Lowbrow Rhyming

I needed some terms and history about rhyming for my Mythmoot paper, so off I went to JSTOR. This article by William Harmon at UNC turned out to be a lot of fun. He cites “The Flintstones”. And in a discussion about how hard it is to do quantitative metrical verse in English (compared to Latin or Greek), he begins the sentence, “Some notable poets attempted the feat but…”. Galloping amphibrachs! (Link to Wikipedia because I love their examples.)

I was looking for an explanation of how rhyme and alliteration seemed to switch roles in poetry, and when it happened.  It turns out that it wasn’t a switch, it was a long fight between the pop poets and the highbrows. Here’s a fact of which I didn’t have an inkling: rhyme was “shunned by versifiers in all major literatures of classical antiquity (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) and all other ancient Indo-European literatures including the Germanic, and in Hebrew and other Semitic languages”.  (p.26).  Here’s one I did:  “No sooner was rhymed qualitative verse established in England than it was attacked as vulgar and cheap.” (p. 29)  Today’s hip-hop poets are in if not “good” then at least long-established company. The source of the fight is something everyone who learns French, German, Spanish, or Italian notices: everything rhymes in an inflected language. It’s too easy, so unworthy of a highbrow poet.

The biggest thing I learned from this paper is not the thing I came to read it for. Have you ever noticed that poets aren’t very good at meter? Even Shakespeare, for crying out loud:  “When my love swears that she is made of truth”, despite what my high-school English teacher said, isn’t iambic pentameter.  It’s not “x/x/x/x/x/”, it’s “xx//xxx/x/”.  Harmon says that’s OK because the importance of adhering to the meter is low at the beginning of a line, and high at the end. Quantifying the importance is a topic for digital humanities, I would imagine. The other thing we can see there is the persistence of the four-beat line from Old English alliterative verse. Even when Modern English poets are trying to write pentameter, one stress usually gets short-changed. The language seems to relax naturally back into four.

Here’s the thing I really wanted to learn:  when a rhyme is between sets of syllables that span across several words, it’s called “heteromerous” or “mosaic rhyme”. (For obvious reasons involving immunity from tenure review, I prefer the latter.) When Edith Sitwell rhymes “gourd and the” with “gardener”, or Eminem rhymes “mom’s spaghetti” with “calm and ready”, that’s mosaic rhyme. Harmon says Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first poet of note to use it. (p. 33)

Another new kind of rhyme has to do with disyllabic words in which both syllables are stressed, requiring rhymes on both. His examples include “hobnailed/bobtailed” (Sitwell), “suitcase/bootlace” (McCartney). This seems to have appeared around 1850. When I look through the pronouncing dictionary for words like that, I find lots of words like “lugnut”, “airport”, “workshop”, “starship”, “broadband”, “deadline”, and so forth. Very modern concepts — I wonder if this is a mode of speech brought to prominence by the Industrial Revolution?

Works Cited

Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.