Klang Hits Wrong

A fascinating book about rhyme in modern poetry

Despite — or perhaps, because of — being in the middle of writing a history of the prose poem, I’m really enjoying poems that rhyme right now. Not so much the old-time kind, sealing lines and stanzas in a coat of harmonious varnish — although that was one of the pleasures I took in revisiting Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” — but the scattered modern sort, which hops about a poem as if it were a platform game, scooping up coins then suddenly missing its footing. This kind of rhyme, which shies away from line-endings but busies itself in the body of a poem, is what critics who called the winner of the National Poetry Competition “prose” completely missed.

A rhyming poet, recently

So I was pleased, while browsing the library shelves on poetic form, to find a book called The Chances of Rhyme (1980), written by the scholar Donald Wesling and published by University of California Press. I immediately saw it was the kind of academic monograph I would enjoy: it’s short (less than 150 pages to the endnotes); it’s swift (there are thirteen pages called “A Short History of Rhyme in English”); and it brings its argument right up to date with contemporary examples. Modern rhyme is too widespread and various to be systematically mapped, so instead Wesling collates materials that seem to have come to hand over the course of the 1970s: a poem by a seven-year-old girl; Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971); the winners of a New Statesman verse competition; lyrics from hip-hop pioneers The Last Poets. His argument is that “rhyme lives on” in modern poetry, “in the ways it is distorted, employed directly, or significantly omitted” — a formula which covers a wide range.

An exemplary poet of the kind of scattered but direct rhyme I describe above is R.F. Langley, who wondered, not long after Wesling’s book appeared, “what would happen if rhyme came back in to do a lot of the running”, and later invented an elusive, imaginary spirit called “Jack” to find out. The internal rhymes of the opening lines of “Man Jack” (1993) get denser and denser in their interlacing:

So Jack’s your man, Jack is your man in things.
And he must come along, and he must stay
close, be quick and right, your little cousin
Jack, a step ahead, deep in the hedge, on
edge, a kiss a rim, at pinch, in place, turn
face and tip a brim, each inch of him

“Jack, a step ahead, deep in the hedge, on / edge”: Langley’s phrasing nicely chimes with Wesling’s description of the modern poet’s freedom when choosing how to use rhyme in the age of free verse:

This freedom appears to be a vivid margin or growing edge, moving slightly beyond the language material and the historical moment.

This is a little abstract in isolation, but I take it (and “Man Jack”) to mean this: that to rhyme is to enter into a “material” and “historical” network of relationships between words (“deep in the hedge”), while seeking to realise the potential for new ones through poetically original patterns of diction, syntax and lineation (“on / edge”).