1 00:00:53,020 --> 00:03:18,290 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] You. I. 2 00:03:27,330 --> 00:03:34,180 Other was. No. 3 00:03:46,880 --> 00:03:51,400 Fresh. Is reserved for the southern. 4 00:04:02,150 --> 00:04:26,070 You know. Just make sure the clicker is clear and just check. 5 00:04:39,630 --> 00:04:43,470 Right. Okay. 6 00:04:47,950 --> 00:04:51,940 I think. It's okay to say it's not. 7 00:04:52,020 --> 00:04:56,910 My voice gives out. The like. 8 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:04,420 Yeah, this whole thing is like my little book, and I need somewhere to put that. 9 00:05:05,500 --> 00:05:12,560 I can do that. That's not. Only one of these clubs. 10 00:05:16,620 --> 00:06:13,080 I don't want to. I think. 11 00:11:33,880 --> 00:11:37,090 Oh, yeah. We used to just go. 12 00:14:05,180 --> 00:16:15,590 Yeah. Yes. 13 00:16:51,340 --> 00:17:38,600 Oh. Stay. 14 00:17:39,020 --> 00:18:53,700 Say that. Uh. 15 00:21:21,660 --> 00:21:26,930 Right. Yeah. 16 00:21:28,110 --> 00:22:09,420 I think. Sorry, so I don't. 17 00:22:20,660 --> 00:22:31,550 I see. You know, like I said. 18 00:22:58,550 --> 00:23:01,730 Hello. To. 19 00:23:24,600 --> 00:24:04,750 Yeah. Yes. 20 00:26:20,670 --> 00:30:32,550 If you don't have the. Good evening. 21 00:30:32,570 --> 00:30:40,280 Thank you for coming. Um, today, um, the title of my talk is Ryme as experiment. 22 00:30:40,850 --> 00:30:52,830 Ryme as alchemy. Creative writing and poetry courses often use the word workshop, 23 00:30:53,970 --> 00:31:00,000 which suggests either elves hammering away at wooden toys in indentured 24 00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:06,600 servitude or a factory full of well greased and potentially dangerous machines. 25 00:31:06,990 --> 00:31:15,960 But what if we think of poetry instead, in terms of a kind of laboratory full of test tubes and flames and pungent smoke? 26 00:31:16,350 --> 00:31:19,560 Part magic, part science. 27 00:31:19,950 --> 00:31:23,730 Testing materials and discovering their properties. 28 00:31:26,470 --> 00:31:35,650 In 1993, after a brief stint at Oxford, um, I was publishing my first non juvenilia poems in magazines. 29 00:31:36,010 --> 00:31:39,340 I was writing in free verse, but sometimes in form. 30 00:31:40,150 --> 00:31:47,510 But the poems that suddenly were getting picked up by editors were the ones that rhymed. 31 00:31:47,530 --> 00:31:51,460 I was slowly committing myself where my heart was, but where fashion was not. 32 00:31:51,910 --> 00:31:57,850 Two poems in metre and rhyme. So I'm imagining my own delight. 33 00:31:58,030 --> 00:32:03,700 I'm looking back at the 1993 movie of Much Ado About Nothing. 34 00:32:04,300 --> 00:32:07,570 A play I had no doubt read, but not with much attention. 35 00:32:08,140 --> 00:32:18,010 When the Love struck Benedick, Kenneth Branagh, in a witty patter prose, discusses the perplexity of making a rhyming poem. 36 00:32:19,830 --> 00:32:29,500 The God of love that sits above and knows me and knows me. 37 00:32:29,520 --> 00:32:39,900 How pitifully, how pitiful I deserve. I mean in singing, but in loving Leander, the good swimmer, Troilus, the first employer of panders, 38 00:32:40,170 --> 00:32:47,280 and a whole book full of those quantum carpet mongers whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse. 39 00:32:47,670 --> 00:32:53,880 Why they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love. 40 00:32:54,660 --> 00:32:58,650 Mary, I cannot show it in rhyme. I have tried. 41 00:32:59,550 --> 00:33:05,280 I can find out. No rhyme to lady but baby. 42 00:33:06,690 --> 00:33:14,670 And innocent rhyme for scorn. Horn A hard rhyme for a school fool A babbling rhyme. 43 00:33:14,760 --> 00:33:21,240 Very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet. 44 00:33:21,690 --> 00:33:24,540 Nor I cannot woo in festival terms. 45 00:33:25,380 --> 00:33:35,630 So in a humorous passage that does not rhyme Shakespeare yet hits upon some of rhymes, mysteries, load bearing and rhymes. 46 00:33:35,640 --> 00:33:41,880 Those ominous endings have a way of distilling a plot or the moral of a narrative. 47 00:33:42,150 --> 00:33:49,500 Lady baby scoring horn, horn, of course, always indicating perhaps cuckolding in Shakespeare school and fool. 48 00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:54,840 And we can read Benedict's thoughts here. First comes love, then comes marriage. 49 00:33:55,020 --> 00:33:58,500 Then comes Benedick with a baby carriage and a baby that might not even be his own. 50 00:34:00,150 --> 00:34:06,570 We also have an example of a spectacularly bad rhyme lady and baby, 51 00:34:07,230 --> 00:34:12,750 which is allowable only in, say, pop songs or light country music, and I will return to that. 52 00:34:13,740 --> 00:34:18,690 Um, but I am intrigued in the way his thoughts are put to the course of true love. 53 00:34:18,690 --> 00:34:22,800 Never did run smooth, but it can rattle along well enough in the even road of a blank verse. 54 00:34:23,100 --> 00:34:33,149 But rhyme is a different matter. Rhyme is something he must try or attempt through trial and error. 55 00:34:33,150 --> 00:34:35,880 And rhymes are something he is trying to find out or discover. 56 00:34:36,120 --> 00:34:40,740 This is if I may be allowed to stretch the point, and I'm going to be stretching all of my points today. 57 00:34:41,460 --> 00:34:50,130 Language of experiment. Experiment and of science, which in Shakespeare's time would have been indistinguishable from what we now call alchemy. 58 00:34:50,820 --> 00:34:57,300 His experiment is a failed one because he says he was not born under a rhyming planet. 59 00:34:57,900 --> 00:35:07,290 This might properly belong to astrology, but of course, the influences and symbolism of the seven planets was also an essential element of alchemy, 60 00:35:07,530 --> 00:35:11,280 astrology and alchemy, part of the same branch of mystical science. 61 00:35:11,580 --> 00:35:17,280 I've given some thought as to which planet this would be, and I have decided it must be Mercury. 62 00:35:17,830 --> 00:35:25,890 Um. The planet associated with diviners, philosophers, astrologers, writers, teachers, secretaries and communicators. 63 00:35:28,650 --> 00:35:34,020 That Benedict's experiment in rhyming is a failed one is evident to Benedict himself, 64 00:35:34,440 --> 00:35:40,560 but it is also clear that any poem developed from these rhyme pairs is going to be a barely passable one. 65 00:35:41,130 --> 00:35:48,240 My suspicion is that Benedict the poet, neither born nor made, would end up using these rhyme words as nouns. 66 00:35:48,270 --> 00:35:56,640 Lady baby, scorned horned school fool. And we'd end up with one simple declarative sentence after another. 67 00:35:57,600 --> 00:36:02,310 Um, the bad rhyme lady and baby is really an accident, not a rhyme at all, 68 00:36:02,340 --> 00:36:08,250 because there is barely a relationship between D and B, besides potentially a visually mirrored one. 69 00:36:08,820 --> 00:36:15,780 Um, and, you know, to, to sort of demonstrate to this to myself, I went through all of Shakespeare's rhyming poems, 70 00:36:15,780 --> 00:36:19,500 the sonnets Venus and Adonis, the Phoenix and the turtle, The Rape of Lucrece. 