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Thank you for coming. Um, today, um, the title of my talk is Ryme as experiment.
Ryme as alchemy. Creative writing and poetry courses often use the word workshop,
which suggests either elves hammering away at wooden toys in indentured
servitude or a factory full of well greased and potentially dangerous machines.
But what if we think of poetry instead, in terms of a kind of laboratory full of test tubes and flames and pungent smoke?
Part magic, part science.
Testing materials and discovering their properties.
In 1993, after a brief stint at Oxford, um, I was publishing my first non juvenilia poems in magazines.
I was writing in free verse, but sometimes in form.
But the poems that suddenly were getting picked up by editors were the ones that rhymed.
I was slowly committing myself where my heart was, but where fashion was not.
Two poems in metre and rhyme. So I'm imagining my own delight.
I'm looking back at the 1993 movie of Much Ado About Nothing.
A play I had no doubt read, but not with much attention.
When the Love struck Benedick, Kenneth Branagh, in a witty patter prose, discusses the perplexity of making a rhyming poem.
The God of love that sits above and knows me and knows me.
How pitifully, how pitiful I deserve. I mean in singing, but in loving Leander, the good swimmer, Troilus, the first employer of panders,
and a whole book full of those quantum carpet mongers whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse.
Why they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love.
Mary, I cannot show it in rhyme. I have tried.
I can find out. No rhyme to lady but baby.
And innocent rhyme for scorn. Horn A hard rhyme for a school fool A babbling rhyme.
Very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet.
Nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
So in a humorous passage that does not rhyme Shakespeare yet hits upon some of rhymes, mysteries, load bearing and rhymes.
Those ominous endings have a way of distilling a plot or the moral of a narrative.
Lady baby scoring horn, horn, of course, always indicating perhaps cuckolding in Shakespeare school and fool.
And we can read Benedict's thoughts here. First comes love, then comes marriage.
Then comes Benedick with a baby carriage and a baby that might not even be his own.
We also have an example of a spectacularly bad rhyme lady and baby,
which is allowable only in, say, pop songs or light country music, and I will return to that.
Um, but I am intrigued in the way his thoughts are put to the course of true love.
Never did run smooth, but it can rattle along well enough in the even road of a blank verse.
But rhyme is a different matter. Rhyme is something he must try or attempt through trial and error.
And rhymes are something he is trying to find out or discover.
This is if I may be allowed to stretch the point, and I'm going to be stretching all of my points today.
Language of experiment. Experiment and of science, which in Shakespeare's time would have been indistinguishable from what we now call alchemy.
His experiment is a failed one because he says he was not born under a rhyming planet.
This might properly belong to astrology, but of course, the influences and symbolism of the seven planets was also an essential element of alchemy,
astrology and alchemy, part of the same branch of mystical science.
I've given some thought as to which planet this would be, and I have decided it must be Mercury.
Um. The planet associated with diviners, philosophers, astrologers, writers, teachers, secretaries and communicators.
That Benedict's experiment in rhyming is a failed one is evident to Benedict himself,
but it is also clear that any poem developed from these rhyme pairs is going to be a barely passable one.
My suspicion is that Benedict the poet, neither born nor made, would end up using these rhyme words as nouns.
Lady baby, scorned horned school fool. And we'd end up with one simple declarative sentence after another.
Um, the bad rhyme lady and baby is really an accident, not a rhyme at all,
because there is barely a relationship between D and B, besides potentially a visually mirrored one.
Um, and, you know, to, to sort of demonstrate to this to myself, I went through all of Shakespeare's rhyming poems,
the sonnets Venus and Adonis, the Phoenix and the turtle, The Rape of Lucrece.
Um, looking at the rhymes, there are some rhymes that are imperfect to us, but perhaps would have been perfect in Shakespeare's pronunciation.
And there are only a handful of rhymes that do any objective fudging.
Downs and hounds where all's is rhymed with old.
Uh, so a slightly different, um, closed end sound, and I think probably the furthest one is replenish and blemish,
where the blemish is a rhyming of and and m related nasal consonants, perhaps, but not best practice.
But nowhere is there anything as bad as lady and baby.
Um, we have things that again, ah, might not have been off to Shakespeare at all.
Sword and word. Um, there might not have been an emphasis on, um, the accent and syllable flatter water gave he have ground wound,
swine and groyne, which we know was a rhyme pair.
A perfect rhyme pair for people as late as Pope.
So we have perfect. And. Imperfect rhyme, pure and base, gold and led.
The testing of them by ear. The discovery of new properties and new kinds of rhyme in English will be my theme.
But first, maybe it's worth establishing a definition of what perfect rhyme is.
I know you all know a good rhyme when you hear one.
Um, but I deal a lot with, um, young poets, um, learning to rhyme and, um, poems that are full of things that simply do not rhyme.
So I'm going to maybe talk about a little bit what a rhyme is.
Edward, this is definition from 1702 will work as a starting point in the art of poetry.
