "run of the mill," which skips a stress and suggests by prosody that freer attitude)

Bald patches? Alopecia! Buy a wig.
(trisected line; representation of dialogue; exaggerated juncture suggesting symptom, diagnosis, and treatment compressed into one line)

Have born a Whig, not suffered Pope, a Tory. (parallel or antithetical syntax; pun on Whig-wig; internal rhyme with "shorn" in previous line)

It might be said that in "Pope mocked Belinda," the rhyme on "not big" is awkward, because the final phrase inverts normal order of adjective and noun; but I think this is, like "lover bold" in line 2, a conscious oddity, deliberately prominent. It is the kind of phrase which trains irony on the subject in order to diminish it. In addition to meeting all the requirements of the competition, both poems have a very high density of various sorts of equivalence. For the sake of incongruity, I compare lines from a more relaxed convention that gets its effects not from connection but from disjunction, not from syntax but from juxtaposed catalogs. The equivalences here are those of simple antithesis, and the lines, from Thomas Hood, perhaps provide a very rough English equivalent to the Chinese manner of proceeding:

Now double entry—now a flowery trope—
Mingling poetic honey with trade wax—
Blogg, brothers—Milton—Grote and Prescott—Pope—
Bristles—and Hogg—Glyn Mills and Halifax—
Rogers—and Towgood—Hemp—The Bard of Hope—
Barilla—Byron—Tallow—Burns—and Flax!^[67]

The superimposition of two different and conflicting systems of rhyme and meaning gives to these last lines the effect of a Petrarchan sonnet: the contrast of ideal and trivial. Rhymes seem blundered upon, though of course they are carefully planned. There is no nuance or quantity of information which must be comprised in these lines at all comparable to the density or flow of the other sonnets. The tone of the catalog is desired, and what usually seems a defect—rhyme's very factitiousness—is here turned to a stylistic preference.

Under the conditions of the competition, successful poems were bound to come up with a density of style. The proportion of aesthetic information to the available containers is

high, of an extreme near to the situation taken to hyperbole by Anthony Burgess in his commentary on last-minute touches to his lyrics for the Broadway musical, Cyrano :

Telephone calls come through demanding fiddling modifications to lyrics. To an unchangeable musical rhythm, in twenty-four syllables, in two lines rhyming—ound, the following information must be imparted to the audience: It is fourteen years since my lover was killed in battle, and since that time I have been living in this convent, seeing the beloved as both dead and living at the same time, somehow a god of the season, but not really dead in the winter and resurgent in the spring, instead possessed of the winter's constancy, not grimness, as well as the loving liveliness of nature in the spring and summer, and clothed in the magnificence of autumn.^[68]

Perhaps because the two sonnets quoted are very special instances of highly overspecified relationships of end to middle, more than other rhyming poems they raise the question whether external constraints in themselves produce aesthetic density. In both sonnets, intruded middles have been strengthened, either to offset or to justify four features or restraints—the overspecified ends, the prescribed diction, the sonnet form, and the iambic ground pattern. It is hard to deny that in these examples there is a causal connection between formal limitation and multiplicity of poetic equivalences. Yet not all equivalences are of this highly specified nature. More random conventions of weakened conventional shape do exist, and from these emerge equivalences, which, though hard to recognize as such because of the obscuring of overt pattern, are equally valid. Modern poetry takes as its project the systematic blurring or dilution of the inherited constraints, and its poetics requires a description of the shapes that result, shapes weakened in the cognitive but not necessarily in the aesthetic sense.