71 00:36:19,860 --> 00:36:28,020 Um, looking at the rhymes, there are some rhymes that are imperfect to us, but perhaps would have been perfect in Shakespeare's pronunciation. 72 00:36:28,290 --> 00:36:32,340 And there are only a handful of rhymes that do any objective fudging. 73 00:36:33,030 --> 00:36:37,850 Downs and hounds where all's is rhymed with old. 74 00:36:38,320 --> 00:36:45,630 Uh, so a slightly different, um, closed end sound, and I think probably the furthest one is replenish and blemish, 75 00:36:45,990 --> 00:36:52,260 where the blemish is a rhyming of and and m related nasal consonants, perhaps, but not best practice. 76 00:36:52,260 --> 00:36:55,620 But nowhere is there anything as bad as lady and baby. 77 00:36:55,920 --> 00:36:59,900 Um, we have things that again, ah, might not have been off to Shakespeare at all. 78 00:36:59,910 --> 00:37:09,510 Sword and word. Um, there might not have been an emphasis on, um, the accent and syllable flatter water gave he have ground wound, 79 00:37:09,780 --> 00:37:13,259 swine and groyne, which we know was a rhyme pair. 80 00:37:13,260 --> 00:37:16,890 A perfect rhyme pair for people as late as Pope. 81 00:37:17,460 --> 00:37:23,730 So we have perfect. And. Imperfect rhyme, pure and base, gold and led. 82 00:37:24,120 --> 00:37:30,120 The testing of them by ear. The discovery of new properties and new kinds of rhyme in English will be my theme. 83 00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:35,820 But first, maybe it's worth establishing a definition of what perfect rhyme is. 84 00:37:35,850 --> 00:37:38,970 I know you all know a good rhyme when you hear one. 85 00:37:39,300 --> 00:37:47,890 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. 86 00:37:47,910 --> 00:37:52,140 So I'm going to maybe talk about a little bit what a rhyme is. 87 00:37:54,480 --> 00:38:00,430 Edward, this is definition from 1702 will work as a starting point in the art of poetry. 88 00:38:00,450 --> 00:38:09,000 He says rhyme is a likeness or uniformity of sound in the terminations of two words I say of sound, not of letters. 89 00:38:09,390 --> 00:38:14,420 For the office of rhyme being to content and please the ear and not the eye. 90 00:38:14,430 --> 00:38:19,020 The sound only is to be regarded, nor not the writing thus made. 91 00:38:19,020 --> 00:38:25,500 And persuade, laugh and quaff or laugh and quaff, though they differ in writing rhyme very well. 92 00:38:25,770 --> 00:38:29,130 But plough and calf, though written alike, rhyme not at all. 93 00:38:29,970 --> 00:38:38,040 Um. As I say here, full perfect rhymes established by coincidence of ending sounds um, from the same stress accent on. 94 00:38:38,040 --> 00:38:47,160 So that is also important. Um, and there being a different consonant, um, sound at the beginning of that rhyme. 95 00:38:47,550 --> 00:38:53,129 Um, so goat coats, dope, tote boats, creosote afloat, etc. rhyme rabbit inhabit hare. 96 00:38:53,130 --> 00:38:59,220 Sheer despair of er solution is diminish, but at least in my American pronunciation. 97 00:38:59,850 --> 00:39:04,080 Donkey and monkey do not rhyme because the accented vowel differs. 98 00:39:04,350 --> 00:39:08,490 I would write rhyme donkey with wonky and monkey with funky. 99 00:39:09,180 --> 00:39:13,440 Um, I realised that in some Englishes donkey and monkey are a perfect rhyme. 100 00:39:13,440 --> 00:39:20,450 And I think if I were to go and watch, um, The David Copperfield with Maggie Smith as, um, 101 00:39:20,460 --> 00:39:24,860 Betsy Trotwood when she's shouting about the donkey, she might have been shouting about donkeys. 102 00:39:24,870 --> 00:39:35,280 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. 103 00:39:35,580 --> 00:39:44,010 I have got into some kind of strange conversations about whether masculine like rhymes are somehow masculine and feminine rhymes, or somehow feminine. 104 00:39:44,280 --> 00:39:50,970 This has nothing to do with gender or pronouns. It has only to do with grammatical gender. 105 00:39:51,630 --> 00:39:54,750 Um. Blonde without an e. 106 00:39:54,780 --> 00:40:01,950 Blonde with an e. So for the purposes of French diversification, um, one is masculine and one is feminine. 107 00:40:02,490 --> 00:40:14,160 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, 108 00:40:14,700 --> 00:40:22,380 maybe chemical union of two or more things because of an attraction of sensual sound rather than cerebral sense. 109 00:40:23,010 --> 00:40:29,730 Perhaps we should think of rhyme pairs as molecules, discrete atoms held together by chemical bonds. 110 00:40:30,450 --> 00:40:38,160 I also think of rhyme as entanglement, and that rhymed words can perform spooky action at a distance. 111 00:40:38,670 --> 00:40:41,910 What effects one rhyme of a pair will affect them both. 112 00:40:42,810 --> 00:40:48,030 So poets often talk about rhyming as a kind of discovery, finding and research. 113 00:40:48,480 --> 00:40:53,820 Um, I would say that especially in English, where pure rhyme is famously limited. 114 00:40:54,510 --> 00:41:01,590 Um, that and there's an element of experimentalism in rhyme, in discovering new rhymes and discovering new ways to rhyme. 115 00:41:02,190 --> 00:41:05,340 Rhyme is one of the most endemic aspects of a language. 116 00:41:05,370 --> 00:41:11,850 I sometimes call it a terroir. In English, tombe and womn are entangled, breath and death are entangled, 117 00:41:12,180 --> 00:41:21,360 whereas love wanders about in an indirect days of of above dove and worst of all, glove. 118 00:41:22,790 --> 00:41:30,710 Um, but in another language, like Greek, for instance, it might be hands and knives that are always fatefully paired together. 119 00:41:31,610 --> 00:41:37,219 Ryme can seem like a kind of equation. Um, ryme itself is a metaphor or a simile. 120 00:41:37,220 --> 00:41:43,220 Saying that is somehow like something is like something else because they have similar sounds, similar endings. 121 00:41:43,610 --> 00:41:51,889 Um, but Ryme also works within a system. So for a system to have energy and potential, it must not have equilibrium potential energy. 122 00:41:51,890 --> 00:41:55,640 And the system has to put do with putting in difference and imbalance. 123 00:41:56,150 --> 00:42:00,110 Absolute balance will be a kind of heat death of the rhyme energy of the poem. 124 00:42:00,320 --> 00:42:04,340 So like when you see a poem that rhymes hat, cat, that mat. 125 00:42:05,030 --> 00:42:08,200 The problem is not that it's got these words in it. 126 00:42:08,210 --> 00:42:14,690 The problem is probably that you have one simple declarative sentence after another and that it is stopped. 127 00:42:15,110 --> 00:42:21,110 So for those of you who, um are thinking about rhyming, consider doing some of the following from time to time. 128 00:42:21,110 --> 00:42:26,570 Rhyme. Check your poems to make sure your rhymes are not static. Rhyme across parts of speech. 129 00:42:27,110 --> 00:42:29,360 This supports a more complex syntax. 