Rhymes are leaving my house and I don’t like it.
This is another way of saying I’m sad my children are growing up. Now the youngest has moved on from picture books, we’re having a clear-out. And I realise that some of the old favourites aren’t the obvious classics, but the ones where the link made by a rhyme lights up a parallel universe, where real things exist in a different relationship to each other.
The poet and critic Edward Hirsch once wrote:
There is something charged and magnetic about a good rhyme, something unsuspected and inevitable, utterly surprising and unforeseen and yet also binding and necessary.
I like this, although there is a touch of literary fussiness about “a good rhyme”: surely all rhyme binds? You wouldn’t say, “That’s a good magnet”. Obviously some rhymes are more ingenious than others, resulting in greater poetic precision and surprise (Jay-Z: “Beautiful music when champagne flutes click”). But this distinction only becomes relevant when you are an adult, whose mind is criss-crossed with the dull rhymes of daily life (“cookbook”, “pay and display”, “a man with a van”), like a piece of paper folded too many times. For a small child, learning how words work, all rhyme must seem both “unsuspected and inevitable”.
“What grows together goes together,” say the kitchen gardeners. Rhyme reinforces the feeling that the world is made up not of lonely objects but companions — a cosy sound-world to inhabit when you are reading a book together. It’s perhaps not going too far to say that rhyme, to a child, must seem like a law of nature.
When one of my children was five, we went to water a neighbour’s garden in the summer holidays. The vegetable patch had a row of runner bean plants, twining up tripods made of garden canes. They were in bloom, and I pointed out to her how much the bees loved the beanflowers. “That’s because,” she said, “they rhyme”.
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