He says rhyme is a likeness or uniformity of sound in the terminations of two words I say of sound, not of letters.
For the office of rhyme being to content and please the ear and not the eye.
The sound only is to be regarded, nor not the writing thus made.
And persuade, laugh and quaff or laugh and quaff, though they differ in writing rhyme very well.
But plough and calf, though written alike, rhyme not at all.
Um. As I say here, full perfect rhymes established by coincidence of ending sounds um, from the same stress accent on.
So that is also important. Um, and there being a different consonant, um, sound at the beginning of that rhyme.
Um, so goat coats, dope, tote boats, creosote afloat, etc. rhyme rabbit inhabit hare.
Sheer despair of er solution is diminish, but at least in my American pronunciation.
Donkey and monkey do not rhyme because the accented vowel differs.
I would write rhyme donkey with wonky and monkey with funky.
Um, I realised that in some Englishes donkey and monkey are a perfect rhyme.
And I think if I were to go and watch, um, The David Copperfield with Maggie Smith as, um,
Betsy Trotwood when she's shouting about the donkey, she might have been shouting about donkeys.
Get the donkeys off! Um, so full rhyme comes in two basic flavours masculine and feminine, rising and falling, although there are also triple rhymes.
I have got into some kind of strange conversations about whether masculine like rhymes are somehow masculine and feminine rhymes, or somehow feminine.
This has nothing to do with gender or pronouns. It has only to do with grammatical gender.
Um. Blonde without an e.
Blonde with an e. So for the purposes of French diversification, um, one is masculine and one is feminine.
Um, so one of the things that I like to do to show what what is good rhyming, um, rhyme, I think of as a kind of mystical,
maybe chemical union of two or more things because of an attraction of sensual sound rather than cerebral sense.
Perhaps we should think of rhyme pairs as molecules, discrete atoms held together by chemical bonds.
I also think of rhyme as entanglement, and that rhymed words can perform spooky action at a distance.
What effects one rhyme of a pair will affect them both.
So poets often talk about rhyming as a kind of discovery, finding and research.
Um, I would say that especially in English, where pure rhyme is famously limited.
Um, that and there's an element of experimentalism in rhyme, in discovering new rhymes and discovering new ways to rhyme.
Rhyme is one of the most endemic aspects of a language.
I sometimes call it a terroir. In English, tombe and womn are entangled, breath and death are entangled,
whereas love wanders about in an indirect days of of above dove and worst of all, glove.
Um, but in another language, like Greek, for instance, it might be hands and knives that are always fatefully paired together.
Ryme can seem like a kind of equation. Um, ryme itself is a metaphor or a simile.
Saying that is somehow like something is like something else because they have similar sounds, similar endings.
Um, but Ryme also works within a system. So for a system to have energy and potential, it must not have equilibrium potential energy.
And the system has to put do with putting in difference and imbalance.
Absolute balance will be a kind of heat death of the rhyme energy of the poem.
So like when you see a poem that rhymes hat, cat, that mat.
The problem is not that it's got these words in it.
The problem is probably that you have one simple declarative sentence after another and that it is stopped.
So for those of you who, um are thinking about rhyming, consider doing some of the following from time to time.
Rhyme. Check your poems to make sure your rhymes are not static. Rhyme across parts of speech.
This supports a more complex syntax.
You can think of rhyming the abstract with the concrete, rhyming the general with the specifics, such as proper nouns,
rhyme monosyllables with polysyllabic words rhyme across registers,
Latinate or French source words with Anglo-Saxon sciency words with pop culture, and so on.
Um, so I often like to just take a random poem by someone who has a good rhyme ster and show how this is working.
This is slightly not as random as usual. I can pick a random Shakespeare sonnet, but this isn't a random one.
Um, for many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign I kissing with golden face.
The meadows green gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Anon permit the basis clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face.
And from the forlorn world his visage hide stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
And so my son, one early morn did shine with all triumphant splendour on my brow.
But out alack, he was but one hour.
Mind the region cloud hath masked him from me.
Now yet him for this my love.
No wit, disdain hath sons of the world may stain.
When heaven's sun standeth. So if we just look at these rhymes seen and green.
We have a verb with an adjective. I is a noun of Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, um, provenance.
Alchemy is a noun, but it is a big noun.
It is a big mysterious noun. Um, possibly Arabic and Greek.
Um, Ryde and Hyde are both monosyllables, and both verb verbs face disgrace are nouns,
but one is larger than the other and one is more abstract than the other.
Shine is a verb mine an adjective. Brow is a noun.
Now an adverb and disdain is and standeth are of slightly different sizes, though, um, they're both verbal.
And there's something about the couplet ending, um, where they match very well.
So that's just an example of you can take any Shakespeare sonnet and do this,
and you'll find a plethora of interesting, um, parts of speech and connections.
Uh, okay. Um, no doubt Shakespeare had to discover his rhymes himself.
