This is part of the paper I presented at Mythmoot VII. I’m breaking it up into blog-sized pieces. This is the graphical core. In the next post, I’ll show what that means in context.
The objective is to find similar patterns of rhyming words in poems that may be very different in genre and era. Going through the verse and marking the rhymes (as I did here) is instructive, but it’s hard to define similarity of patterns. Instead, let’s use the idea of density of rhymes. The way we’ll do it is to start with a chunk of verse of 100-200 words. We’ll number the words in order. Next to each word that participates in a rhyme, we’ll put a 1. Others words get 0. Then we graph the density of 1’s in the poem as a function of linear position in the text. This method doesn’t require the poem to be in lines, which is good because as Prof. Olsen noted, one of our subjects doesn’t use lines per se.
But if the poet uses similar-length words and puts rhyme at the end of a line, we’ll see that come out. It will show a smooth, wavelike structure. Particularly long or short words make small perturbations around the wave. When it’s applied to metric verse, we’ll see things about the poet’s word-choices. When they switch from short words to long, it’ll show up in the troughs between rhyme-peaks. Mosaic rhymes (like the ones Eminem, Dame Edith, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are so fond of) add variation to the pattern by putting a cluster of 1s together, which raises a peak.
Shakespeare
Here are two sonnets back to back. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “When my love swears that she is made of truth”. The rhymes happen at regular intervals, as you’d expect. The troughs are the interesting parts. The first thing this chart hits us with is that these sonnets are mostly monosyllables. The place just to the right of center is where Shakespeare used some big words “some untutored youth, unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.” That reduces the number of non-rhyming words, which raises the minimum density. Note that these (my two favorites) are both “light verse”.
Sonnets 130 and 138
Who else, seen from the vantage of the 1920s, is a stodgy traditionalist? How about Alfred, Lord Tennyson? Another master of iambic pentameter. My first thought was to use “The Idylls of the King” since there are so many Arthurian fans here, but that’s because I’m not very good at thinking sometimes. The Idylls are blank verse, of course, so there are no predictable points at which the density will peak. What I’d never noticed before was that there are no rhymes at all in the Idylls. In the few hundred lines I looked at, not a single accidental rhyme. That’s impressive versifying. So here’s the first few hundred words of “In Memoriam”. It’s just as predictable as Shakespeare.
“In Memoriam”, first 34 lines
Dame Edith Sitwell
Now let’s look at what happened in the 1920s. Europe was recovering from insanity (into which it had dragged the entire world). Here’s the rhyme density in “Hornpipe”. It’s clear that structure was not on Dame Edith’s mind when she wrote this. The peaks are up almost to 2 in these dimensionless units. I do see a little chunk of traditional verse about 75% of the way in – Tennyson would not approve of that sloppiness.
“Hornpipe” from Façade
Here’s “Fox Trot”. Once again, Dame Edith throws a big bolus of rhyme at us up front, and then sort of settles down in the second half. There’s also a 13-word gap of no rhymes at all, to keep us guessing.
“Foxtrot” from Façade
“Tarantella”, on the other hand, shows us two contending rhyme patterns fighting for control. These are higher peaks: “Trampling and sampling mazurkas, Cachucas and turkas” – every word except “and” is part of a rhyme. Looking at the graph, you could almost convince yourself there’s a classical rhythmic pattern hiding in there, but it’s interrupted by low spots. These are alliterative passages that form pivot points: “flatter the flat-leaved fruit” and “pheasants’ tail feathers”. The poem changes at these points from a conversation between Venus and Silenus that I’d call erotically-tinged if it weren’t so preposterous, and becomes a verbal representation of a country dance that might actually be a tarantella, and then changes back.
“Tarantella” from Façade
The Rappers
Now I can show you why I say Edith Sitwell is the grandmother of rap. Here’s Chuck D, who’s as serious as Tennyson. We see the craggy profile here that’s familiar from Sitwell’s Modernist nonsense-verse. Chuck D clusters his rhymes at the end, like a grand finale, which is something we haven’t seen before, because this is an exhortation. He’s winding up the crowd to take action, so he uses the bursts of rhymes at the end to focus their attention.
