Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  West Point to the south of me,

  Memphis to the north.

  In between is planted with

  pinwheels for the Fourth.

  A rhyme like north | fourth evinces no Byronic derring-do; it must be for simpletons. This is like believing that the chord progression D-C-G is necessarily inferior to more elaborate progressions, so that just about any Genesis or Yes song is better than “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

  Originality, fetish object of the young and naïve, is no virtue in itself. If it were, every free jazz collective, no matter how inept, would be superior to the Rolling Stones. What matters, again, is what you do with the rhyme, not the rhyme itself. The poet and translator Alicia Stallings is exquisitely right: “There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.”37

  That anyone should think otherwise is probably the result of embarrassment. Centuries of jeering at jingles have produced a kind of shame at finding pleasure in rhyme—everyone is always trying to come up with some sophisticated theory of rhyme. In his essay “Why Rhyme Pleases,” Simon Jarvis provides a catalog of calumnies directed at rhyme: “Rhyme is an idol, it is witchcraft, it is contemptible, it is depraved, it is a prostitute, it is a mercenary, it is a barbarian, it is stupefaction.”38

  Well, and what if it be witchcraft? Taking his cue from Coleridge on meter’s “medicated atmosphere,” Madrid argues that rhyme pleases because it acts as a kind of drug. No one is surprised that drugs please people; that’s what they’re for. They make you feel good, for no logical reason beyond their innate power. Madrid holds that rhyme’s “seductive effect is partly secured by the reader’s intuition of a poetic mandate that seems to issue from the English language itself”: disparate words “are found utterly to belong together as if by the hand of some unknown, riddling divine force.” Rhyme words possess “a kind of occult affinity.” “Rhyme is a good thing,” Madrid proposes, “precisely because it makes no logical sense.”39

  Now, as it happens, this thesis puts Madrid at odds with many of rhyme’s advocates. For isn’t this the most obscurantist, romantic nonsense? Is it not a touch, erm, anti-intellectual? We must have firm principles—preferably diagrammatical—on which to base our approbation of the sound of like endings. To hear The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics tell it:

  it is essential that the definition [of rhyme] not be framed solely in terms of sound, for that would exclude the cognitive function . . . the phonic semblance (and difference) then points up semantic semblance or difference: the equivalence of the rhyme syllables or words on the phonic level implies a relation or likeness or difference on the semantic level.40

  That is to say, rhyme is a good thing precisely because it does make logical sense. The affinity of rhymes is anything but occult, for it is not only sonic. One must take account of the meanings of the rhyme words. This is what René Wellek and Austin Warren call the “semantic function of rhyme.”

  Kenner shows how this is to work. Discovering such rhymes in Pope as glade | shade, descends | ends, twines | vines, he notes that “their senses concur, or at least grope toward one another.” Vines twine in a shady glade as the sun descends and the day ends. So with Shakespeare’s “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” The necessity of mortality is writ into the language: “Everybody understands [the rhyme words’] relationship, and we ought to feel that ancestral wisdom patterned the language to underwrite their effects.”41

  But ought we to feel this, really? What ought we then to feel about the countless unrhymed word pairs whose senses are even more intimately linked? Were languages whose words for must and dust don’t rhyme patterned by ancestral folly? Kenner implies that poets devote a great deal of thought to the semantic relation of their rhyme pairs. While I can believe that Pope was sometimes at pains to forestall the impression that one rhyme suggested another, and that Shakespeare might have considered affinity of sense along with affinity of sound, I often find that the semantic function has generally been overstated.

