In today's random ramble - rhyme!
Rhyme is fantastic, I can't get enough. How could I - My other creative pursuit is writing songs, and with a few notable exceptions you just can't escape the sweet, sharp trap of rhyme in popular music.
One of the first poems I remember reading is "Casey at the Bat," and just being entranced by the musicality of it, and part of that is the rhymes Thayer uses.
And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped–
"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one," the umpire said.
Who doesn't love that? The high-flown over-descriptions in a mock-epic style, completely undercut by Casey's laconic slang and the umpire's clipped phrase. All in two rhymed couplets!
That dum-dee-dum-dee-dum style is perfect for getting kids into poetry, it's the same reason there's dirty limericks (repeated myself there), nursery rhymes, jump rope songs, and military jodies. (I know I'm skipping over the importance of rhythm in this, but I'll get there another time.)
There's something about the call-and-response of two words that mean different things but sound alike that we just. can't. get. enough of.
But it can get really tedious after you read enough of it. I remember a stretch of plowing through the English Romantics and being so relieved I could take a break with "Paradise Lost" for a different class. Milton's still got that strict rhythm, but it felt like being freed after the agonizing tedium of neverending rhyme.
Then again, look through most contemporary poetry anthologies or university reviews and most of what you see is free verse. No rhyme, no rhythm, just "prose with funny spacing" as some wag described it. No less a worthy than Robert Frost made the famous claim that "Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net." And I can see that it's easy to get lazy with free verse.
On the OTHER hand, it's not as though rhyme automatically makes a poem any better. You could say Frost himself might have improved his swing by taking the net down a game or two. Rhyme is just a technique like enjambment (making the run-on sentence a virtue) or caesura (like a hiccup but even more
melodramatic.)
On ANOTHER hand, there is beginning to be a somewhat sizable "neo-classical" school that values all those fuddy-duddy things like meter, rhyme, balance, discipline. And some of my favorite contemporary poets like A.E. Stallings fall more or less into that camp.
All of this to say, I love rhyme and employ it whenever I can. I appreciate its skillful use, but don't declare it to be indispensable. If I could, though, I would love to write more in the vein of this poem. The rhymes come at you from unusual places, not where you'd expect. It's never forced or contrived, but the rhymes really land - like the uppercut you didn't see coming.
An Emblem of Two Foxes
Barry Spacks
can make him bleed,
the fox whose leg
is trapped, whose will
awaits the kill.
Why should he flail?
Moving hurts, so he lies still.
Around him walks
a prouder fox,
his severed leg
a homily
on going free,
as if to say
it hurts, it hurts
either way.
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