“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy
And, finally, here’s Eminem. Just to show that I read the call for papers, this is his work “Darkness”. He’s on the “defining” side of the conference theme, not the “defying” – this piece tries to put himself into the shoes of the Las Vegas gunman. I’m allowing all kinds of slant-rhymes and assonances (like Prof. Olsen does) because Eminem seems to avoid perfect rhymes. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to infer that Eminem agrees with the luminaries of Poetry that perfect rhymes are frivolous.
This piece has a verse-and-chorus structure that you can see in the second half of the work. The structure is obscured in the first half by the standard pop-music formula of starting the chorus after the second verse. There are also rapid bursts of rhymes, so we know it’s Eminem. The density curve shows us long-wavelength and short-wavelength parts contending for attention.
“Darkness” by Eminem
Notice that Eminem, like Chuck D and Dame Edith, has rhyme densities that peak around 2-2.5, where Shakespeare and Tennyson sustain a peak value around 1 to 1.5 for their entire poem. Here’s another example from Eminem is “Mosh”, which I chose because the chorus rhymes “darkness” with “spark that”. Once again, it starts with a bolus of rhymes (that fat peak at the beginning), and slacks off to normal levels to develop the themes. The rhyme density drops off towards the end, though, because this work is a political tract. The last quarter of the piece is basically exhorting the audience to register to vote, so the humor value of rhyme would detract from its effectiveness.
“Mosh” by Eminem
So we’ve established that there are structural similarities between the rhyme density of Sitwell’s verse and Eminem’s. They’re both musical performances, at bottom. Walton’s music is not an accompaniment any more than is Dr. Dre’s. It’s music.
Tolkien
Tolkien is another case. His verse doesn’t fit neatly into one category because Tolkien consciously changed his poetic voice according to which character was supposed to have written the verse. When he’s telling us Bilbo’s poems, they look as regular as Lord T’s. “The Road Goes Ever On” is really short, but it’s available in several versions which I’ve concatenated here to make it long enough to analyze this way. There’s one place in “Oliphaunt” where old Bilbo slips out of traditional chaucerian masculine rhyme. It really sticks out, in this metric.
“The Road Goes Ever On” by B. Baggins
“Oliphaunt”, Traditional
Sindarin words break Bilbo’s perfect waves. Remember when Shakespeare went briefly trisyllabic, and we could read it like a seismograph? When Tolkien wrote English verse with Elvish names in it, in Legolas’s voice this time, the long names are constantly fighting with the regular rhymes, which causes low-amplitude turbulence in the density curve. The peaks are still there, though, as they ought to be.
“Nimrodel” translated by Legolas
Now it gets complicated. Among all the wonderful things about the Lord of the Rings, the real tour de force (in my humble opinion) is the way Tolkien wove a high romance about Aragorn and Théoden with a modernist tragedy (to quote Prof. Flieger again) about Frodo and Sam. Tolkien wrote verse in Sam’s voice, too, and this is the result. Sam came home from the war as Modernist as anyone. I think it’s interesting that the introduction to “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” says that rhyme-games are an invention of the Elves, but Elves seem to be stodgy about rhyme. Modernism is not an Elvish mode of thought, I guess.
“The Stone Troll”, by S. Gamgee
“Cat” by S. Gamgee
We’ve established the sequence now. The traditionalists have a smooth wave-like structure of rhyme. Modernists have a different pattern, with exuberant bursts of rhyme, usually at the beginning. Tolkien straddles the divide, depending on the character who’s ostensibly writing the verse. He can be on either side, and I think that’s the key to what he’s doing.
Irrelevant Coda
The Beatles were famous for the artistic tension between their two most prolific songwriters. Here’s the difference between Lennon and McCartney in graphic form.
“I am the Walrus” by Lennon and McCartney
“Blackbird” by Lennon and McCartney
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