Reason and Rhyme

Reason

In my previous post (“Get Real” https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2022/05/get-real.html), I quoted the famous line from Ben Jonson’s tribute to Shakespeare—that Will had “small Latin and less Greek.” Almost immediately after I posted on the blog, an article by Tom Moran appeared online, which argued that 

Jonson’s statement concerning Shakespeare’s alleged ignorance of Greek and Latin might be the single most misunderstood and misinterpreted line of English poetry ever written: it means the opposite of what most people think it means. 

(https://antigonejournal.com/2022/05/shakespeare-greek-latin/)

Moran makes a strong case for Shakespeare having a good knowledge of both those languages and that Jonson was really acknowledging that fact. (Moran is less persuasive when he goes on to attempt to show how the ancient playwrights influenced Shakespeare’s work. Moran really stretches his material to the breaking point.)

Anyway, I needed to make this update.

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Rhyme

In the May 30, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviewed a book on rhyme by Daniel Levin Becker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/the-rules-of-rhyme-daniel-levin-becker-whats-good-notes-on-rap-and-language). The following discussion will make no reference to either Gopnik’s or Levin Becker’s work. Their works just gave me the occasion to write my own thoughts on rhyme.

*

Ask someone to write a poem and what will you get? 

Dum de dum de rhyme

Dum de dum de rhyme.

Or in the words of Ira Gershwin:

I've written you a song

A beautiful routine

(I hope you like it)

My technique can't be wrong

I learned it from the screen

(I hope you like it)

I studied all the rhymes that all the lovers sing

Then just for you I wrote this little thing

Blah blah blah blah moon

Blah blah blah above

Blah blah blah blah croon

Blah blah blah blah love

Tra la la la tra la la la la merry month of May

Tra la la la tra la la la la 'neath the clouds of gray

Blah blah blah your hair

Blah blah blah your eyes

Blah blah blah blah care

Blah blah blah blah skies

Tra la la la tra la la la la cottage for two

Blah blah blah blah blah darling with you!

The idea in most people’s heads about poetry is that it must rhyme. So when attempting to compose a poem, they will contort English syntax as much as necessary to end each line with a rhyming word. And that rhyming word is usually of the utmost banality: e.g., sing/thing, croon/moon, eyes/skies, two/you. That is assuming that the “poet” can actually form real rhymes. And how often do those real rhymes come at the expense of the English language itself. Here’s Bob Dylan: “Then time will tell who has fell . . .” (For this he won the Nobel Prize?) Or in one translation of “The Girl From Ipanema”: 

“But each day when she walks to the sea,

She looks straight ahead – not at he.”

Now consider what happens when they can’t achieve true rhyme: “I'm so excited I just can't hide it” by the Pointer Sisters or the running joke in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, “Lady, lady, be my baby.”

*

Enough of the bad.

Alexander Pope was the great master of English rhyme. He maneuvered his syntax (within the bounds of English usage) to get the most telling words at the end of the line—and to rhyme. From “The Rape of the Lock”:

(Describing Hampton Court)

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey.

Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes Tea (pronounced “tay”).

Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort,

To taste awhile the pleasures of a Court;

In various talk th' instructive hours they past,

Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;

One speaks the glory of the British Queen,

And one describes a charming Indian screen;

A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;

At ev'ry word a reputation dies.

Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,

With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.

What a triumph of the bathetic!

*

To me the greatest triumph of rhyme is achieved in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Act II, Scene 2, Puck has wrongly drugged the eyes of sleeping Lysander (who is love with Hermia) to make him fall in love with the next person he sees—who happens to be Hermia’s friend Helena.

Helena:

Lysander if you live, good sir, awake.

Lysander:

[Awaking] And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake.

Shakespeare with his rhyme (awake/sake) locks the two characters together. And so the mismatched craziness of (eventually) four characters in and out of love (with even a pathetic attempt at a duel) ensues to the delight of the audience.

That is what great rhyming can do.