  The thesis requires poets and readers to attend to the meanings of rhyme words, independent of syntactic context, in a way that doesn’t jibe with my usual experience of writing and reading poems. W. K. Wimsatt’s classic essay “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason” is chiefly concerned to posit that Pope’s rhymes are more dynamic than those of other poets because his rhyme words are likelier to belong to different parts of speech (or to the same part in different functions). Yet, as Madrid points out, Wimsatt never explicitly claims that Pope consciously chose to vary his rhymes in this way—it could well be “an accidental effect of the powerful combination of Pope’s choice of closed couplets and his commitment to packing those couplets with dense, discursive thought.”42 Nor does Wimsatt have much to say about the effect the practice is supposed to have. Few readers are likely to register the respective parts of speech of alone | throne or eyes | rise—unless they are writing an essay on the relation of rhyme to reason. And even assuming they do notice, how much pleasure or intellectual satisfaction will the fact provide?

  For we have lost track somewhere of rhyme’s reason—to give pleasure. It seems bizarre to have to make such an elementary point, but so it goes with moribund nineteenth-century, paternalistic attachments. What is so shameful about rhyme that we must forever be discovering every motivation for it but the sheer wild revel of phonetic harmony?

  Grammatical index aside, Wimsatt admirably stresses the alogical character of rhyme—the play of chance, of difference and counterpoint, of delight in fortuitous connections. Pace Kenner, it is surely a happy accident that must rhymes with dust, and if meaning must come into the question, it does so secondarily. Rhyme casts a spell, circumvents the rational apparatus, charms the snake body. Blood-knowledge, D. H. Lawrence called it.

  While on the shop and street I gazed

  My body of a sudden blazed;

  And twenty minutes more or less

  It seemed, so great my happiness,

  That I was blessed and could bless.

  Maybe Yeats’s music doesn’t possess you as it does me. Maybe you’d rather talk about how, although happiness and bless are semantically related, they belong to different parts of speech. As for me and my house, we serve the song.

  * * *

  Well, that’s a bit de trop. It’s the sort of thing I think when I’ve stayed up till two listening to Fleetwood Mac (I have never heard Stevie singing “Gypsy” and thought, “I’m not really in the mood for this song”). In other tempers, I’m with Simon Jarvis: “The pleasures of verse in no way represent some entirely unmediated category of ‘sheer sensuous pleasure’, however much they might feel like that. The notion of sheer sensuous pleasure, in the case of verbal art, is only the obverse of an inner logicism.”43

  Rhyme isn’t, can’t be, only sheer wild revel. When I start to think it is, I consider the practice of Paul Muldoon, our trickiest, most Byronic rhymester. Muldoon conceives of rhyme as nothing less than a furrow in which the self might fight free of fate.44 The ninety rhymes deployed in the poems “Incantata” and “Yarrow,” from The Annals of Chile (1994), are the same as those used in “The Mudroom” and “The Bangle (Slight Return)” from Hay (1998); “At the Sign of the Black Horse” from Moy Sand and Gravel (2002); and “Sillyhow Stride” from 2006’s Horse Latitudes. These poems range in form from sestina to sonnet sequence to terza rima, but half of them, tellingly, are elegies: “Incantata” for Mary Powers; “Yarrow” for a former lover referred to as S—— and the poet’s mother; “Sillyhow Stride” for both Warren Zevon and Muldoon’s sister. Thus the invocation of Powers in the first line of “Incantata”—“I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow”—rhymes in both a prosodic and a thematic sense across twelve years with the ninety-fifth line of “Sillyhow Stride,” which refers to Maure
en Muldoon: “and couldn’t think that she had sunk so low.”

  Steven Matthews calls this obsessive end-rhyme compulsion “a sign of repeatedly played out ending, of death writ o’er all.”45 But it is more than this; in a way, it is the opposite of this. For what Muldoon has crafted here is, first, a template of the self in time and, second, the creation of a new form; and these are simply different ways of saying the same thing. This method of poem assemblage—this addiction to rhyme—encodes a theory of the self, as structures persist across time through repetition with variation. The scale of the poems allegorizes the scale of a human life, as formal structures are subverted from within by discordant elements like the off rhymes that link “brim” and “pram” from “At the Sign of the Black Horse” to “barm” and “prom” in “Sillyhow Stride.” Occasional lines in the poems seem to acknowledge the project; Muldoon writes in “At the Sign” of “An overwhelming sense of déjà vu.” But what reader’s response would even get as far as déjà vu (or déjà lu)? How likely is even the most devoted reader to notice such an arrangement? As Clair Wills says, “This is a repetitive device beyond anything which an attentive reader of the individual poem could be expected to grasp.”46

