“Rhyme distracts the conscious mind,” the poet Marvin Bell (1937-2020) once remarked. Speaking from the vantage point of a working writer, he was noting that during the process of composition, the imperative to find a rhyme jolts the writer out of logical, linear thinking and into another, more open state of mind. In this alternative mode of cognition and creation, sometimes described as “lateral thinking,” hidden connections between the things of this world, as represented by rhyming but seemingly unrelated words, are brought into conscious awareness and fully realized. Rhyming fear with dire, for example, reveals a real-world relationship as well as an acoustic connection. When a situation is dire, we are more than likely to feel fear.
Rhymes please the ear. They may also serve as mnemonic devices, as in the case of “Thirty days hath September . . .” And in mature poetry, the many varieties of rhyme—full rhyme, off rhyme, slant rhyme, internal rhyme, etc.—can serve, at once, as structural components and integral elements of meaning:
Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground,
However the wind tugs, the headstones shake.
This plot is consecrated, for your sake,
To what lies in the future tense. You lie
Past tension now, and spring is coming round,
Igniting flowers on the peninsula.
Set on the Ards Peninsula in Northern Ireland, this is the opening sestet of “At Carrowdore Churchyard,” a formal elegy by the Irish poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020). The poem honors the memory of the poet Louis MacNeice (1903-1967), who, like Mahon, was born and reared in Northern Ireland. In Mahon’s lines, the end-rhymes add a somber music to the words. Moreover, in the case of lie and peninsula, the slant rhyme illuminates an intimate relationship between MacNeice and his native landscape. In a subsequent stanza, Mahon will amplify that connection, describing the surrounding hills as “hard / As nails, yet soft and feminine in their turn” as the seasons change. Those qualities also distinguish MacNeice’s poems, which are rich in ironic contrasts and “solving ambiguities.” Landscape and poetry rhyme, as it were, as do the poet’s sensibility and his final resting place.
Robert Frost famously observed that the test of a good rhyme was whether the reader could tell which word came first. In the verse of unpracticed poets, the rhymes are often not only painfully obvious but conspicuously forced. The reader can easily discern where idioms and phrases were wrenched to fit the rhyme. Sometimes, as in “it’s the truth, it’s actual / Everything is satisfactual,” the effect is intentionally comic. More often, however, contrived rhymes proclaim the victory of fixed form over the natural flow of the English language. What is lost is the “art that conceals art”: the mastery of form that pairs rhyming phrases without twisting them out of all recognition.
To Frost’s time-honored test I would hasten to add a second, equally important criterion: Does the rhyme merely restate a known relationship (dove / love; cottontail / bunny trail), or does it shed light on a hitherto unnoticed connection? And does the rhyme merely call attention to the poet’s “prowess,” as Frost liked to call it, or does it also disclose the relatedness of the things of this world? Rhymes that perform the latter function (e.g., abandon / return; moon / doubloon; aftershock / wedlock; snow / risorgimento) embody insights, discoveries, and fresh perspectives, visual and semantic. Beyond that, they underscore the reality of relatedness itself: the fact that no “thing’ or “self” or meaning arises solely on its own or exists in isolation. On the contrary, within the vast network of the known universe, all are interrelated. Everything depends upon everything else.
In The Little Book of Zen Healing, the Buddhist scholar and Zen teacher Paula Arai explores Japanese rituals such as flower arranging and the traditional tea ceremony, which, she notes, “can subtly guide our awareness to the extensive matrix we all share. Ritualized tea drinking can inspire us to connect to our deeper selves and spur connecting to others in a healing manner. . . . Experiencing our interrelatedness can wake us up to the reality that if we do not embody compassion, who will?”
Likewise, the “lateral” device of rhyme can awaken us to the relatedness of people, animals, and inanimate objects, which linear thought tends to view as separate entities. Robert Frost well understood this aspect of his art, as evidenced by this two-line poem:
THE SPAN OF LIFE
The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.
Up and pup connote energy and youthful vigor. Working synergistically, these paired words sharply contrast with the stress-laden image of the elderly dog. The result is a memorable, aphoristic statement about finite existence, made all the more powerful by the venerable device of rhyme.
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Paula Arai, The Little Book of Zen Healing (Shambhala, 2023), 88.
Photo: Derek Mahon
Dear Mr. Howard, Thank you so much for this. In particular, Marvin Bell was one of my writing mentors 20 years ago, and he is terribly missed. But this reminder of how his mind worked, and the dedication and seriousness of his craft married to the joy and play of it, was a great balm this morning. Thanks so much, Adrian Koesters
Excellent piece. I love rhyme.