But at the start of the 18th century, the rhyming dictionary arrives in English.
It had already been a staple of other languages.
I think the first and I could be wrong, but I think the first is Edward Bishop's 1702 the Art of English Poetry,
which contains rules of prosody and examples from approved poets.
Um. He has a brief, rather charming remark on the serendipitous pleasures of browsing.
Um, because he has all these examples, he's like, you know, maybe some of these examples won't work for you, but you'll find other interesting things.
Nay, I sometimes even found it difficult to choose under what.
Head to place several of the best thoughts, but the readers may be assured.
The reader may be assured that if he find them not where he expects, he will not wholly lose his labour, for the search itself rewards his pains.
And if, like chemists, his great and he myths yet things well worth his toil,
he gains and does his charge and labour pay with good unsought experiments.
By the way. Uh, this is actually from a poem about seducing a mistress.
Um, though. So those experiments are perhaps sexual experiments.
But I like this idea of, um, the sort of, uh, accidental pleasures and discovery when we're looking even at a reference book.
This deals only with pure rhymes, though at this time in place.
For instance, as I mentioned, wine and join are perfect rhymes, and of those rhymes only rhymes appropriate for heroic verse.
He omits words that are low or burlesque, and for this reason lists no rhymes on the ad sound, for if badge might work well enough.
A badge of honour fad is low. It's a kind of Scottish bread, and catch is too obscure.
Apparently, for Bish it is something out of falconry that meant a mobile perch that could hold many birds at once.
Um, he talks about single and double and triple rhymes, which we might call masculine,
feminine and triple, and grapples with some of the problems of English rhyme and orthography.
So some of his rules, which still hold true, at least in conventional English rhyming,
include not rhyming words like vice with advice or light and delight, because that is too perfect and um is sort of has an irritating charm to it.
And he adds that it where a word cannot rhyme, its to itself, even if the signification is different.
But probably the most important rhyming dictionary would be some 70 years later.
Walker's rhyming Dictionary, originally titled dictionary of the English Language, answering at once the purposes of rhyming,
spelling and pronouncing, is a very useful volume, which included a reverse dictionary,
so a dictionary by n sound rather than initial alphabetical order, which served as a rhyming dictionary,
but where Walker is original is in his discovery and theorising of allowable rhymes and his index thereof.
Whether because of vowel shifts or other changes in pronunciation rhyme pairs
that had been in use for hundreds of years in some cases did not strictly rhyme,
yet they were allowable and they were pleasing to the ears, sometimes more pleasing than perfect rhyme.
As Walker says, an index to allowable rhymes is an attempt perfectly new.
So we have this sense again, of discovery.
It may not be improper to make a few observations with respect to its utility, and answer some objections to which it may be liable.
The same masculine force that supports our poetry, without the assistance of any rhyme at all,
seems to exempt it from the servile attention to perfectly similar rhymes to which the French reciprocation is invariably bound.
Nay, so far from a deficit, there seems to be sometimes a beauty in departing from a perfect exactness of rhyme.
It's quite interesting to me that as early as 1775, we basically have a pitch for slant rhyme in perfect and approximate line rhyme.
But though an English ear will freely admit to a range between a long and short of the same vowel,
and sometimes between the long and short of different vowel sounds, yet the vowels that are suffered to rhyme are not of a different nature.
So there's a kind of rule even for this slant verse ification short o can rhyme with long o um vowels that are closely related.
E's and a's can rhyme together. That is okay. Um, the only the only infallible touchstone is the ear.
The ears. The discovery of the relations between similar vowels better than a grammatical analysis.
He talks about radical sound, whether unions are lawful or not.
Um, all of this again, has a slightly, um, experimental chemistry, chemical or alchemical, um, kind of basis in the vocabulary.
Um, he says that's the different sounds of the vowels I, e, a, o.
You slide into each other by an easy gradation,
each of which is sufficiently related to the preceding and succeeding sound to form what is called an allowable rhyme.
Um, it intrigues me that he doesn't say a e I o u, but I e o u, which is perhaps a little bit closer to thinking about the scale of vowels.
Vowels have pitch, um, there higher vowels and lower vowels.
And his list of bells seems to me a little bit closer to that.
I'm not a linguist, but, um, it did sort of strike me that they were not in alphabetical order.
This is one of these things where you get ear, so you look up ear and here you have a whole bunch of things.
Um, he's not so worried about everything, only be it being heroic verse.
He's got beer, for instance. Um, which I don't think Bush would allow.
Um, he's got beer and beer and beer and Dominator and privateer perfect rhymes that are kind of spelled differently.
And then we sometimes have allowable rhymes bear, dare, prefer deter character.
And he always supports this idea with examples from the best poets.
Um, this is Rhyme Zone, which you can find online and has a kind of similar idea.
There are now online rhyming dictionaries. Um, Rhyme Zone is one of the better ones.
Um, it will have more common words and bold.
