The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (24 page)

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison–

Just for paying a few bills!

That’s out of proportion.

The whole poem continues for another seven stanzas with loose consonantal para-rhymes of this nature. Emily Dickinson was fond of consonance too. Here is the first stanza of her poem numbered 1179:

Of so divine a Loss

We enter but the Gain,

Indemnity for Loneliness

That such a Bliss has been.

The poet most associated with a systematic mastery of this kind of rhyming is Wilfred Owen, who might be said to be its modern pioneer. Here are the first two stanzas from ‘Miners’:

There was a whispering in my hearth,

A sigh of the coal,

Grown wistful of a former earth

It might recall.

I listened for a tale of leaves

And smothered ferns;

Frond forests; and the low, sly lives

Before the fawns.

Ferns/fawns, lives/leaves
and
coal/call
are what you might call
perfect
imperfect rhymes. The different vowels are wrapped in
identical
consonants, unlike Larkin’s
soils/bills
and
life/off
or Dickinson’s
gain/been
which are much looser.

In his poem ‘Exposure’, Owen similarly slant-rhymes
war/wire, knive us/nervous, grow/gray, faces/fusses
and many more. His most triumphant achievement with this kind of ‘full’ partial rhyme is found in the much-loved ‘Strange Meeting’:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for you so frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried: but my hands were loath and cold.

Here is the complete list of its slant-rhyme pairs:

All (bar one) are couplets, each pair is different and–perhaps most importantly of all–no
perfect
rhymes at all. A sudden rhyme like ‘taint’ and ‘saint’ would stand out like a bum note. Which is not to say that a mixture of pure and slant-rhyme is
always
a bad idea: W. B. Yeats frequently used a mixture of full and partial rhymes. Here is the first stanza of ‘Easter 1916’, with slant-rhymes in
bold
.

I have met them at close of
day

Coming with vivid
faces

From counter or desk among
grey

Eighteenth century
houses
.

I have passed with a nod of the
head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and
said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had
done

Of a mocking tale or a
gibe

To please a
companion

Around the fire at the
club
,

Being certain that they and
I

But lived where motley is
worn
:

All changed, changed
utterly

A terrible beauty is
born
.

Assonance rhyme is suitable for musical verse, for the vowels (the part the voice sings) stay the same. Consonance rhyme, where the vowels change, clearly works better on the page.

There is a third kind of slant-rhyme which
only
works on the page. Cast your eye up to the list of para-rhyme pairs from Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. I said that all
bar one
were couplets. Do you see the odd group out?

It is the
hair/hour/here
group, a triplet not a couplet, but that’s not what makes it stands out for our purposes.
Hair/here
follows the consonance rule, but
hour
does not: it
looks
like a perfect consonance but when read out the ‘h’ is of course silent. This is a consonantal version of an
EYE-RHYME
, a rhyme which works visually, but not aurally. Here are two examples of more conventional eye-rhymes from Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
:

Blow, blow thou winter
wind

Thou art not so
unkind
…

Though thou the waters
warp

Thy sting is not so
sharp

It is common to hear ‘wind’ pronounced ‘wined’ when the lines are read or sung, but by no means necessary: hard to do the same thing to make the
sharp/warp
rhyme, after all.
Love/prove
is another commonly found eye-rhyme pair, as in Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’.

Come live with me and be my
love

And we will all the pleasures
prove.

It is generally held that these may well have been true sound rhymes in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s day. They have certainly been used as eye-rhymes since, however. Larkin used the same pair nearly four hundred years later in ‘An Arundel Tomb’:

…and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

In his poem ‘Meiosis’ Auden employs another conventional eye-rhyme for that pesky word:

The hopeful falsehood cannot stem with
love

The flood on which all move and wish to
move
.

The same poet’s ‘Precious Five’ shows that eye-rhyme can be used in all kinds of ways:

Whose oddness may provoke

To a mind-saving joke

A mind that would it
were

An apathetic
sphere
:

Another imperfect kind is
WRENCHED
rhyme, which to compound the felony will usually go with a wrenched
accent
.

He doesn’t mind the language being
bent

In choosing words to force a wrenched
accént
.

He has no sense of how the verse should
sing

And tries to get away with wrenched rhym
ing
.

A bad wrenched rhyme won’t ever please the
eye:

Or find its place in proper poe
try.

Where ‘poetry’ would have to be pronounced ‘poe-a-try’.
³
You will find this kind of thing a great deal in folk-singing, as I am sure you are aware. However, I can think of at least two fine
elegiac
poems where such potentially wrenched rhymes are given. This from Ben Jonson’s heart-rending, ‘On My First Son’.

