Rhyme

[Anthony] Madrid spoke first, beginning with a general précis of his argument about the trajectory of rhyme in English verse.  I’d heard this before, when Madrid joined Don Share and Lea Graham on a panel on the poetry of Michael Robbins I chaired at the Midwest MLA a year ago, but it’s such an intriguing argument I was happy to hear it rehearsed again.  The gist of it is that after the Elizabethan period, whole categories of rhyme are, essentially, decommissioned from English verse, or become far less common (critics of Madrid’s theory love to find exceptions, but a full reading of his doctoral work in The Warrant for Rhyme reveals a strong case for a general trend of the kind he des/ cribes).  Rhymes that involve strong semantic links—semantic similarities, or opposites, or rhymes from the same semantic category—greatly diminish over the course of the seventeenth century.  So me/thee, mine/thine, he/she, berry/cherry, and the like become far less common.  Madrid makes much of this: the link between rhymes becomes less rational, he says, and more a matter of mystery, as if the poet wills the rhyming words to belong together for reasons unknowable to the intellect.

The anti-semantic nature of rhyme becomes a norm in the eighteenth century, and it is only with Thomas Percy’s 19765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an antiquarian’s selection of old ballads and other poems, that the older style of rhyme begins to return for the Romantic era.  A Romantic like Byron, when he is serious, as in Childe Harold, rhymes like an eighteenth century poet, but when he’s comic, as in Don Juan or Beppo, he makes rhymes that go out of their way to draw attention to themselves, and appear as stunts (as Butler’s comic rhymes in Hubridas did).  The rhyme becomes something deliberately original, frame-breaking and winking.  And this sounds the death-knell for rhyme, since over the nineteenth century rhyme becomes less a holistic part of poems and more of an attention-grabbing device, until in the modern era it is all-but abandoned. / samizdatblog