130 00:42:29,720 --> 00:42:35,960 You can think of rhyming the abstract with the concrete, rhyming the general with the specifics, such as proper nouns, 131 00:42:36,170 --> 00:42:40,550 rhyme monosyllables with polysyllabic words rhyme across registers, 132 00:42:40,850 --> 00:42:46,850 Latinate or French source words with Anglo-Saxon sciency words with pop culture, and so on. 133 00:42:47,170 --> 00:42:53,090 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. 134 00:42:53,240 --> 00:42:58,730 This is slightly not as random as usual. I can pick a random Shakespeare sonnet, but this isn't a random one. 135 00:42:59,390 --> 00:43:06,799 Um, for many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign I kissing with golden face. 136 00:43:06,800 --> 00:43:11,000 The meadows green gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. 137 00:43:11,300 --> 00:43:15,680 Anon permit the basis clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face. 138 00:43:16,010 --> 00:43:22,160 And from the forlorn world his visage hide stealing unseen to west with this disgrace. 139 00:43:22,460 --> 00:43:28,580 And so my son, one early morn did shine with all triumphant splendour on my brow. 140 00:43:28,820 --> 00:43:31,940 But out alack, he was but one hour. 141 00:43:31,940 --> 00:43:35,059 Mind the region cloud hath masked him from me. 142 00:43:35,060 --> 00:43:38,209 Now yet him for this my love. 143 00:43:38,210 --> 00:43:41,900 No wit, disdain hath sons of the world may stain. 144 00:43:41,900 --> 00:43:47,479 When heaven's sun standeth. So if we just look at these rhymes seen and green. 145 00:43:47,480 --> 00:43:56,180 We have a verb with an adjective. I is a noun of Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, um, provenance. 146 00:43:56,180 --> 00:43:59,600 Alchemy is a noun, but it is a big noun. 147 00:43:59,600 --> 00:44:04,970 It is a big mysterious noun. Um, possibly Arabic and Greek. 148 00:44:05,600 --> 00:44:12,679 Um, Ryde and Hyde are both monosyllables, and both verb verbs face disgrace are nouns, 149 00:44:12,680 --> 00:44:17,030 but one is larger than the other and one is more abstract than the other. 150 00:44:17,540 --> 00:44:21,739 Shine is a verb mine an adjective. Brow is a noun. 151 00:44:21,740 --> 00:44:30,080 Now an adverb and disdain is and standeth are of slightly different sizes, though, um, they're both verbal. 152 00:44:30,080 --> 00:44:34,610 And there's something about the couplet ending, um, where they match very well. 153 00:44:34,880 --> 00:44:40,730 So that's just an example of you can take any Shakespeare sonnet and do this, 154 00:44:40,730 --> 00:44:46,310 and you'll find a plethora of interesting, um, parts of speech and connections. 155 00:44:50,760 --> 00:44:54,750 Uh, okay. Um, no doubt Shakespeare had to discover his rhymes himself. 156 00:44:55,320 --> 00:44:59,140 But at the start of the 18th century, the rhyming dictionary arrives in English. 157 00:44:59,160 --> 00:45:01,560 It had already been a staple of other languages. 158 00:45:02,130 --> 00:45:09,780 I think the first and I could be wrong, but I think the first is Edward Bishop's 1702 the Art of English Poetry, 159 00:45:09,780 --> 00:45:15,300 which contains rules of prosody and examples from approved poets. 160 00:45:16,020 --> 00:45:20,760 Um. He has a brief, rather charming remark on the serendipitous pleasures of browsing. 161 00:45:21,570 --> 00:45:28,590 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. 162 00:45:28,960 --> 00:45:32,370 Nay, I sometimes even found it difficult to choose under what. 163 00:45:32,370 --> 00:45:37,859 Head to place several of the best thoughts, but the readers may be assured. 164 00:45:37,860 --> 00:45:47,730 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. 165 00:45:48,090 --> 00:45:53,610 And if, like chemists, his great and he myths yet things well worth his toil, 166 00:45:53,610 --> 00:45:59,309 he gains and does his charge and labour pay with good unsought experiments. 167 00:45:59,310 --> 00:46:04,440 By the way. Uh, this is actually from a poem about seducing a mistress. 168 00:46:04,770 --> 00:46:08,370 Um, though. So those experiments are perhaps sexual experiments. 169 00:46:08,370 --> 00:46:16,710 But I like this idea of, um, the sort of, uh, accidental pleasures and discovery when we're looking even at a reference book. 170 00:46:18,300 --> 00:46:23,400 This deals only with pure rhymes, though at this time in place. 171 00:46:23,400 --> 00:46:32,520 For instance, as I mentioned, wine and join are perfect rhymes, and of those rhymes only rhymes appropriate for heroic verse. 172 00:46:33,210 --> 00:46:44,040 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. 173 00:46:44,310 --> 00:46:52,000 A badge of honour fad is low. It's a kind of Scottish bread, and catch is too obscure. 174 00:46:52,020 --> 00:46:58,620 Apparently, for Bish it is something out of falconry that meant a mobile perch that could hold many birds at once. 175 00:46:59,970 --> 00:47:05,670 Um, he talks about single and double and triple rhymes, which we might call masculine, 176 00:47:05,670 --> 00:47:11,070 feminine and triple, and grapples with some of the problems of English rhyme and orthography. 177 00:47:11,370 --> 00:47:16,469 So some of his rules, which still hold true, at least in conventional English rhyming, 178 00:47:16,470 --> 00:47:28,380 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. 179 00:47:28,920 --> 00:47:37,350 And he adds that it where a word cannot rhyme, its to itself, even if the signification is different. 180 00:47:44,450 --> 00:47:48,410 But probably the most important rhyming dictionary would be some 70 years later. 181 00:47:48,830 --> 00:47:56,390 Walker's rhyming Dictionary, originally titled dictionary of the English Language, answering at once the purposes of rhyming, 182 00:47:56,750 --> 00:48:02,780 spelling and pronouncing, is a very useful volume, which included a reverse dictionary, 183 00:48:02,780 --> 00:48:08,300 so a dictionary by n sound rather than initial alphabetical order, which served as a rhyming dictionary, 184 00:48:08,810 --> 00:48:17,270 but where Walker is original is in his discovery and theorising of allowable rhymes and his index thereof. 185 00:48:19,540 --> 00:48:23,740 Whether because of vowel shifts or other changes in pronunciation rhyme pairs 186 00:48:24,040 --> 00:48:28,720 that had been in use for hundreds of years in some cases did not strictly rhyme, 187 00:48:29,140 --> 00:48:33,880 yet they were allowable and they were pleasing to the ears, sometimes more pleasing than perfect rhyme. 188 00:48:34,450 --> 00:48:40,329 As Walker says, an index to allowable rhymes is an attempt perfectly new. 189 00:48:40,330 --> 00:48:42,760 So we have this sense again, of discovery. 190 00:48:43,420 --> 00:48:50,740 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. 191 00:48:51,940 --> 00:48:58,000 The same masculine force that supports our poetry, without the assistance of any rhyme at all, 192 00:48:58,540 --> 00:49:06,940 seems to exempt it from the servile attention to perfectly similar rhymes to which the French reciprocation is invariably bound. 