Rhyme and Reason
Robert Browning's Pied Piper used music to charm rats out of Hamelin and into
the River Weser, but according to an early legend Ireland was freed from them by
the power of rhyme. Philip Sidney refers to the story in his Apologie for
Poetrie (1595), when he wrote, "I will not unto you...to be rhymed to death,
as is said to be done in Ireland."
Alexander Pope, two centuries later, also knew the story: "Songs no longer move; No rat is rhymed to death, nor maid to love."
Rhyme is often taken as an image of order. In the 17th century, Samuel Butler
wrote, "For rhyme the rudder is of verses, with which like ships they steer
their courses." It has not, however, been universally admired; John Milton spoke
of "the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming", and explained at greater
length: "Rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good
verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set
off wretched matter and lame metre."
Dryden, more succinctly, said, "Rhyme is
the rock on which thou art to wreck." Nearer our own time, Nigel Molesworth
noted that "Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes."
However, there are still strong voices to speak up for rhyme (perhaps
including, implicitly, Robert Frost, who wrote, "I'd as soon write free verse
and play tennis with the net down"). As Byron put it: "Prose poets like
blank-verse. I'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools."
Elizabeth Knowles
08/08/2004
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