It will give you one syllable rhymes. Two syllable rhymes, three syllable enforceable.
For instance, if you are writing a song and you need something of several syllables.
Right away. Um, basically, the Walker dictionary gets name checked by none other than Byron.
Pretty, pretty early on. Um, so Walker discovers this allowable slang term, perfect rhyme and all of these beauties.
Um, it is important when we're talking about rhymes. Consonants are more important than vowels.
This is really the basic principle that, um, I want all of the poets out there to walk away from.
Um, because English vowels are very fluid.
They vary by time and place. They vary by generation and class.
They vary by geography. They vary by ethnic um groups.
Uh, in Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter, tired, meaning weary and hard meaning difficult are a perfect rhyme.
Tired and hard on the page.
They don't look perfect, but when she enunciates them, they are a perfect rhyme.
So this is one of the reasons why it's important to hitch rhymes to the consonants and not the vowels.
Um. In Beppo Byron writes, but I am but a nameless sort of person, a broken dandy lately on my travels,
and take for rhyme to hook my rambling verse on the first that Walker's lexicon unravels.
And when I can't find that I put a worse on not caring as I ought for critics caverns I've half a mind to tumble down to prose.
But verse is more in fashion. So here goes.
Um. Ironically, the only two rhymes he could have got out of Walker's lexicon here are pros and gos.
Um, the system of the lexicon only allows for masculine rhymes, because it's only the very last ending sound, so you couldn't have got person.
It doesn't rhyme. This mosaic rhymes where you rhyme more than one words with another word.
Person verse on worse on.
Um. Although I actually like the term Frankenstein rhymes because we're stitching words together.
Travels, unravels, cables. Um, these are all rhymes that Byron would have pretty much had to have come up with himself.
Um, he is a discoverer of wonderful burlesque rhymes.
Um, I think intellectual and henpecked you all is one of the most famous, um, here, though you could also see that strong rhyming.
Her favourite science was the mathematical. Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity, her wit.
She sometimes tried it. Wit was attic. All her serious things darkened to sublimity.
In short, in all things she was fairly what I call a prodigy.
Her morning dress was dimity her evening silk, or in the summer muslin, and other stuffs with which I won't stay puzzling.
I know that that's supposed to be pronounced puzzling here, because Byron,
I don't even know the name for this sort of rhyme where we set up a kind of humorous pronunciation,
and I know I need to pronounce that like a Regency book and not puzzling.
Um, and we also have wonderful differences of rhyme mathematical.
One huge word was article three words, what I call of a different kind of register altogether magnanimity,
sublimity, and dimity kind of shrinking down to something more and more mundane and then muslin and puzzling.
Um, rhyme also, though, allows for discoveries of vocabulary.
Um, this is from the shipwreck canto of dungeon.
Our shipwrecked seamen thought it a good omen. It is as well to think so now and then.
Twas an old custom of the Greek and Roman, and may become of great advantage when folks are discouraged.
And most surely no man had greater need to nerve themselves again than these.
And so this rainbow looked like hope.
Quite a celestial kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope was a brand new word to the English language in 1818 1819.
Maybe he had looked in Walker's lexicon, and he was tired of all of the rhymes.
What does hope rhyme with? According to Walker, it rhymes with soap.
Cope. Mope. Grope. Pope.
Interloper. Horoscope. Antelope. Heliotrope.
Telescope. Um. But, uh, the kaleidoscope had just been invented.
Um. David Brewster invented it and named it in 1817.
And John Murray, Byron's publisher, gave him a kaleidoscope.
And so he had this brand new toy with this wonderful new word.
This is the first use of kaleidoscope in any kind of figurative way.
Um, Byron is responsible for importing it into the language.
Um, when we're listening to the Beatles and we hear Kaleidoscope Eyes, that is due to Byron.
Um, but again, it's the pressure of the rhyme that is causing some of this innovation.
Um, around the same time, I'm not really going to go too much into the Keats.
Um, but, uh, Peter McDonald mentions, um, that in the letter that Keats writes.
This is the same year, 1819 John Keats writes to his brother and sister George and Georgiana in Louisville, Kentucky.
It will never not blow my mind that George Keats is buried in the same cemetery as my grandfather in Cave Hill, Louisville, Kentucky.
Um, he writes about it in this kind of scientific way.
He's not really pushing the kinds of rhyme, but he's concerned about the patterns of rhyme and how English is all stuck in the sonnet pattern.
So I've been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have, and we have this wonderfully interwoven.
If by double rhymes, our English must be changed.
So again, that idea of maybe taking what is a disadvantage in English,
the paucity of rhymes and that strict rhyme patterns and using that as a kind of pressure, um, to innovate.
So we have that in this lovely sonnet.
Um, let us jump. 20 years and a generation and across the Atlantic, we are going to keep in mind that vowels do not travel well.
Consonants have the longer shelf life. In the 1840s, Emily Dickinson, um, daughter of a lawyer and um, who is the trustee of Amherst College,
is attending school, um, at Amherst Academy and then is educated at Mount Holyoke Cemetery.