193 00:49:07,540 --> 00:49:13,270 Nay, so far from a deficit, there seems to be sometimes a beauty in departing from a perfect exactness of rhyme. 194 00:49:13,420 --> 00:49:22,210 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. 195 00:49:22,720 --> 00:49:27,130 But though an English ear will freely admit to a range between a long and short of the same vowel, 196 00:49:27,760 --> 00:49:34,450 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. 197 00:49:34,600 --> 00:49:42,429 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. 198 00:49:42,430 --> 00:49:50,230 E's and a's can rhyme together. That is okay. Um, the only the only infallible touchstone is the ear. 199 00:49:50,350 --> 00:49:56,680 The ears. The discovery of the relations between similar vowels better than a grammatical analysis. 200 00:49:57,010 --> 00:50:01,630 He talks about radical sound, whether unions are lawful or not. 201 00:50:01,990 --> 00:50:12,940 Um, all of this again, has a slightly, um, experimental chemistry, chemical or alchemical, um, kind of basis in the vocabulary. 202 00:50:13,450 --> 00:50:19,269 Um, he says that's the different sounds of the vowels I, e, a, o. 203 00:50:19,270 --> 00:50:23,139 You slide into each other by an easy gradation, 204 00:50:23,140 --> 00:50:30,370 each of which is sufficiently related to the preceding and succeeding sound to form what is called an allowable rhyme. 205 00:50:30,610 --> 00:50:41,230 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. 206 00:50:41,410 --> 00:50:45,219 Vowels have pitch, um, there higher vowels and lower vowels. 207 00:50:45,220 --> 00:50:48,850 And his list of bells seems to me a little bit closer to that. 208 00:50:48,850 --> 00:50:55,030 I'm not a linguist, but, um, it did sort of strike me that they were not in alphabetical order. 209 00:50:57,870 --> 00:51:03,510 This is one of these things where you get ear, so you look up ear and here you have a whole bunch of things. 210 00:51:03,780 --> 00:51:07,349 Um, he's not so worried about everything, only be it being heroic verse. 211 00:51:07,350 --> 00:51:11,100 He's got beer, for instance. Um, which I don't think Bush would allow. 212 00:51:11,430 --> 00:51:18,210 Um, he's got beer and beer and beer and Dominator and privateer perfect rhymes that are kind of spelled differently. 213 00:51:18,420 --> 00:51:24,960 And then we sometimes have allowable rhymes bear, dare, prefer deter character. 214 00:51:25,200 --> 00:51:31,350 And he always supports this idea with examples from the best poets. 215 00:51:32,400 --> 00:51:37,850 Um, this is Rhyme Zone, which you can find online and has a kind of similar idea. 216 00:51:37,860 --> 00:51:43,680 There are now online rhyming dictionaries. Um, Rhyme Zone is one of the better ones. 217 00:51:44,070 --> 00:51:47,390 Um, it will have more common words and bold. 218 00:51:47,400 --> 00:51:51,180 It will give you one syllable rhymes. Two syllable rhymes, three syllable enforceable. 219 00:51:51,180 --> 00:51:56,340 For instance, if you are writing a song and you need something of several syllables. 220 00:51:59,280 --> 00:52:09,030 Right away. Um, basically, the Walker dictionary gets name checked by none other than Byron. 221 00:52:09,030 --> 00:52:15,990 Pretty, pretty early on. Um, so Walker discovers this allowable slang term, perfect rhyme and all of these beauties. 222 00:52:16,350 --> 00:52:21,390 Um, it is important when we're talking about rhymes. Consonants are more important than vowels. 223 00:52:21,420 --> 00:52:26,340 This is really the basic principle that, um, I want all of the poets out there to walk away from. 224 00:52:26,790 --> 00:52:29,940 Um, because English vowels are very fluid. 225 00:52:30,330 --> 00:52:35,489 They vary by time and place. They vary by generation and class. 226 00:52:35,490 --> 00:52:41,400 They vary by geography. They vary by ethnic um groups. 227 00:52:41,940 --> 00:52:50,610 Uh, in Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter, tired, meaning weary and hard meaning difficult are a perfect rhyme. 228 00:52:50,790 --> 00:52:54,209 Tired and hard on the page. 229 00:52:54,210 --> 00:52:57,210 They don't look perfect, but when she enunciates them, they are a perfect rhyme. 230 00:52:57,210 --> 00:53:02,910 So this is one of the reasons why it's important to hitch rhymes to the consonants and not the vowels. 231 00:53:03,510 --> 00:53:10,290 Um. In Beppo Byron writes, but I am but a nameless sort of person, a broken dandy lately on my travels, 232 00:53:10,650 --> 00:53:16,980 and take for rhyme to hook my rambling verse on the first that Walker's lexicon unravels. 233 00:53:17,280 --> 00:53:25,319 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. 234 00:53:25,320 --> 00:53:28,740 But verse is more in fashion. So here goes. 235 00:53:29,550 --> 00:53:36,240 Um. Ironically, the only two rhymes he could have got out of Walker's lexicon here are pros and gos. 236 00:53:36,570 --> 00:53:43,860 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. 237 00:53:44,070 --> 00:53:49,049 It doesn't rhyme. This mosaic rhymes where you rhyme more than one words with another word. 238 00:53:49,050 --> 00:53:52,080 Person verse on worse on. 239 00:53:52,650 --> 00:53:56,760 Um. Although I actually like the term Frankenstein rhymes because we're stitching words together. 240 00:53:57,030 --> 00:54:04,560 Travels, unravels, cables. Um, these are all rhymes that Byron would have pretty much had to have come up with himself. 241 00:54:05,280 --> 00:54:10,620 Um, he is a discoverer of wonderful burlesque rhymes. 242 00:54:10,620 --> 00:54:18,329 Um, I think intellectual and henpecked you all is one of the most famous, um, here, though you could also see that strong rhyming. 243 00:54:18,330 --> 00:54:24,870 Her favourite science was the mathematical. Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity, her wit. 244 00:54:24,870 --> 00:54:30,239 She sometimes tried it. Wit was attic. All her serious things darkened to sublimity. 245 00:54:30,240 --> 00:54:34,260 In short, in all things she was fairly what I call a prodigy. 246 00:54:34,260 --> 00:54:42,780 Her morning dress was dimity her evening silk, or in the summer muslin, and other stuffs with which I won't stay puzzling. 247 00:54:43,410 --> 00:54:46,889 I know that that's supposed to be pronounced puzzling here, because Byron, 248 00:54:46,890 --> 00:54:51,750 I don't even know the name for this sort of rhyme where we set up a kind of humorous pronunciation, 249 00:54:51,750 --> 00:54:55,650 and I know I need to pronounce that like a Regency book and not puzzling. 250 00:54:56,280 --> 00:55:00,629 Um, and we also have wonderful differences of rhyme mathematical. 251 00:55:00,630 --> 00:55:08,010 One huge word was article three words, what I call of a different kind of register altogether magnanimity, 252 00:55:08,010 --> 00:55:14,250 sublimity, and dimity kind of shrinking down to something more and more mundane and then muslin and puzzling. 253 00:55:14,940 --> 00:55:20,310 Um, rhyme also, though, allows for discoveries of vocabulary. 254 00:55:21,150 --> 00:55:24,390 Um, this is from the shipwreck canto of dungeon. 