  MacDonald P. Jackson has discovered a similar structure on a smaller scale within Shakespeare’s Sonnets 131 to 146, where a rhyme word in one sonnet repeats in the next, a new rhyme word from that sonnet repeats in the following sonnet, and so on.47 Dylan Thomas’s chiastic “Prologue” is another close analogue: two verse paragraphs of fifty-one lines each, with no rhymes until the fifty-first line, which rhymes with the fifty-second, the fifty-third with the fiftieth, and so on until the 102nd line rhymes backward with the first line. Here are the middle six lines:

  Molten and mountainous to stream

  Over the wound asleep

  Sheep white hollow farms

  To Wales in my arms.

  Hoo, there, in castle keep,

  You king singsong owls, who moonbeam

  How many lines in to the second verse paragraph can any reader get before the rhymes become inaudible? If you can’t hear a rhyme because one hundred lines separate one word of the pair from the other, is it still a rhyme? How about when one line appears in one poem in a book published in 1994 (“and how resolutely you would pooh-pooh”) and its rhyme in another poem in a book published in 2006 (“for Diet, yeah right, Diet Mountain Dew”)?I

  If this is rhyme—if rhymes can resound across such distances—it has little to do with druggy revels. Muldoon’s batty allusiveness doesn’t seem meant to be “got.” It frees the idea of causality from the requirements of discovery.II Given this private dimension, the project remains deeply autobiographical. Muldoon’s obsessive continuation of a single rhyme scheme across several books and years is a way of grappling with death and loss of self, precisely by insisting upon the perseverance of the I, subtly undermining the poem’s senses of ending by inflecting the endings of his lines with obstinate continuity: I persist, I persist.

  But it is also the creation of a form—call it the muldoon—that anyone might take up, an empty vessel that might be filled with any content whatsoever as long as the rhymes remain the same. For Muldoon to fill this form is to produce his own life, but its very attenuation, its possibility of infinite extension, produces a version of himself that could be carried on by anyone. In this way his self might persist as form but not content, as structure but not signification—just as we say the father lives on in the son.

  This possibility is figured in “At the Sign of the Black Horse,” where Muldoon writes that in the flooded aftermath of Hurricane Floyd he and his family might “climb the hill and escape . . . to a place where the soul might indeed recover / radical innocence.” The latter phrase is lifted from Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter,” and “At the Sign” is Muldoon’s prayer for his son, as he signals further by appropriating the earlier poem’s rhyme scheme. Walking “because of the great gloom that is in my mind,” as the wind screams “in the elms above the flooded stream,” and “Considering that, all hatred driven hence, / The soul recovers radical innocence, / And learns at last that it is self-delighting,” Yeats imagines his daughter might some day find the happiness that has eluded him. Muldoon’s poem is about his son, but on a crypt level48 it is the form he bequeaths to future poets that might recover for him radical innocence, the innocence of formal agency without the burden of responsibility for content: thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe than ours. As Yeats writes, it is “in custom and in ceremony” that innocence is born.

  Not that anyone would be mad enough to try it, this strange template of the self. (I might try it myself, one of these days.) The form’s survival, and Muldoon’s concomitant escape into radical innocence, remains theoretical. As a practical matter, Muldoon himself toils lonely within the form, imagining a form of freedom from within the bonds of rhyme. Thus his self-mocking aside in “Sillyhow Stride,” in which addiction is a delusion of freedom. Channeling Donne, Muldoon remembers the day he met the rock musician Warren Zevon, whose hard living precipitated his early death from lung cancer:

  Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse

  who, on the day we met, happened

  also to meet an individual dragging a full-length cross

  along 42nd Street and kept mum, each earning extra Brownie points

  for letting that cup pass. The alcoholic

  knows that to enter in these bonds

  is to be free, yeah right.

