The following excerpt on THE POWER OF RHYME comes from our longtime contributor, Jeffrey Burghauser‘s new book entitled THE HEAVY LIFTING: A BOY’S GUIDE TO WRITING POETRY. It was provided graciously by his publisher:

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It doesn’t require any particular skill to throw balls into the air. To catch them, however, is a different story. Not only does the proficient juggler catch them; he catches them with apparently effortless panache.

The dramatic tension is engendered by three elements:

1. The playful abandon with which he launches the balls.
2. The length of their flight, during which they seem somehow beyond the scope of his concern, and
3. Our confidence that he’ll catch them, oddly coexisting with the anxiety that he won’t.

The only thing more satisfying than watching the juggler catch balls is hearing the poet rhyming well. Here’s a relatively straightforward example: a quatrain from In Memoriam, a book-length elegy by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.1

When he ends the first line with “sin,” he tosses a ball into the air, which he catches when ending the fourth line “with-in.” After the “-in” is launched, we lose track of it, since Tennyson has diverted our attention with a couplet (“feel” / “reveal”) which gives us a more immediate (though milder) thrill, since that ball isn’t airborne for very long at all.

And another thing: “sin” is monosyllabic; “within,” bisyllabic. When rhymed words differ in syllable count, the shorter word should always come first, as it does here. The “caught” rhyme tends to arrive as a happier surprise when things are thus arranged. Many of our greatest poets, sadly, fail to observe this “best practice;” every time a longer word is rhymed with a shorter, aesthetic energy is lost.

Here’s another (highly idiosyncratic) “best practice:” two words shouldn’t be rhymed if they share too many “syllable sounds,” or if one word “contains” the other. Here’s an example from The Rape of Lucrece by Shakespeare, who wasn’t above mishandling the occasional line. In this scene, Lucrece is pleading with the villainous Tarquin to leave her alone. She cries:

To thee, to thee, my heaved-up hands appeal Not to seducing lust, thy rash relier.

I sue for exiled magisty’s repeal:
Let him return, and flatt’ring thoughts retire.

“Appeal” and “repeal” are basically the same word, but with different prefixes.

If you pay close attention, you’ll find that many rhyming words that seem distinct are musically (and sometimes even lexically) pretty much the same. Words like “yak,” “kayak,” “cardiac,” “maniac,” “ammoniac,” and “ileac” are essentially musical variations on what, in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation, would be written /jæk/. Accordingly, they shouldn’t be rhymed with each other.

If you need to rhyme something with “back,” for instance, I suggest that you list all viable candidates, and then cluster them according to “root sound:”

Yak, Kayak, Cardiac, Maniac, Ammoniac, Iliac	Tack, Attack	Lack, Shellac
Paperback, Piggyback	Knack, Almanac, Pasternak	Rack, Wrack
Jack, Lumberjack	Pack, Unpack	Whack, Bivouac, Kerouac

The remainder of our eligible words (“Thwack,” “Hack,” “Black,” “Clack,” “Plaque,” “Flak,” “Slack,” “Mac,” “Smack,”

“Snack,” “Quack,” “Crack,” “Track,” “Sack,” “Shack,” “Stack”) avoid stepping on each other’s toes. Where clusters exist, make sure not to use more than one word per cluster.

Another rhyme-related fumble is when two words that are meant to rhyme don’t end up quite rhyming. Here’s Shakespeare again, this time from Sonnet 77:

The wrinkles which thy glass2 will truly show Of mouthéd graves will give thee memory; Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know Time’s thievish progress to eternity.

“Memory” and “eternity”? Really? Do try harder next time, young William.

It’s important to use rhyme with scrupulous care, since it can be powerful—and power is what we’re after. Here’s an example from “An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine, Being Married on St. Valentine’s Day.” The poet is John Donne, and an Epithalamion is a poem celebrating a marriage. It often describes the entire wedding, from before the church service all the way to the wedding night. We seldom speak nowadays of a marriage’s “consummation,” since premarital canoodling is nearly universal. And when we do speak of it, it’s seldom without wink-winking, nudge-nudging, and ribald euphemism.

Donne, however, has no such squeamishness. Stanza six contains some of the sexiest lines of poetry in the English language. In full, it reads:

They did, and night is come; and yet we see
Formalities retarding thee.
What mean these ladies, which (as though
They were to take a clock in pieces) go
So nicely about the bride?
A bride, before a “Goodnight” could be said,
Should vanish from her clothes into her bed,
As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied.
But now she’s laid; what though she be?
Yet there are more delays, for where is he?
He comes, and passeth through sphere after sphere:
First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere.
Let not this day, then, but this night be thine;
Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.

Man, that’s good. I sometimes pump my fist in the air when I read something so perfect, which has been known to stimulate the worried attention of security personnel when I find such passages while sitting in a library.

Lines 11 through 12 constitute a symphony in twenty syllables, a triumph of sound and sense, of rhyme and prosody:

[Inhale] He cómes [pause] and pásseth through sphére after sphére [Inhale]

Fírst her shéets [pause] thén her árms [longerpause] then ánywhere.

And that “anywhere” sprawls forth, each of its three syllables fully articulating itself, suggesting an almost carnal opulence that amplifies the line’s literal meaning. The lines produce an aesthetic consummation reflecting the nuptial consummation being described. And the effect is heightened when you realize that, in the seventeenth century, “sphere” and “anywhere” constituted a tighter rhyme.

After such a release of power, there’s nothing to be done but to slide into lines thirteen and fourteen—the refrain, which, in kaleidoscopically shifting versions, concludes each stanza.

The power of well-executed rhyme is so vivid that its absence is something we actually feel, rather than acknowledge abstractly. There are more than a few reasons why modern pop music is bad, but one of them is the total perversion of rhyme. This negligence is so widespread that even someone like country singer Brad Paisley, who’s otherwise a scrupulous songwriter (or hires scrupulous songwriters), stumbles into it. He proves himself so sloppy in the rhyme department, that, if only in this respect, he seldom rises above hit-parade drivel.

See, for instance, “I’m Still a Guy:”

I can hear you now talking to your friends,
Saying, “Yeah, girls, he’s come a long way
From dragging his knuckles and carrying a club
And building a fire in a cave.”
But when you say a backrub means only a backrub,
Then you swat my hand when I try,
Well, now what can I say?
At the end of the day, Honey, I’m still a guy.

While “friends” isn’t supposed to rhyme with anything, “way” is meant in some vague, wishful way to rhyme with “cave”—which it doesn’t. I count seven pseudo-rhymes in the song as a whole. Compare this mess of subpoetic corner-cutting to stanzas three and six of Hank Williams’ “Settin’ the Woods on Fire:”

I don’t care who thinks we’re silly.
You’ll be daffy; I’ll be dilly.
We’ll order up two bowls of chili.
Settin’ the woods on fire…
You clap hands and I’ll start bowin’.
We’ll do all the law’s allowin’.
Tomorrow I’ll be right back plowin’.
Settin’ the woods on fire…

The most conspicuous reason why “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” is so much more charming than “I’m Still a Guy” is that the latter is half-assed about rhyme, while the former is committed to precision. Charm isn’t just a function of what you say, but of the lyrical firepower brought to bear in the saying of it.

Using rhyme badly is like an archer aiming not at the tar- get, but pointing his weapon in the target’s general direction.

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Photo by Rafał Szczawiński on Unsplash