255 00:55:26,020 --> 00:55:31,240 Our shipwrecked seamen thought it a good omen. It is as well to think so now and then. 256 00:55:31,630 --> 00:55:37,780 Twas an old custom of the Greek and Roman, and may become of great advantage when folks are discouraged. 257 00:55:38,050 --> 00:55:42,610 And most surely no man had greater need to nerve themselves again than these. 258 00:55:42,820 --> 00:55:45,910 And so this rainbow looked like hope. 259 00:55:46,360 --> 00:55:56,280 Quite a celestial kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope was a brand new word to the English language in 1818 1819. 260 00:55:58,140 --> 00:56:03,570 Maybe he had looked in Walker's lexicon, and he was tired of all of the rhymes. 261 00:56:03,900 --> 00:56:07,110 What does hope rhyme with? According to Walker, it rhymes with soap. 262 00:56:07,800 --> 00:56:11,550 Cope. Mope. Grope. Pope. 263 00:56:11,910 --> 00:56:15,299 Interloper. Horoscope. Antelope. Heliotrope. 264 00:56:15,300 --> 00:56:21,840 Telescope. Um. But, uh, the kaleidoscope had just been invented. 265 00:56:22,320 --> 00:56:26,310 Um. David Brewster invented it and named it in 1817. 266 00:56:26,550 --> 00:56:30,810 And John Murray, Byron's publisher, gave him a kaleidoscope. 267 00:56:31,110 --> 00:56:35,940 And so he had this brand new toy with this wonderful new word. 268 00:56:36,450 --> 00:56:41,010 This is the first use of kaleidoscope in any kind of figurative way. 269 00:56:41,340 --> 00:56:44,820 Um, Byron is responsible for importing it into the language. 270 00:56:45,150 --> 00:56:50,340 Um, when we're listening to the Beatles and we hear Kaleidoscope Eyes, that is due to Byron. 271 00:56:50,880 --> 00:56:56,640 Um, but again, it's the pressure of the rhyme that is causing some of this innovation. 272 00:56:57,690 --> 00:57:03,990 Um, around the same time, I'm not really going to go too much into the Keats. 273 00:57:04,020 --> 00:57:10,079 Um, but, uh, Peter McDonald mentions, um, that in the letter that Keats writes. 274 00:57:10,080 --> 00:57:17,760 This is the same year, 1819 John Keats writes to his brother and sister George and Georgiana in Louisville, Kentucky. 275 00:57:18,120 --> 00:57:25,410 It will never not blow my mind that George Keats is buried in the same cemetery as my grandfather in Cave Hill, Louisville, Kentucky. 276 00:57:25,980 --> 00:57:29,810 Um, he writes about it in this kind of scientific way. 277 00:57:29,820 --> 00:57:38,250 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. 278 00:57:38,250 --> 00:57:45,840 So I've been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have, and we have this wonderfully interwoven. 279 00:57:46,080 --> 00:57:49,260 If by double rhymes, our English must be changed. 280 00:57:49,290 --> 00:57:55,319 So again, that idea of maybe taking what is a disadvantage in English, 281 00:57:55,320 --> 00:58:02,370 the paucity of rhymes and that strict rhyme patterns and using that as a kind of pressure, um, to innovate. 282 00:58:02,380 --> 00:58:05,880 So we have that in this lovely sonnet. 283 00:58:06,450 --> 00:58:18,120 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. 284 00:58:18,450 --> 00:58:29,820 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, 285 00:58:30,180 --> 00:58:37,260 is attending school, um, at Amherst Academy and then is educated at Mount Holyoke Cemetery. 286 00:58:37,620 --> 00:58:47,670 Seminary. Sorry. Her education, unusually for the time, either for boys or girls, heavily emphasised the natural sciences. 287 00:58:48,450 --> 00:58:51,780 Um students had to memorise and recite scientific texts. 288 00:58:52,080 --> 00:58:55,350 When she was 17, she wrote to her brother Austin. 289 00:58:56,160 --> 00:59:02,430 I finished my examination in Euclid. My studies are chemistry, physiology, and a quarter course in algebra. 290 00:59:02,910 --> 00:59:11,250 In 1848, she writes, I am now studying Solomon's chemistry and Cutler's physiology, in both of which I am much interested. 291 00:59:12,000 --> 00:59:22,320 And, uh, my favourite bit. You're welcome. Letter found me all engrossed in the history of sulphuric acid with five exclamation points. 292 00:59:22,470 --> 00:59:26,379 Bam bam bam bam bam. Um. 293 00:59:26,380 --> 00:59:34,360 Famed geology geologist Doctor Edward Hitchcock was the president of Amherst College during Dickinson's years at Amherst Academy, 294 00:59:34,630 --> 00:59:42,100 and Mount Holyoke was headed by its founder, Mary Leon, who was a chemist by training. 295 00:59:42,490 --> 00:59:47,620 Um, I did kind of peer into this book that she was very interested in about chemistry. 296 00:59:47,830 --> 00:59:55,600 Um, remember, this is, um, 1840s. It's kind of the time of Victorian amateur scientists. 297 00:59:55,990 --> 01:00:01,000 Um, this Solomon's, um, book was designed for people who knew nothing about chemistry, 298 01:00:01,000 --> 01:00:06,520 and it's really introductory and supposed to be, um, get students interested in thinking about chemistry themselves. 299 01:00:06,520 --> 01:00:09,910 But I like this this little pitch about chemistry and alchemy. 300 01:00:10,270 --> 01:00:12,999 Um, whose object was to discover the philosopher's stone, 301 01:00:13,000 --> 01:00:18,160 an imaginary substance which it was supposed to convert the baser metals into gold or silver. 302 01:00:18,370 --> 01:00:22,990 To speak of the equally delusive pursuit after the Grand Catholic con, etc., etc. 303 01:00:23,260 --> 01:00:24,969 Um. The Alchemist, however, 304 01:00:24,970 --> 01:00:32,410 accumulated many valuable facts which have been employed with good advantage in laying the foundations of modern chemical science. 305 01:00:33,040 --> 01:00:38,520 Um, experiment is actually a big word for, um, Emily Dickinson. 306 01:00:38,530 --> 01:00:48,010 It shows up again and again, and there are lots of poems, um, that deal in, um, science as metaphor and all of those. 307 01:00:48,250 --> 01:00:51,970 We maybe think of her a lot, um, in terms of faith and doubt. 308 01:00:52,390 --> 01:00:56,320 Um, but science is placed in there immediately. Experiment, discourse. 309 01:00:56,320 --> 01:01:00,340 This last is pungent. Company will not allow an axiom and opportunity. 310 01:01:01,060 --> 01:01:09,760 Um, experiment to me, is everyone I meet. If it contain a kernel, the figure of a nut presents upon a tree equally plausibly. 311 01:01:10,090 --> 01:01:13,900 But meat within is requisite to squirrels. And to me. 312 01:01:14,260 --> 01:01:19,720 Um, so she has all these, you know, she has atoms and volcanoes and this is all things that she was studying in school. 313 01:01:20,710 --> 01:01:25,270 Um, this is a little poem that's quite intriguing. 314 01:01:25,870 --> 01:01:32,240 Um, where I'm kind of headed with this is does she think of her unconventional prosody as a kind of experiment? 315 01:01:32,260 --> 01:01:40,180 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. 316 01:01:40,510 --> 01:01:44,290 A little madness in the spring is wholesome, even for the King. 317 01:01:44,650 --> 01:01:54,610 But God be with the clown who ponders this tremendous scene, this whole experiment of green as if it were his own, 318 01:01:55,300 --> 01:02:01,630 um, clown and own are, of course, a perfectly allowable rhyme under Walker's scheme. 