The Blank Spaces in the Table of Forms
Post-Romantic writers are suspicious of literary form in its guise of ornamental rhetoric, and this has made the history and role of the device central in modern poetics. Rhyme, the instance chosen, is not disappearing in English and American poetry, but rather is being wrenched as far as possible into personal meaning. To defeat expectation, the device is
warped, re-positioned, used as instance rather than design in unmetered poems with variable line breaking. In history and in cognition these distortions of rhyme correlate it with free verse—which places unexpectedly heavy reliance on rhyme, but only to de-emphasize its traditional role as a marker of literariness. Successful use of rhyme as a free feature has altered rhyme's meaning, and yet this resource will not be extinguished: modern rhyme still exemplifies the ancient dynamic whereby two meanings find the same sound.
My description of post-Romantic rhyme, as the selection of unfamiliar forms of the device which will certify spontaneity, matches Paul de Man's account of the modernity of a literary period "as the manner in which it discovers the impossibility of being modern."[32] Device and modernity are paradoxical formulations, united in a rapport-of-difference, the one standing for a false bondage to convention, and the other standing for a false detachment from it. When we apprehend the poem as a historical utterance, we surpass these difficulties in the experience of reading. "The spontaneity of being modern conflicts with the claim to think and write about modernity," writes de Man: "it is not at all certain that literature and modernity are in any way compatible concepts." Into that sentence place "device" as subscript for "literature" to specify the term, and "history" above it to raise it to a higher power, and the project of the present essay is given in brief. The attempt has been to coordinate several concepts by the use of a single, narrowly defined convention of sound and sense. In the instance of rhyme, the terms device and modernity are not compatible, but rather dialectically related and mutually defining. Perhaps the terms device and modernity in coordination may, even more successfully than modernity alone in de Man's phrasing, be "one of the ways by means of which the link between literary theory and literary praxis is being partially restored." If such a link is to be salvaged, the
exemplary pasages quoted here must by their representative nature carry an especially heavy weight of conviction.
Let us return to a sentence already quoted from Gérard Genette: "A new creation is usually nothing but the chance encounter with a blank space (if one remains) in the table of forms." Conceivably the possibilities for permutation of rhyme could be laid out as a schema of sounds and positions. Many of these options would be foreclosed by previous usage; for example, Wimsattian or "reasonable" rhyme in the stricter Popian model will be a mode admirably achieved in another century and, while always possible, never strongly probable in an age of stylistic pluralism. The rhyming tradition in English is so rich, so formidable, that inevitably the blank spaces on our table will be hard to find and will, this late in history, consist mainly of antirhyme and distortions of canonical rhyme.[33] The encounter with a new rhyme form will not, therefore, be entirely the matter of chance that Genette seems to imply, but neither will it be something dictated by the canon. The off-key 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. The placement of rhymes in passages from Logan and Dorn, above, prefigures one kind of sporadic sound linkage that, in time, will perhaps become the norm rather than the deviation.
For a modernist instance, representative in the quality and the placement of its sound repetitions, here is H. D.'s "Oread":
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us
cover us with your pools of fir.[34]
The tree nymph, speaking, sees the ocean with the imagery of her own forests, and this charming misinterpretation is articulated through words keyed to one another rather as they are in the Logan poem described in chapter two. Several sequences are at work: Whirl-whirl-hurl-fir, your-your, pines-pines, great-green, over-cover, some of these true rhyme or alliteration, others simple repetition. But the linkages of sound do not fall at predictable places in the lines; so, while the little poem is densely packed with devices, they are hardly identified as such. For this reason, the poem, though written more than fifty years ago, is still fresh in its technique. To my mind the same is true of the italicized devices in these passages:
Sumer, nû wil dîn gewalt
walt den anger und die heide
beide kleiden : dast dien kleinen vogeln nôt.[35]
Ich minne, sinne , lange zît
versinne Minne sich
wie sie schône lône mîner tage .
Nû lône schône : dêst mîin strît
vil kleine meine mich,
neine meine kleine mîine klage . . .[36]
Bar mîn herze ie bernde wunne,
daz was swenne ich sach ir wunne clîchen schîn
under ir ougen sam der sunne
dur mîn ougen liuhten in daz herze mîn
dar nâch wart mir leit in kurzen stunden .
owê Minne wunden !
wie hâst dû dich mîn sus und erwunden
daz ich sender siecher bin noch fröiden bar ![37]
N'onc preterit present n'i fu
Et si vous redi que li fu-
Turs n'i aura james presence. . . .[38]
Lo mon veg cazut fort en greu port et destreg
Quar e pleg vol descort e far tort contra dreg per naleg . . . .[39]
Pierre Guiraud, from whom I borrow the French examples, remarks: "It will perhaps seem paradoxical to compare two versifications apparently so opposed: to put face to face modern free verse and the fixed forms of the Middle Ages. However the two techniques proceed from principles partly held in common."[40] Guiraud is able to show that Paul Verlaine, the man who wrote (in a rhyming poem!) that we must wring the neck of rhyme, employs the same sort of witty segmentation of rhyme words ("devant elle-de dentelle") as certain medieval poets. The syllabic breaking of "fu- / Turs" in the Roman de la Rose passage is the sort of careful impertinence one would not have thought possible before Apollinaire or Marianne Moore. One may select for notice the rhyming of end words with those at line beginnings, the jamming of equivalences into line middles, the leapfrogging of one rhyme over another, and the eight-line stanza that begins and ends with the same word ("Bar"), thus inordinately stretching the reader's retroactive memory: these techniques achieve a striking modernity of placement, rhythm, and harmony. The passages give force to Guiraud's point that the modern poets, "in breaking the molds of classical rules, within which poetry would have finished by being extinguished, could not help but renew a tradition." The similarities occur because poets who initiate a device are in respect of technique in the same situation as those who have the historical task of reinventing it from within.