Rest in soft peace, and asked say, ‘Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’

Auden uses precisely the same rhyme pair in his ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’:

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

I think those two examples work superbly, and of course no reader of them in public would wrench those rhymes. However, we should not necessarily assume that since Yeats and Jonson are officially Fine Poets, everything they do must be regarded as unimpeachable. If like me you look at past or present poets to help teach you your craft, do be alive to the fact that they are as capable of being caught napping as the rest of us.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus
, as Horace famously observed: ‘sometimes even the great Homer nods’. Here is a couplet from Keats’s ‘Lamia’ by way of example:

Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by,

Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully

Again, a reader-out-loud of this poem would not be so unkind to poet or listener as to wrench the end-rhyme into ‘thoughtful-eye’. Nonetheless, whether wrenched or not the metre can safely be said to suck. The stressed ‘he’ is unavoidable, no pyrrhic substitutions help it and without wrenching the rhyme or the rhythm the line ends in a lame dactyl.

Where
gainst
a
col
umn
he
leant
thought
fully

Add to this the word order inversion ‘gainst a column he leant’, the very banality of the word ‘thoughtfully’ and the archaic aphaeretic
⁴
damage done to the word ‘against’ and the keenest Keatsian in the world would be forced to admit that this will never stand as one of the Wunderkind’s more enduring monuments to poesy. I have, of course, taken just one couplet from a long (and in my view inestimably fine) poem, so it is rather mean to snipe. Not every line of
Hamlet
is a jewel, nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling worthy of admiring gasps. In fact, Keats so disliked being forced into archaic inversions that in a letter he cited their proliferation in his extended poem
Hyperion
as one of the reasons for his abandonment of it.

Wrenching can be more successful when done for comic effect. Here is an example from Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Motorcycle Song’.

I don’t want a pickle

Just want to ride on my motorsickle

And I’m not bein’ fickle

’Cause I’d rather ride on my motorsickle

And I don’t have fish to fry

Just want to ride on my motorcy…cle

Ogden Nash was the twentieth-century master of the comically wrenched rhyme, often, like Guthrie, wrenching the spelling to aid the reading. These lines are from ‘The Sniffle’.

Is spite of her sniffle,

Isabel’s chiffle.

Some girls with a sniffle

Would be weepy and tiffle;

They would look awful

Like a rained-on waffle.

…

Some girls with a snuffle

Their tempers are uffle,

But when Isabel’s snivelly

She’s snivelly civilly,

And when she is snuffly

She’s perfectly luffly.

Forcing a rhyme can exploit the variations in pronunciation that exist as a result of class, region or nationality. In a dramatic monologue written in the voice of a rather upper-class character
fearfully
could be made to rhyme with
stiffly
for example, or
houses
with
prizes
(although these are rather stale ho-ho attributions in my view).
Foot
rhymes with
but
to some northern ears, but then
foot
in other northern areas (South Yorkshire especially) is pronounced to rhyme with
loot
.
Myth
is a good rhyme for
with
in America where the ‘th’ is usually
unvoiced
. This thought requires a small explanatory aside: a ‘sidebar’ as I believe they are called in American courtrooms.

Voiced
consonants are exactly that, consonants produced with the use of our vocal chords. We use them for z, b, v and d but not for s, p, f and t, which are their
unvoiced
equivalents. In other words a ‘z’ sound cannot be made without using the larynx, whereas an ‘s’ can be, and so on: try it by reading out loud the first two sentences of this paragraph. Aside from expressing the consonant sounds, did you notice the two different pronunciations of the word ‘use’? ‘We
use
them for…’ and ‘without the
use
of…’Voiced for the verb, unvoiced for the noun. Some of the changes we make in the voicing or non-voicing of consonants are so subtle that their avoidance is a sure sign of a non-native speaker. Thus in the sentence ‘I have two cars’ we use the ‘v’ in
have
in the usual voiced way. But when we say ‘I have to do it’ we usually un-voice the ‘v’ into its equivalent, the ‘f’–‘I
haff
to do it. ‘He
haz
two cars’–‘he
hass
to do it’, ‘he
had
two cars’–‘he
hat
to do it’. When a regular verb that ends in an unvoiced consonant is put into the past tense then the ‘d’ of ‘-ed’ usually loses its voice into a ‘t’: thus
missed
rhymes with
list, passed
with f
ast, miffed
with
lift, stopped
with
adopt
and so on. But we keep the voiced -ed if the verb has voiced consonants,
fizzed, loved, stabbed
etc. Combinations of consonants can be voiced or unvoiced too: the ‘ch’ in
sandwich
has the voiced ‘j’ sound, but in
rich
it is an unvoiced ‘tch’; say the ‘th’ in
thigh
and it comes out as an unvoiced lisping hiss, say the ‘th’ in
thy
or
thine
and your larynx buzzes.