319 01:02:01,780 --> 01:02:06,219 But this is not how the poem started out. Um, an early draft. 320 01:02:06,220 --> 01:02:14,350 She has this, um, uh, sudden legacy of green is how she starts this. 321 01:02:14,590 --> 01:02:17,800 And then we see her going through different possibilities. 322 01:02:19,400 --> 01:02:28,250 This whole apocalypse of grain. I like apocalypse, sort of that sense of discovery, but also other, other ideas. 323 01:02:28,460 --> 01:02:38,750 This whole experience of green, this whole astonishment of green, this whole periphery of green. 324 01:02:38,750 --> 01:02:43,460 And then she hits it, experiment and she underlines it. 325 01:02:43,790 --> 01:02:54,630 And then at the end she thinks about wild experiment. Does she know what she's doing is unconventional? 326 01:02:54,660 --> 01:02:59,130 Yes she does. 1850, when she's about 20. 327 01:02:59,520 --> 01:03:05,520 Um, we have her very earliest poem. It is as conventional as it could possibly be. 328 01:03:06,420 --> 01:03:10,680 Um, it's a Valentine poem. Hear the rhyme. 329 01:03:10,680 --> 01:03:14,190 Swain. Twain. Air. Fair one sun, b trees. 330 01:03:14,190 --> 01:03:17,309 Small ball. Roses. Leaves one sun. Tune. 331 01:03:17,310 --> 01:03:23,280 Moon. Here we have something slightly off. Vows lose, but that's allowable under Walker. 332 01:03:23,550 --> 01:03:27,360 Bride. Eventide. True. Sea roll. So lone, so long. 333 01:03:27,360 --> 01:03:30,419 Song. Fair. Hair of sea. Tree. Climb. Time. Bower. 334 01:03:30,420 --> 01:03:35,310 Flower drum hum. Again. Perfectly allowable even under walker. 335 01:03:35,640 --> 01:03:38,880 This is a. We can't really get any more conventional than this. 336 01:03:39,210 --> 01:03:47,100 Two years later, though, um. She suddenly writes this poem in hymn metre following kind of Isaac Watts. 337 01:03:47,520 --> 01:03:56,610 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. 338 01:03:56,910 --> 01:04:02,880 Unto the legislature. My country bids me go. I'll take my India rubbers in case the wind should blow. 339 01:04:03,240 --> 01:04:09,480 During my education it was announced to me that gravitation, stumbling fell from an apple tree. 340 01:04:09,810 --> 01:04:16,920 The earth upon an axis was once supposed to turn by way of a gymnastic in honour of the sun. 341 01:04:17,220 --> 01:04:23,010 Um, these are just some of the stanzas. The first stanza, um, quotes Isaac Watts and it quotes Catullus. 342 01:04:23,190 --> 01:04:26,730 It's almost like a data dump of all of the stuff that she was learning. 343 01:04:27,060 --> 01:04:32,760 Um, in school and college, these rhymes are all again, very allowable. 344 01:04:33,270 --> 01:04:38,520 Go and blow or and before me and tree obviously turn and sun. 345 01:04:39,450 --> 01:04:46,950 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. 346 01:04:47,130 --> 01:04:51,990 We also need to remember that she is speaking with a strong Massachusetts accent. 347 01:04:52,260 --> 01:04:57,000 So a final R is a vowel Park the car in the Harvard Yard. 348 01:04:58,470 --> 01:05:03,750 So we're going to ignore all of the final, um, vowels, uh, final hours as vowels. 349 01:05:05,770 --> 01:05:12,010 Here again, I just these are random stanzas from Isaac Watts, um, who is a poet that she parodies and responds to. 350 01:05:12,340 --> 01:05:15,700 Um, she did not have a rhyming dictionary in her library. 351 01:05:15,700 --> 01:05:20,169 I don't know if she had access to one, but she did have a lot of Isaac Watts, um, come home. 352 01:05:20,170 --> 01:05:26,350 Very allowable dust first there is that are as a vowel dust fast. 353 01:05:26,860 --> 01:05:32,890 Um gone. Sun cares years allowable because A's and E's are closed. 354 01:05:33,790 --> 01:05:38,290 So what happens when she really gets into her own? This is all of, you know, this poem. 355 01:05:38,290 --> 01:05:41,800 It's one of her most famous. Because I could not stop for death. 356 01:05:42,130 --> 01:05:47,380 He kindly stopped for me. The carriage held. But just ourselves and immortality. 357 01:05:49,440 --> 01:05:58,140 We slowly drove. He knew no haste, and I had put away my labour and my leisure too, for his civility. 358 01:05:58,620 --> 01:06:03,000 We passed the school where children strove at recess in the ring. 359 01:06:03,300 --> 01:06:06,959 We passed the fields of gazing green. We passed the setting sun. 360 01:06:06,960 --> 01:06:13,470 Or rather, he passed us. The dews drew quivering and chill for only gossamer. 361 01:06:13,470 --> 01:06:20,160 My gown, my tippet only tool we passed before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground. 362 01:06:20,460 --> 01:06:29,280 The roof was scarcely visible, the cornice in the ground since then, two centuries, and yet feel shorter than the day. 363 01:06:29,490 --> 01:06:33,510 I first surmised the horse's heads were towards eternity. 364 01:06:34,140 --> 01:06:36,600 This is probably the version as you know it. 365 01:06:36,990 --> 01:06:48,450 Um, but in the early published her early posthumous published version, um, which was put together by Mabel Lewis Todd and Thomas Higginson. 366 01:06:48,930 --> 01:06:57,360 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. 367 01:06:57,870 --> 01:07:03,750 The rhymes that are not, that are too far, that are not acceptable, the unacceptable rhymes. 368 01:07:04,140 --> 01:07:07,650 So it's easy to see what is considered acceptable and what isn't. 369 01:07:07,860 --> 01:07:12,150 And this actually, I've got one of the stanzas wrong, and I think I had, um, 370 01:07:12,570 --> 01:07:16,500 I had corrected it in another one, but ignore what I've got for the third stanza. 371 01:07:16,710 --> 01:07:20,250 This is actually what the Loomis and Higginson has, because I could not stop for death. 372 01:07:20,310 --> 01:07:24,780 Kindly stop for me. The carriage held, but just ourselves in immortality we slowly drove. 373 01:07:24,780 --> 01:07:30,060 He knew no haste, and I had put away my labour and my leisure, too, for his civility. 374 01:07:30,540 --> 01:07:34,559 And this is the proper stanza they have here. I'm sorry I messed this one up on the slide. 375 01:07:34,560 --> 01:07:38,850 We passed the school where children played, their lessons scarcely done. 376 01:07:39,180 --> 01:07:43,050 We passed the fields of gazing grain. We passed the setting sun. 377 01:07:43,440 --> 01:07:51,239 So ring and sun. Loomis and um uh hic Higginson do not think is appropriate. 378 01:07:51,240 --> 01:07:54,420 That's too far. It's that energy sound. Not allowable. 379 01:07:54,930 --> 01:07:59,579 Um. Ground we passed before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground. 380 01:07:59,580 --> 01:08:02,639 The roof was scarcely visible. The cornice, but a mound. 381 01:08:02,640 --> 01:08:05,910 You cannot rhyme a thing with itself. That is an antique rhyme. 382 01:08:05,910 --> 01:08:10,049 And they take it out since then to centuries, but each feel shorter than the day. 383 01:08:10,050 --> 01:08:13,170 I first surmised the horses heads were towards eternity. 