Commenting on the Middle High German passages, Henry Lanz notices a certain "absurdity" in Gottfried von Neifen's "complicated rhyming devices," and goes on to say that this proves "there is no natural limit where musical phrases of this kind should begin or stop."[41] Following Jan M. Meijer, I have already shown that rhyme never accelerates or brakes itself but relies for its pace on cognitive principles in the content of the text. Further, to respond to the idea that the very complication of usage indicates the primitive state of medieval
rhyme, I should say that rhymes are known to be rhymes, and absurd, successful, reasonable, daring, primitive, only by reference to preexisting conventions that enable us to understand the device in context. In this sense the device has the force of genre; and with medieval as with modern texts, when forms and genres are in flux, it seems best to avoid prescriptive commentary. This is especially true with modern rhyme, where today's extreme distortion is tomorrow's hateful precedent. Modern rhyme exploits a much looser definition of the device and admits within its confines forms of simple repetition already noticed, for example, in passages from Mallarmé, Jarrell, and H. D. This method, much used by our poets for local emphasis, is far closer to homoeoteleuton than to Wimsattian reasonable rhyme, but that is its special, unwitty tone:
'What is that noise?'
The wind under the door.
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
remember
'Nothing?'[42]
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the day time, torch-like with the smoking
blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness
spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep
of white day
torch flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's
dark-blue daze
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale
lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.[43]
From this almost choral return not of ending sounds but identical whole words, the evanescence of the device may be pur-
sued even further. "There are subject-rhymes, two sensibilities may rhyme, there are culture-rhymes," Hugh Kenner writes helpfully of thematic rhyming in the recurrent topics of long poems like Pound's Cantos , and by now we are entirely off the table of forms and have begun to use the device as an analogy.[44] This too modernity includes.
Since the innovative blank spaces occur on a table of forms, there is no special hierarchy of literary over nonliterary types of rhyming. And this being so, with literary rhyming already covering the table with precedents, it seems more likely that the most promising area of evolution within the device will be the sector of ordinary language broadly defined. Ordinary and nonliterary forms will be translated, as in the Last Poets' shifting of political harangue into drum chants—or Robert Creeley's sinister rewriting of the tones of nursery rhyme:
If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get.
A soft bodied dog, a hen—
feathers and fur to begin it again.
When the sun goes down and it gets dark
I saw an animal in a park.
Bring it home, to give it to you.
I have seen animals break in two.[45]
Innovative work will also, very likely, take place in the border country between poetry and art prose. Poetry will give alliterative and rhymelike effects to the sequence, fictional or essayistic, of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg; meanwhile prose will help determine the innovating rhythms of prose poems such as this fourth of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns (1971):
I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots
and endings. Child's play. I abode there, bided my
time: where the mole
shouldered the clogged wheel, his golden solidus; where
dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the
long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.[46]
In the reader's developing apprehension, this physical division of words abutting each other in syntax and linked by rhyme ("mole / shouldered") is eventful, a rhyme through enjambment keyed, below, to the sounds in "gold solidus." The sophisticated mimetic effect achieved by sound and position in "shouldered" fills one blank space in the table of forms. Further, Hill has made play with the most rudimentary form of rhyming in the language, the verb paradigm ("I abode there, bided my time"); and this in a forbidding masterpiece that drives "right down into the gorge of modernism—where," says Calvin Bedient, "the unwritten law is the risk of the greatest chaos that can yet give a poignant hint of a difficult order."[47]
Earlier I used Frost's "Desert Places" as a poem that imitates, and thereby formalizes, the habits of speech. Josephine Miles gives an even more pronounced example of appropriated garrulity, the hoisting of speech acts into complex literariness; the title is "Reason":
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first serve.
Said, Give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space, sir.
Said, For God's sake, is this still a free country or what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper's horse
And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady,
Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbow,
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.[48]
Without a consistent iambic ground pattern or a single conventional rhyme, these lines achieve their own decorum. "The
act" (line 4) is palpably a speech act, dramatized conversation, single lines of dialogue arranged to expose character. The speakers are not identified by quotation marks, but eventually the reader sorts out the violent, overinsistent tones of Reason, which prevail at the end just short of physical assault. Having at first bristled at what turned out to be a sensible request, Reason at last accedes and explains with the same theatrical surplus of language; he convicts, then partly redeems himself by his own speech. Mr Reason is, we discover, something less than Reason personified, yet we savor every idiom of his street talk. And what is the relation of rhyme to Reason? Anaphora ("Said") begins six of twelve lines conversationally, binding the discontinuous lines with a rhymelike function. Certain of the repetitions are ironic, like the last line's "Reason, Reason ," the name that gives personal as well as general import to the poem's title. In two places the poem verges on traditional rhyme: "car" repeats a consonant from "sir," and the two final lines, verging on iambic pentameter for an effect of closure, are linked by an imperfect rhyme ("Explain-name"). Though Josephine Miles accounts for a trait of character through representation of idiomatic voice, and thus cannot let the literariness of bold devices obtrude, she leads her readers to the point where we are content to let rhyme be her conclusion.