  The sense of weary resignation is only reinforced by consideration that “to enter in these bonds is to be free” is Donne’s near-blasphemous (hence its occurring to Muldoon in connection with the memory of a man dragging a cross) attempt to talk his mistress into having sex with him. To enter in the bonds of his byzantine and potentially infinite rhyme scheme is to be free, Muldoon hopes—with the recognition that the answer to that hope might be “yeah right.” For if we consult Donne’s elegy further, we find a rebuke to the Yeatsian wish of “At the Sign of the Black Horse”: “Here is no penance, much less innocence.”

  If this argument holds, the relation of rhyme it describes is one of intertextual logicism, scholarly rather than narcotic. And yet the muldoon is notable precisely because it is a deviation from standard rhyming practice. Rhymes are usually meant to be heard, as Captain Obvious once wrote.

  I think we have to internalize the external opposition between rhyme’s irrational drug effects and its logical function—they produce each other. Rhyme is alchemical, as Stallings says—“an irrational, sensual link between two words”—and therefore subject to an inner logicism. We always try to subjugate the irrational. We fear the atavistic remnants of cultic ritual. In the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, and Thomas Dekker, the witches cast their spells in rhyme, as did the actual (accused) witches Agnes Sampson and Isobel Gowdie, who wrote: “I sall goe intill ane haire / With sorrow, and sych, and meikle caire.”49

  We all-too-enlightened Westerners explain witchcraft away. But this doesn’t mean rhyme has no logistic function any more than it means witchcraft is real.

  You can guess what I feel most strongly, in my snake body and blood-knowledge. Madrid wrote to me: “For me, reading most ‘explanations’ of rhyme is like listening to some masterpiece of avian taxidermy lecture that the beauty of John Donne is that he was a genius at substituting trochees where you would ‘expect’ iambs.”

  As someone whose classroom lecture on meter includes pointing out that Donne’s “Batter my heart” sonnet begins on an unexpected trochee, mimicking the sudden violence of the desired act, I wince. But I know what he means.

  * * *

  I. George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie has a confusing discussion of how many “distances” may fall between rhymes; Charles F. Richardson claims that “the English ear does not carry rhymes more than three lines apart.”

  II. A reversal of Nicholas Abraham and Mária Török’s liberation of discovery from convention
al notions of causal structure in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). I argue this case more fully in “Paul Muldoon’s Covert Operations.”

  HOW TO WRITE A CHARLES SIMIC POEM

  How to write a Charles Simic poem: Go to a café. Wait for something weird to happen. Record mouse activity. Repeat as necessary. (For “mouse,” feel free to substitute “cat,” “roach,” “rat,” “chicken,” “donkey,” etc.) Born in Belgrade, Simic immigrated to the United States in 1954. He inherited the uncanny sensibility of Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Vasko Popa, and other pale Quixotes whose chivalric romances were flyspecked bulbs illuminating empty cupboards. From the ’60s through, say, the late ’80s, Simic could summon a creepy malaise, made somehow creepier by his matter-of-fact tone, straightforward syntax, and plain language. Consider these lines from “Help Wanted,” one of nearly four hundred poems collected in his New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012:

  They ask for a knife

  I come running

  They need a lamb

  I introduce myself as the lamb

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  They require a shepherd

  For their flock of black widows

  This has something of the dream logic of fable, with its detached pronouns and bureaucratic menace.

  Simic is always referred to by critics as a surrealist, but it takes more than illogical goings-on and flocks of black widows to brew up surrealism. Rather, he removes the safety nets from the everyday, taking Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) literally: