1. Mentioned in passing by James Milroy in The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977). This is one piece of Milroy's evidence in his critique of Hopkins's editor, Robert Bridges, whose dismissal of such effects proves that he "did not really know how to read the poems (with the ear)" (p. 133).

2. See William K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 153-66; Hugh Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," ELH 41, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 74-88; and John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

3. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 277.

4. Debra Fried, "Rhyme Puns," in On Puns: The Foundations of Letters , ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 83-99. Her essay is prefaced with a brief overview by Culler, whose intriguing title, "The Call of the Phoneme" (from Fried's essay, p. 88), seems less to the point of his comments than the pun on "letters" in his subtitle. Phonemic matters are given no particular stress in his remarks, except in the most general sense of homophonic punning, nor are they explored per se in any of the later essays to the extent to which Debra Fried takes them up. Nonetheless, the notion of the continue

reader as "juxtologist," highlighted in Culler's introduction (pp. 8-9) and developed in the essay by R. A. Shoaf that coins the term, "The Play of Puns in Late Middle English Poetry: Concerning Juxtology" (pp. 44-61; esp. p. 60), might well have particular bearing on the phonemic sequencing of the syntagmatic chain--if, that is, the term were taken to refer more literally, more narrowly, to textual juxtapositions and junctures rather than merely to intertextual convergences and semantic collisions. Pursuing this emphasis, Fried at one point raises important doubts about Anthony Easthope's claim in Poetry as Discourse ([London: Methuen, 1983], pp. 110-21) that (in her paraphrase) "Augustan poetics reins in the dangerous materiality of words" by deploying end rhyme so that its sound play "is consistently written off to convention," a sense of the phonic "so scrupulously licensed that it cannot affect its neighbors," even though they are "equally a jostling of like and unlike sounds" (p. 88). Fried doubts that "the infectious, babbling echolalia of the phoneme" can be so easily "put . . . into quarantine." So, of course, do I in this chapter and this book, the former isolating in particular rhyme's own inability to "inoculate" its most nearly adjacent "neighbors" not only against associated sound play but against more of the very same rhyming span.

5. Published well before Rhyme's Reason , John Hollander's earlier consideration of phonetic iteration, "Rhyme and the True Calling of Words," is reprinted in Vision and Resonance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), a collection concerned, as the title implies, with the difference between the "poem in the eye" and the "poem in the ear." Hollander illustrates his version of accretive echo with lyrics from Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart that rhyme across three words, "wreck to me"/"neck to me," and then across the syllables of a single lexical unit, "appendectomy" (p. 126). He connects this phonic comedy to such fractured rhyming as Marianne Moore's "could not/pilot-" (p. 128), where the lexically and syntactically requisite ing after "pilot-" is enjambed onto the next line. He does not, however, examine the opposite sort of phonemic enjambment between the gap of words themselves, rather than lines, an overlap that bonds further echoing matter to already rhyming syllables. When he argues, for instance, that rhymes like nick/flick/tick/lick tend to imply a "hypothetical morpheme" like ick ("I shall not follow linguistics in calling it the 'phonestheme'" [p. 120], he adds in parentheses), his commentary stops short of following out the complementary process by which single phonemes or phonemic clusters--without the quasi-morphological, quasi-syllabic nature of a false root like ick --might repeatedly invade from the left and extend the rhyming nucleus, whether or not the accretion could stand alone as a monosyllable. This is what I have called a polyphonemic rhyming, a pattern with no particular allegiance to syllabic demarcation.

6. John Hollander, "Dallying Nicely With Words: Poetic Linguistics," in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature , ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe (New York: continue

Methuen, 1987), p. 129 (rpt. in Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988], pp. 180-93).

7. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 32.

8. Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 100.

9. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," p. 164; Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," p. 80.

10. Donald Wesling, The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 21.

11. In correspondence about these lines from Pope, Marie Borroff has suggested a "kinaesthetic" dimension as well to what I hear as a latent drift from "maxims bring" to "maxims spring." She calls attention, in a thematizable upswing or upspring, to the phonetic "rise" within sibilance from the heavier /z/ of "maxims" to the /s/ of "spring," this differential enunciation in keeping with the comparable voiced-to-unvoiced shift from /b/ of "bring" to the lighter /p/ of "spring."

12. David I. Masson, "Free Phonetic Patterns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Neophilologus 37 (October 1954): 277-89. See also Masson, "The Keatsian Incantation: A Study in Phonetic Patterning," in John Keats: A Reassessment , ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), pp. 159-80.

13. The example from Beppo appears in Susan Wolfson's "Couplets, Self, and The Corsair, " Studies in Romanticism 27 (Winter 1988): 507 n. 26. I am grateful to the author's correspondence for the Don Juan example, and to Jocelyn Marsh for pointing out that the manuscript version of the first of these rhyming lines was originally "And all mouths were applied unto all ears!"--with "all mouths" changed to the eliding "all lips" as if to anticipate the reverse slippage at "all (l)ears."

14. Answering Kingsley Amis's charges (in "The Curious Elf: A Note on Rhyme in Keats," Essays in Criticism I [1951]: 189-92) against this "hopelessly inadequate," telltale "Cockney" rhyme, William Keach (in "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 [Summer 1986]) concentrates on the predecessor of this rhyme, as cited by Amis as well, in defending the political ramifications of Keats's virtually decentered notion of self in Endymion . The early rhyme, with no transegmental "justification" this time: "The journey homeward to habitual self / A mad pursuing of the fog-born elf" (276-77). Keach on its behalf: "Readers more interested than Amis apparently was in Keats's brooding about the self as a construct at once deceiving in its significance and yet hauntingly persistent may find that the rhyming precipitation of 'elf' out of 'self' (it's like a miniature of Blake's 'spectre' and 'emanation'), far from being 'hopelessly inadequate,' is intrinsic to Keats's thinking through the issue of poetic subjectivity" (p. 192). In my reading of the subsequent, more "conservative" rhyme from the Night- soft

ingale ode, it is more the deceptive nature of fancy, as it inflects but cannot wholly encompass the poetic self, that must be not just precipitated out but separated off from identity.

15. Donald Reiman, Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 97 n. 15.

16. William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 200.

17. Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 148.

18. James Joyce, "A Flower Given to My Daughter," Collected Poems (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 49.

19. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1962), 1. 736; the four-canto poem that begins this work hereafter cited by line number; the subsequent "Commentary" by page number.

20. John Hollander, "Summer Day," New Yorker, 14 August 1989, p. 28.