Seminary. Sorry. Her education, unusually for the time, either for boys or girls, heavily emphasised the natural sciences.
Um students had to memorise and recite scientific texts.
When she was 17, she wrote to her brother Austin.
I finished my examination in Euclid. My studies are chemistry, physiology, and a quarter course in algebra.
In 1848, she writes, I am now studying Solomon's chemistry and Cutler's physiology, in both of which I am much interested.
And, uh, my favourite bit. You're welcome. Letter found me all engrossed in the history of sulphuric acid with five exclamation points.
Bam bam bam bam bam. Um.
Famed geology geologist Doctor Edward Hitchcock was the president of Amherst College during Dickinson's years at Amherst Academy,
and Mount Holyoke was headed by its founder, Mary Leon, who was a chemist by training.
Um, I did kind of peer into this book that she was very interested in about chemistry.
Um, remember, this is, um, 1840s. It's kind of the time of Victorian amateur scientists.
Um, this Solomon's, um, book was designed for people who knew nothing about chemistry,
and it's really introductory and supposed to be, um, get students interested in thinking about chemistry themselves.
But I like this this little pitch about chemistry and alchemy.
Um, whose object was to discover the philosopher's stone,
an imaginary substance which it was supposed to convert the baser metals into gold or silver.
To speak of the equally delusive pursuit after the Grand Catholic con, etc., etc.
Um. The Alchemist, however,
accumulated many valuable facts which have been employed with good advantage in laying the foundations of modern chemical science.
Um, experiment is actually a big word for, um, Emily Dickinson.
It shows up again and again, and there are lots of poems, um, that deal in, um, science as metaphor and all of those.
We maybe think of her a lot, um, in terms of faith and doubt.
Um, but science is placed in there immediately. Experiment, discourse.
This last is pungent. Company will not allow an axiom and opportunity.
Um, experiment to me, is everyone I meet. If it contain a kernel, the figure of a nut presents upon a tree equally plausibly.
But meat within is requisite to squirrels. And to me.
Um, so she has all these, you know, she has atoms and volcanoes and this is all things that she was studying in school.
Um, this is a little poem that's quite intriguing.
Um, where I'm kind of headed with this is does she think of her unconventional prosody as a kind of experiment?
I would say yes. Um, and we'll go into that a little bit. But certainly experiment itself is a very important touchstone for her.
A little madness in the spring is wholesome, even for the King.
But God be with the clown who ponders this tremendous scene, this whole experiment of green as if it were his own,
um, clown and own are, of course, a perfectly allowable rhyme under Walker's scheme.
But this is not how the poem started out. Um, an early draft.
She has this, um, uh, sudden legacy of green is how she starts this.
And then we see her going through different possibilities.
This whole apocalypse of grain. I like apocalypse, sort of that sense of discovery, but also other, other ideas.
This whole experience of green, this whole astonishment of green, this whole periphery of green.
And then she hits it, experiment and she underlines it.
And then at the end she thinks about wild experiment. Does she know what she's doing is unconventional?
Yes she does. 1850, when she's about 20.
Um, we have her very earliest poem. It is as conventional as it could possibly be.
Um, it's a Valentine poem. Hear the rhyme.
Swain. Twain. Air. Fair one sun, b trees.
Small ball. Roses. Leaves one sun. Tune.
Moon. Here we have something slightly off. Vows lose, but that's allowable under Walker.
Bride. Eventide. True. Sea roll. So lone, so long.
Song. Fair. Hair of sea. Tree. Climb. Time. Bower.
Flower drum hum. Again. Perfectly allowable even under walker.
This is a. We can't really get any more conventional than this.
Two years later, though, um. She suddenly writes this poem in hymn metre following kind of Isaac Watts.
Um, and here are some of those stands. As I climb the hill of science, I view the landscape or such transcendental prospect I never beheld before.
Unto the legislature. My country bids me go. I'll take my India rubbers in case the wind should blow.
During my education it was announced to me that gravitation, stumbling fell from an apple tree.
The earth upon an axis was once supposed to turn by way of a gymnastic in honour of the sun.
Um, these are just some of the stanzas. The first stanza, um, quotes Isaac Watts and it quotes Catullus.
It's almost like a data dump of all of the stuff that she was learning.
Um, in school and college, these rhymes are all again, very allowable.
Go and blow or and before me and tree obviously turn and sun.
Um, this you see rhymes like this and Isaac Watts, which is perhaps where she's getting some of this idea of what is allowable and what is not.
We also need to remember that she is speaking with a strong Massachusetts accent.
So a final R is a vowel Park the car in the Harvard Yard.
So we're going to ignore all of the final, um, vowels, uh, final hours as vowels.
Here again, I just these are random stanzas from Isaac Watts, um, who is a poet that she parodies and responds to.
Um, she did not have a rhyming dictionary in her library.
I don't know if she had access to one, but she did have a lot of Isaac Watts, um, come home.
Very allowable dust first there is that are as a vowel dust fast.
Um gone. Sun cares years allowable because A's and E's are closed.
So what happens when she really gets into her own? This is all of, you know, this poem.
It's one of her most famous. Because I could not stop for death.
He kindly stopped for me. The carriage held. But just ourselves and immortality.
We slowly drove. He knew no haste, and I had put away my labour and my leisure too, for his civility.
We passed the school where children strove at recess in the ring.
We passed the fields of gazing green. We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us. The dews drew quivering and chill for only gossamer.
My gown, my tippet only tool we passed before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground.
The roof was scarcely visible, the cornice in the ground since then, two centuries, and yet feel shorter than the day.
I first surmised the horse's heads were towards eternity.
This is probably the version as you know it.
Um, but in the early published her early posthumous published version, um, which was put together by Mabel Lewis Todd and Thomas Higginson.
Um, they give it a title, The Chariot. They cut an entire stanza, the one about the tippet and the tool, and they correct the rhymes.
The rhymes that are not, that are too far, that are not acceptable, the unacceptable rhymes.
So it's easy to see what is considered acceptable and what isn't.
And this actually, I've got one of the stanzas wrong, and I think I had, um,
I had corrected it in another one, but ignore what I've got for the third stanza.
This is actually what the Loomis and Higginson has, because I could not stop for death.
Kindly stop for me. The carriage held, but just ourselves in immortality we slowly drove.
He knew no haste, and I had put away my labour and my leisure, too, for his civility.
And this is the proper stanza they have here. I'm sorry I messed this one up on the slide.
We passed the school where children played, their lessons scarcely done.
We passed the fields of gazing grain. We passed the setting sun.
So ring and sun. Loomis and um uh hic Higginson do not think is appropriate.
That's too far. It's that energy sound. Not allowable.
Um. Ground we passed before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground.
The roof was scarcely visible. The cornice, but a mound.
You cannot rhyme a thing with itself. That is an antique rhyme.
And they take it out since then to centuries, but each feel shorter than the day.
I first surmised the horses heads were towards eternity.
Um. In the second edition of these poems, Mabel Loomis Todd writes in Emily Dickinson's exacting hands,
the especial intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic,
and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music.
Lines are always daringly constructed,
and the thought rhyme appears frequently appealing indeed to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing um,
so is is ring and sun a thought rhyme is ground and ground, a thought rhyme.
Um, these are interesting, interesting things to think about.
Um, I am very interested in actual thought. Rhymes can set conceptual rhymes.
Rhymes where you rhyme opposite things, for instance, or I rhymes things.
Um, ditties of no tone that don't exist at all except as an idea.
Um, in the ear or mind of the rhymer. Um, so what are the discoveries that Emily Dickinson hits upon about rhyme?
This is Dickinson's acceptable rhymes. It pushes further than the walker.
I'm just deducing these from her rhymes. I'm not saying that she's written this anywhere.
Obviously, all vowels are an algebraic x.
Any vowel can rhyme with any other vowel, as long as the consonants are secure.
Final nasal consonants and m um, and ends of syllables or lines can rhyme with each other.
A final r is a vowel, and open Judea and nia is a perfect rhyme.
A word may rhyme with itself. I actually call this an anti rhyme, ground and ground.
And indeed there's something, um, very zero at the bone about that ground.
Ground rhyme about death. There are some outliers, even for Dickinson.
When looking at rhymes in Dickinson's poems, it's important to look at the rhyme position what's was or him him.
This will sometimes rhyme one and three in a quatrain and sometimes not.
That's not an indication that something is wrong. But you look at two and four outliers, even for Dickinson, Sahib and Wood.
What? I mean, the O's are not the same.
Is this a case of the lady baby rhyme? I don't know.
It's the interchangeability of B and D, because visually flipped used birds is also a kind of strange word,
but almost all of the rhymes are either walker approved rhymes or something.
Pushing that envelope with the vowels again, perhaps coming from American vowels.
Um, reading a lot of poetry and deducing one's own rules from that.
Um. Slant imperfect.
Approximate rhyme is wonderful in poems. Again, if you fix it to the consonants.
Um, assonance is okay for aural performance. It's not great on the page or for literary work.
I find it so boring. Minor key. Modal.
Chromatic. Um, you think of something like, um, Edison Vincent's malaise, counting out rhyme,
silver bark of beech and sallow bark of yellow birch and yellow twig of willow, stripe of green and moosewood maple.
Colours seen in leaf of apple. Bark of purple wood of purple.
Pale is moonbeam. Wood of oak for yolk and barn beam.
Wood of hornbeam, silver bark of beech and hollow stem of elder, tall and sallow twig of willow.
Um. These are wonderful effects in English and not to be avoided.
Um. There are versions even of the under the species of continental rhyme,
para rhyme being maybe the most famous and the most famous practitioner in English, Wilfred Owen.
So in this, um, the whole syllable, the front and the back of the syllable are rhyming in their consonants.
But we have a full range of slippage when it comes to the vowels, although generally Wilfred Owen goes down, um,
that scale of vowels, generally they go to lower vowels, you know, so bad, bad, bad bad bad, bydd bod, bode bud are all para rhymes.
Um, and we have a little example here.
One of his sonnets. Futility. Move him into the sun gently.
It's touch awoke him once at home, whispering of fields unseen.
Always. It woke him even in France. Until this morning.
And this snow, if anything, might rouse him now the kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes. The seeds work once the clays of a cold star.
Our limbs so dear, achieved, our sides full nerved, still warm, too hard to stir.
Was it for this? The clay grew tall. Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all.
This is a kind of anti. Oh, bod.
Um, there's something erotic and romantic about it.
Um. That kind old sun reminds me of, um.
That busy old fool, unruly son of John Donne.
Um. But this is the lover, as it were, that will not ever wake up.
Um. Son turns into un soon.
Once France is a straightforward slant rhyme.
Snow turns into now turns into no seeds turn into sides, star and duster tall into toil, and then kind of dissolves at.
Oh, um, this is Auden's gesture.
I think it's also it's it's a kind of a bod that is healing the anti bod of Wilfred Owen, in a sense.
Um, and whereas Wilfred Owen has sort of erotic imagery in a war poem and does the flip thing, and he has war imagery and a love poem that night,
when joy began our nearest veins to flush, we waited for the flash of morning's levelled gun.
But morning let us pass. And day by day relief outgrows his nervous laugh.
Grown credulous of peace. As mile by mile is seen.
No trespassers reproach. And love's best glasses reach no fields but are his own.
Began turns into gun flesh into flash past though turns into peace.
Relief turns into laugh. Scene turns into his own reproach, into reach.
And maybe you're noticing it sounds even more raymie than it appears to, because there is a counter pattern of assonance.
Um 1324 began flash flush gun past laugh relief, peace scene reach approach.
Owen. And there is a sort of almost sonic feeling of that alchemical change, one thing changing into another, but also maybe of healing.
Um, we skip to 1942. In 1942.
Jose Garcia via a Filipino poet, also known as the Karma Poet for his fondness for that punctuation.
Um is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his book Have Come Am here, in which he announced a new invention again the idea of ryme as innovation.
He is very excited about this.
He announces a new method of rhyming, a method which has never been used in the history of English poetry, nor in any poetry.
The principle involved is that of reversed consonants.
The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or last principal consonants of a word are reversed for the corresponding rhyme.
Thus a rhyme for near would be run. So there is that slippage of vowel.
We're just looking at the consonants. Near run. Rain.
Green. A green rain light can rhyme therefore with tell tall, tale steel, etc.
Um. And he has other rules for if it ends in an open vowel. Um, here we have one of those poems, number four.
Um, nobody yet knows who I am, nor myself may, nor yet what I deal, nor yet where I lead.
But in my skull, already bright and deaf, and rose a tire.
And in my mouth already star and jewels firmly rot.
And in my eyes the sweetness almost fierce as the sun. And in my ears already music.
Hearing the future kiss. Yet myself knows myself not.
Is it? I have have forgotten. Yet finality is very near I, I run, I run, so I am flips and turns into me.
Deal flips and turns into lead. Bright flips around and becomes a tire star into wrought sweetness.
Turns into sun, music into kiss. That's my favourite there.
I'm not really sure how not and forgotten is working.
Exactly. Um. Near turns into run, but in 1948, Edmund Wilson came out with the Pickerel Pond.
Now we have, um, consonants. Uh, this is sort of, um, continental inversed rhyme reversed consonants.
Um, Edmund Wilson calls this emphasis Bannock rhyme the pickerel pond.
It goes to 70 stanzas. I'm just going to look at the first three. Um, the lake lies with never a ripple.
I limp to leave sores from a leper, the sand white assault in an air that has filtered and tamed every ray below limpid water.
Those lissom scroll trees scribbled by mussels, the floating dropped feathers of gulls.
A leech like a lengthening slug that shrinks at a touch.
Ink an orange, a child's wrecked Rio de Janeiro, one fortress of which flies read the cleft in quick prints of a deer.
So ripple flips around and becomes leper.
Er rhymes with Ray. My favourite maybe.
Here is Lissom and mussels. Gulls turns into slug and here we think of orange just not having a rhyme in English, but it has a reverse rhyme by God.
Ink and orange. Rio de Janeiro. Um, that's pretty brilliant.
Read and dear and so forth. Now, um, so this caused a bit of a flap for, um, because Jose Garcia via said he was copying me.
This is I invented this rhyme. Edwin Wilson was like, um, I never read your work at all.
I've come up by myself. Um, so there was a slight dust up.
I think ee cummings weighed in on the side of Vila.
Um, so there was a little bit of a dust up in the, the mid 40s about this weird rhyming,
um, alchemy of this is what a amphibian amphibian Vina looks like.
It's a little bit like that alchemical or a Burroughs, but the opposite.
So instead of something eating its tail, it's something that has two heads.
Um, and this rhyme largely went to ground, um, for a long time.
I mean, maybe are examples in the 50s or 60s. I don't know of them.
And if you do, let me know. But in 1990, um, JD McClatchy, Sandy McClatchy, um, published a book called The Rest of the way.
And the first poem in that book is called The Landing. And it involves and a dramatic rhyme.
So this idea of rhyme is picked up again. It's got discrete couplets.
So this rhymes are very clear. We have saw rhyming with was cloud with could pages with gape has with ash own with now.
The book was dedicated to his friend James Marrow in 1990.
I guess Merrill would have maybe just been, um, coming down with, um, his sickness from Aids, which would eventually kill him some years later.
And this book and this poem has a kind of elegiac feel to it.
Uh, I don't I wasn't very aware of this poem. Um, but I came across a conversation where two younger poets mentioned this poem.
Um. Richie Hoffman and, um, The Heron by Randall Mann.
Um, in a conversation in The Kenyon Review, um,
Randall Mann says The Heron is one of the first true poems I wrote in 1993 as an
undergraduate and at Francis about a painting in the Harn Museum in Gainesville,
Florida, in which there set a heron. At the time, I was reading JD, JD McClatchy as the rest of the way, the first poem of which is The Landing,
which uses anagram rhyme, as you call it, a pond, the colour of oolong ts a heron refusing to look anywhere but east.
Unlike the Pickering Pond.
This is this idea of reflected water, which works very well in this reversed and and a dramatic rhyming mangroves flecked with fire,
deep set birches rife with the wait for night in stone.
The heron stares, the stoic tones of the sky, a story procession of palms, their red tipped fronds overhanging lamps.
I really love palms and lips waterbird.
It has been centuries since I felt anything for you. You have been left.
Look around. Why does the owl rest on a goddess's shoulder while you wait?
So the very charming poem, um, Richie Hoffman in this, um, same conversation, also namechecks the Landing.
This is his wonderful illustration from Percival, dedicated to JD McClatchy.
So you see that connection very clearly here. Our enigmatic rhymes are steady and dusty.
Scarlet to clear its spread turns into drakes, golden into land treasure for us dearer tress rests,
beard bred past taps tapered predate and veil live.
I wrote illustration from Parsifal while staying at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut.
Ryme is such a dramatic limitation, I feel when I rhyme like I'm relinquishing some responsibility for writing the poem to the poem itself,
the phenomenon feels supernatural or divine to me, and it feels Marillion, um, in that house.
His books were full of scrawls on the pages that were full of anagrams.
One memorable instance was Merrill's transformation of Phyllis Thomas to Hot Ladies Man.
Um. Uh. It's a nod to morals and a dramatic play, but the anagram rhyme poem I knew was JD McCloud.
Tis the landing.
So the landing takes this discovery that was sort of almost forgotten and carries that maybe to a new generation of experimental poets.
Um, words that are anagrams of one another share the same sonic building blocks.
And this is what's kind of alchemical about it. We think of, um, alchemists changing substance from one to another,
but also because perhaps that substance is already there and a rearrangement of the building blocks,
the sound effects that result are really interesting and beautiful to me.
Um, the recombine relationship of their vowels and consonants in a way that feels original and forceful and striking.
It's like painting a new subject with the same palette. Whatever shapes they take, they share a kind of primordial essence.
They're made of the same stuff. Um, and Merrill himself, with his poem The Changing Light of Sand over um,
is it's an epic poem where he and his partner are speaking to the dead through a Ouija board, and there's constant plays on anagrams.
There's constant talk about alchemy, um, about live Olympics.
Um, uh, and you get this sense there's the spirit.
Sol. Is that the soul? Is that the sun?
Um, the idea of watching anagrams. Um, uh, come in and out of the page.
Um, I was I'm going to end on a James Merrill poem, and I was very lucky that Erica McAlpine reminded me of this poem, which I had forgotten about.
Um, but very much suits our theme processional by James Merrill.
Here we have another sonnet. It's an unusual sonnet. We usually think of eight and 6 or 3 quatrains in a couplet.
Here we have six, six, and we have a couplet at the end.
It's about, uh, the transmutation of matter.
We have a drop of water and what it turns into, perhaps think what the demotic droplets felt.
Translated by a polar wand to keen six pointed Mandarin all singularity.
It's developed on of a hitherto untold flakiness gem like nevermore to melt.
But melt it would and look become now bird glance.
Now the gingko leaf span light to the same tune, whereby immensely old slabs of dogma and opprobrium, exchanging ions under pressure,
bred a spa of burnt black anchorite, or in three lucky strokes of word golf, led once again turns loathed goad to gold.
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