The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  I got lots of friends who are turkeys

  An all of dem fear christmas time,

  Dey wanna enjoy it,

  dey say humans destroyed it

  n humans are out of dere mind,

  Yeah, I got lots of friends who are turkeys

  Dey all hav a right to a life,

  Not to be caged up an genetically made up

  By any farmer an his wife.

  You can see that fun/Mum, alive/side, time/mind, enjoy it/destroyed it and perhaps Christmas/wicked are all used as rhyming pairs. The final pair life/wife constitute the only ‘true’ rhymes in the poem. Assonantally rhymed poems usually do end best with a full rhyme.

  Now let us look at another well-known nursery rhyme:

  Hickory, dickory, dock,

  The mouse ran up the clock.

  The clock struck one,

  The mouse ran down!

  Hickory, dickory, dock.

  The one/down rhyme is partial too, but here the end consonant is the same but the vowels (vowel sounds) are different. This is called CONSONANCE: examples would be off/if, plum/calm, mound/bond and so on. Take a look at Philip Larkin’s ‘Toads’:

  Why should I let the toad work

  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 rhyming.

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

  Or find its place in proper poetry.

  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 column he leant thoughtfully

  Add to this the word order inversion ‘gainst a column he leant’, the very banality of the word ‘thoughtfully’ and the archaic aphaeretic4 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 fast, 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.

  To conclude with the pair that started this excursion: in British English there is no rhyme for our voiced with, whereas the Americans can happily rhyme it with pith, myth, smith and so on. Weirdly we British do voice the ‘th’ of with in ‘forthwith’ (but not for some reason in ‘herewith’). All of these pronunciations are, of course, natural to us. All we have to do is use our ears: but poets have to use their ears more than anyone else and be alive to all these aural subtleties (or ‘anal subtitles’ as my computer’s auto-correct facility insisted upon when I mistyped both words). Rhyming alerts us to much that others miss.

  Feminine and Triple Rhymes

  Most words rhyme on their beat, on their stressed syllable, a weak ending doesn’t have to be rhymed, it can stay the same in both words. We saw this in Bo Peep with find them/behind them. The lightly scudded ‘them’ is left alone. We wouldn’t employ the rhymes mined gem or kind stem. Beating rhymes happily with meeting, but you would not rhyme it with sweet thing or feet swing. Apart from anything else, you would wrench the rhythm. This much is obvious.

  Such rhymes, beating/heating, battle/cattle, rhyming/chiming, station/nation are called feminine. We saw the melteth and pelteth in Keats’s ‘Fancy’ and they naturally occur where any metric line has a weak ending, as in Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet:

  A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted

  Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

  A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

  With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

  And we saw feminine and masculine endings alternate in Kipling’s ‘If’:

  If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,

  If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  It is the stressed syllables that rhyme: there is nothing more you need to know about feminine rhyming – you will have known this instinctively from all the songs and rhymes and poems you have ever heard and seen.

  As a rule the more complex and polysyllabic rhymes become, the more comic the result. In a poem mourning the death of a beloved you would be unlikely to rhyme potato-cake with I hate to bake or spatula with bachelor5 for example. Three-syllable rhymes (also known as triple-rhyme or sdrucciolo6) are almost always ironic, mock-heroic, comic or facetious in effect, in fact I can’t think of any that are not. Byron was a master of these. Here are some examples from Don Juan:

  But – oh! ye lords and ladies intellectual

  Inform us truly, have they not hen pecked you all?

  He learn’d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,

  And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.

  Since, in a way that’s rather of the oddest, he

  Became divested of his modesty

  That there are months which nature grows more merry in,

  March has its hares, and May must have its heroine.

  I’ve got new mythological machinery

  And very handsome supernatural scenery

  He even manages quadruple rhyme:

  So that their plan and prosody are eligible,

  Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible.

  Auden mimics this kind of feminine and triple-rhyming in, appropriately enough, his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’.

  Is Brighton still as proud of her pavilion

  And is it safe for girls to travel pillion?

  To those who live in Warrington or Wigan

  It’s not a white lie, it’s a whacking big ’un.

&n
bsp; Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on

  The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

  Such (often annoyingly forced and arch) rhyming is sometimes called hudibrastic, after Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (the seventeenth-century poet Samuel Butler, not the nineteenth-century novelist of the same name), a mock-heroic verse satire on Cromwell and Puritanism which includes a great deal of dreadful rhyming of this kind:

  There was an ancient sage philosopher

  That had read Alexander Ross over

  So lawyers, lest the bear defendant

  And plaintiff dog, should make an end on’t

  Hudibras also offers this stimulating example of assonance rhyming:

  And though his countrymen, the Huns,

  Did stew their meat between their bums.

  Rich Rhyme

  The last species worthy of attention is rich rhyme.7 I find it rather horrid, but you should know that essentially it is either the rhyming of identical words that are different in meaning (homonyms) . . .

  Rich rhyme is legal tender and quite sound

  When words of different meaning share a sound

  When neatly done the technique’s fine

  When crassly done you’ll cop a fine.

  . . . or the rhyming of words that sound the same but are different in spelling and meaning (homophones).

  Rich rhyming’s neither fish nor fowl

  The sight is grim, the sound is foul.

  John Milton said with solemn weight,

  ‘They also serve who stand and wait.’

  Technically there is a third kind, where the words are identical in appearance but the same neither in sound nor meaning, which results in a kind of rich eye-rhyme:

  He took a shot across his bow

  From an archer with a bow.

  This rhyme is not the best you’ll ever read

  And surely not the best you’ve ever read.

  Byron rhymes ours/hours, heir/air and way/away fairly successfully, but as a rule feminine rich rhymes are less offensive to eye and ear for most of us than full-on monosyllabic rich rhymes like whole/hole and great/grate. Thus you are likely to find yourself using produce/induce, motion/promotion and so on much more frequently than the more wince-worthy maid/made, knows/nose and the like.

  A whole poem in rich rhyme? Thomas Hood, a Victorian poet noted for his gamesome use of puns and verbal tricks, wrote this,‘A First Attempt in Rhyme’. It includes a cheeky rich-rhyme triplet on ‘burns’.