384 01:08:13,830 --> 01:08:22,020 Um. In the second edition of these poems, Mabel Loomis Todd writes in Emily Dickinson's exacting hands, 385 01:08:22,500 --> 01:08:29,700 the especial intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic, 386 01:08:30,000 --> 01:08:34,050 and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music. 387 01:08:34,470 --> 01:08:36,840 Lines are always daringly constructed, 388 01:08:37,170 --> 01:08:47,399 and the thought rhyme appears frequently appealing indeed to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing um, 389 01:08:47,400 --> 01:08:55,170 so is is ring and sun a thought rhyme is ground and ground, a thought rhyme. 390 01:08:55,620 --> 01:08:58,920 Um, these are interesting, interesting things to think about. 391 01:08:59,250 --> 01:09:03,960 Um, I am very interested in actual thought. Rhymes can set conceptual rhymes. 392 01:09:04,170 --> 01:09:08,370 Rhymes where you rhyme opposite things, for instance, or I rhymes things. 393 01:09:08,670 --> 01:09:13,380 Um, ditties of no tone that don't exist at all except as an idea. 394 01:09:13,740 --> 01:09:21,149 Um, in the ear or mind of the rhymer. Um, so what are the discoveries that Emily Dickinson hits upon about rhyme? 395 01:09:21,150 --> 01:09:24,300 This is Dickinson's acceptable rhymes. It pushes further than the walker. 396 01:09:24,540 --> 01:09:28,559 I'm just deducing these from her rhymes. I'm not saying that she's written this anywhere. 397 01:09:28,560 --> 01:09:31,860 Obviously, all vowels are an algebraic x. 398 01:09:32,310 --> 01:09:36,060 Any vowel can rhyme with any other vowel, as long as the consonants are secure. 399 01:09:36,510 --> 01:09:42,690 Final nasal consonants and m um, and ends of syllables or lines can rhyme with each other. 400 01:09:43,050 --> 01:09:49,890 A final r is a vowel, and open Judea and nia is a perfect rhyme. 401 01:09:51,180 --> 01:09:56,370 A word may rhyme with itself. I actually call this an anti rhyme, ground and ground. 402 01:09:56,370 --> 01:10:00,719 And indeed there's something, um, very zero at the bone about that ground. 403 01:10:00,720 --> 01:10:04,350 Ground rhyme about death. There are some outliers, even for Dickinson. 404 01:10:04,350 --> 01:10:10,709 When looking at rhymes in Dickinson's poems, it's important to look at the rhyme position what's was or him him. 405 01:10:10,710 --> 01:10:14,550 This will sometimes rhyme one and three in a quatrain and sometimes not. 406 01:10:14,790 --> 01:10:21,030 That's not an indication that something is wrong. But you look at two and four outliers, even for Dickinson, Sahib and Wood. 407 01:10:21,630 --> 01:10:25,720 What? I mean, the O's are not the same. 408 01:10:26,290 --> 01:10:29,510 Is this a case of the lady baby rhyme? I don't know. 409 01:10:29,530 --> 01:10:35,499 It's the interchangeability of B and D, because visually flipped used birds is also a kind of strange word, 410 01:10:35,500 --> 01:10:41,590 but almost all of the rhymes are either walker approved rhymes or something. 411 01:10:41,590 --> 01:10:45,790 Pushing that envelope with the vowels again, perhaps coming from American vowels. 412 01:10:46,120 --> 01:10:52,300 Um, reading a lot of poetry and deducing one's own rules from that. 413 01:10:53,380 --> 01:10:56,430 Um. Slant imperfect. 414 01:10:56,760 --> 01:11:01,710 Approximate rhyme is wonderful in poems. Again, if you fix it to the consonants. 415 01:11:01,740 --> 01:11:06,900 Um, assonance is okay for aural performance. It's not great on the page or for literary work. 416 01:11:07,290 --> 01:11:10,680 I find it so boring. Minor key. Modal. 417 01:11:10,980 --> 01:11:17,670 Chromatic. Um, you think of something like, um, Edison Vincent's malaise, counting out rhyme, 418 01:11:18,090 --> 01:11:26,909 silver bark of beech and sallow bark of yellow birch and yellow twig of willow, stripe of green and moosewood maple. 419 01:11:26,910 --> 01:11:31,649 Colours seen in leaf of apple. Bark of purple wood of purple. 420 01:11:31,650 --> 01:11:35,790 Pale is moonbeam. Wood of oak for yolk and barn beam. 421 01:11:35,970 --> 01:11:43,560 Wood of hornbeam, silver bark of beech and hollow stem of elder, tall and sallow twig of willow. 422 01:11:43,920 --> 01:11:48,390 Um. These are wonderful effects in English and not to be avoided. 423 01:11:48,780 --> 01:11:56,099 Um. There are versions even of the under the species of continental rhyme, 424 01:11:56,100 --> 01:12:01,920 para rhyme being maybe the most famous and the most famous practitioner in English, Wilfred Owen. 425 01:12:02,220 --> 01:12:09,060 So in this, um, the whole syllable, the front and the back of the syllable are rhyming in their consonants. 426 01:12:09,240 --> 01:12:18,629 But we have a full range of slippage when it comes to the vowels, although generally Wilfred Owen goes down, um, 427 01:12:18,630 --> 01:12:30,000 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. 428 01:12:30,510 --> 01:12:33,570 Um, and we have a little example here. 429 01:12:34,620 --> 01:12:39,329 One of his sonnets. Futility. Move him into the sun gently. 430 01:12:39,330 --> 01:12:44,340 It's touch awoke him once at home, whispering of fields unseen. 431 01:12:44,970 --> 01:12:48,870 Always. It woke him even in France. Until this morning. 432 01:12:48,870 --> 01:12:54,360 And this snow, if anything, might rouse him now the kind old sun will know. 433 01:12:55,340 --> 01:13:00,820 Think how it wakes. The seeds work once the clays of a cold star. 434 01:13:00,830 --> 01:13:07,280 Our limbs so dear, achieved, our sides full nerved, still warm, too hard to stir. 435 01:13:07,610 --> 01:13:15,260 Was it for this? The clay grew tall. Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all. 436 01:13:16,520 --> 01:13:19,610 This is a kind of anti. Oh, bod. 437 01:13:20,180 --> 01:13:23,420 Um, there's something erotic and romantic about it. 438 01:13:23,510 --> 01:13:27,469 Um. That kind old sun reminds me of, um. 439 01:13:27,470 --> 01:13:31,160 That busy old fool, unruly son of John Donne. 440 01:13:31,520 --> 01:13:35,150 Um. But this is the lover, as it were, that will not ever wake up. 441 01:13:35,570 --> 01:13:39,080 Um. Son turns into un soon. 442 01:13:39,260 --> 01:13:42,200 Once France is a straightforward slant rhyme. 443 01:13:42,530 --> 01:13:54,980 Snow turns into now turns into no seeds turn into sides, star and duster tall into toil, and then kind of dissolves at. 444 01:13:55,190 --> 01:14:00,079 Oh, um, this is Auden's gesture. 445 01:14:00,080 --> 01:14:09,620 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. 446 01:14:10,010 --> 01:14:22,549 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, 447 01:14:22,550 --> 01:14:30,230 when joy began our nearest veins to flush, we waited for the flash of morning's levelled gun. 448 01:14:30,770 --> 01:14:37,669 But morning let us pass. And day by day relief outgrows his nervous laugh. 449 01:14:37,670 --> 01:14:42,950 Grown credulous of peace. As mile by mile is seen. 450 01:14:43,220 --> 01:14:49,580 No trespassers reproach. And love's best glasses reach no fields but are his own. 451 01:14:50,570 --> 01:14:56,510 Began turns into gun flesh into flash past though turns into peace. 452 01:14:56,870 --> 01:15:03,230 Relief turns into laugh. Scene turns into his own reproach, into reach. 453 01:15:03,530 --> 01:15:11,690 And maybe you're noticing it sounds even more raymie than it appears to, because there is a counter pattern of assonance. 454 01:15:12,320 --> 01:15:20,809 Um 1324 began flash flush gun past laugh relief, peace scene reach approach. 455 01:15:20,810 --> 01:15:30,170 Owen. And there is a sort of almost sonic feeling of that alchemical change, one thing changing into another, but also maybe of healing. 456 01:15:31,040 --> 01:15:36,320 Um, we skip to 1942. In 1942. 457 01:15:36,350 --> 01:15:44,030 Jose Garcia via a Filipino poet, also known as the Karma Poet for his fondness for that punctuation. 458 01:15:44,720 --> 01:15:56,300 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. 459 01:15:56,540 --> 01:15:57,830 He is very excited about this. 460 01:15:58,340 --> 01:16:06,860 He announces a new method of rhyming, a method which has never been used in the history of English poetry, nor in any poetry. 461 01:16:08,480 --> 01:16:11,810 The principle involved is that of reversed consonants. 462 01:16:12,440 --> 01:16:18,769 The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or last principal consonants of a word are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. 463 01:16:18,770 --> 01:16:23,790 Thus a rhyme for near would be run. So there is that slippage of vowel. 464 01:16:23,810 --> 01:16:27,620 We're just looking at the consonants. Near run. Rain. 465 01:16:27,620 --> 01:16:35,000 Green. A green rain light can rhyme therefore with tell tall, tale steel, etc. 466 01:16:35,510 --> 01:16:42,170 Um. And he has other rules for if it ends in an open vowel. Um, here we have one of those poems, number four. 467 01:16:42,890 --> 01:16:49,910 Um, nobody yet knows who I am, nor myself may, nor yet what I deal, nor yet where I lead. 468 01:16:49,910 --> 01:16:53,540 But in my skull, already bright and deaf, and rose a tire. 469 01:16:53,540 --> 01:16:57,049 And in my mouth already star and jewels firmly rot. 470 01:16:57,050 --> 01:17:01,790 And in my eyes the sweetness almost fierce as the sun. And in my ears already music. 471 01:17:01,790 --> 01:17:05,749 Hearing the future kiss. Yet myself knows myself not. 472 01:17:05,750 --> 01:17:14,470 Is it? I have have forgotten. Yet finality is very near I, I run, I run, so I am flips and turns into me. 473 01:17:15,440 --> 01:17:24,290 Deal flips and turns into lead. Bright flips around and becomes a tire star into wrought sweetness. 474 01:17:24,290 --> 01:17:28,250 Turns into sun, music into kiss. That's my favourite there. 475 01:17:28,520 --> 01:17:31,790 I'm not really sure how not and forgotten is working. 476 01:17:31,790 --> 01:17:41,210 Exactly. Um. Near turns into run, but in 1948, Edmund Wilson came out with the Pickerel Pond. 477 01:17:42,290 --> 01:17:50,510 Now we have, um, consonants. Uh, this is sort of, um, continental inversed rhyme reversed consonants. 478 01:17:50,810 --> 01:17:56,270 Um, Edmund Wilson calls this emphasis Bannock rhyme the pickerel pond. 479 01:17:56,270 --> 01:18:01,880 It goes to 70 stanzas. I'm just going to look at the first three. Um, the lake lies with never a ripple. 480 01:18:02,540 --> 01:18:11,749 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. 481 01:18:11,750 --> 01:18:17,209 Those lissom scroll trees scribbled by mussels, the floating dropped feathers of gulls. 482 01:18:17,210 --> 01:18:20,450 A leech like a lengthening slug that shrinks at a touch. 483 01:18:20,750 --> 01:18:28,250 Ink an orange, a child's wrecked Rio de Janeiro, one fortress of which flies read the cleft in quick prints of a deer. 484 01:18:28,430 --> 01:18:31,430 So ripple flips around and becomes leper. 485 01:18:32,120 --> 01:18:35,299 Er rhymes with Ray. My favourite maybe. 486 01:18:35,300 --> 01:18:44,510 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. 487 01:18:45,380 --> 01:18:50,630 Ink and orange. Rio de Janeiro. Um, that's pretty brilliant. 488 01:18:50,870 --> 01:19:00,169 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. 489 01:19:00,170 --> 01:19:05,600 This is I invented this rhyme. Edwin Wilson was like, um, I never read your work at all. 490 01:19:05,600 --> 01:19:09,889 I've come up by myself. Um, so there was a slight dust up. 491 01:19:09,890 --> 01:19:12,920 I think ee cummings weighed in on the side of Vila. 492 01:19:13,130 --> 01:19:18,290 Um, so there was a little bit of a dust up in the, the mid 40s about this weird rhyming, 493 01:19:18,710 --> 01:19:24,260 um, alchemy of this is what a amphibian amphibian Vina looks like. 494 01:19:24,590 --> 01:19:28,219 It's a little bit like that alchemical or a Burroughs, but the opposite. 495 01:19:28,220 --> 01:19:32,600 So instead of something eating its tail, it's something that has two heads. 496 01:19:33,230 --> 01:19:37,040 Um, and this rhyme largely went to ground, um, for a long time. 497 01:19:37,580 --> 01:19:41,600 I mean, maybe are examples in the 50s or 60s. I don't know of them. 498 01:19:41,600 --> 01:19:50,929 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. 499 01:19:50,930 --> 01:19:56,299 And the first poem in that book is called The Landing. And it involves and a dramatic rhyme. 500 01:19:56,300 --> 01:20:00,560 So this idea of rhyme is picked up again. It's got discrete couplets. 501 01:20:00,560 --> 01:20:11,600 So this rhymes are very clear. We have saw rhyming with was cloud with could pages with gape has with ash own with now. 502 01:20:12,380 --> 01:20:15,980 The book was dedicated to his friend James Marrow in 1990. 503 01:20:15,980 --> 01:20:24,530 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. 504 01:20:24,800 --> 01:20:28,880 And this book and this poem has a kind of elegiac feel to it. 505 01:20:29,300 --> 01:20:37,130 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. 506 01:20:37,760 --> 01:20:43,930 Um. Richie Hoffman and, um, The Heron by Randall Mann. 507 01:20:44,260 --> 01:20:47,620 Um, in a conversation in The Kenyon Review, um, 508 01:20:47,620 --> 01:20:52,899 Randall Mann says The Heron is one of the first true poems I wrote in 1993 as an 509 01:20:52,900 --> 01:20:57,700 undergraduate and at Francis about a painting in the Harn Museum in Gainesville, 510 01:20:57,700 --> 01:21:06,160 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, 511 01:21:06,370 --> 01:21:15,400 which uses anagram rhyme, as you call it, a pond, the colour of oolong ts a heron refusing to look anywhere but east. 512 01:21:15,690 --> 01:21:17,110 Unlike the Pickering Pond. 513 01:21:17,110 --> 01:21:24,610 This is this idea of reflected water, which works very well in this reversed and and a dramatic rhyming mangroves flecked with fire, 514 01:21:25,060 --> 01:21:29,320 deep set birches rife with the wait for night in stone. 515 01:21:29,320 --> 01:21:36,700 The heron stares, the stoic tones of the sky, a story procession of palms, their red tipped fronds overhanging lamps. 516 01:21:36,700 --> 01:21:39,700 I really love palms and lips waterbird. 517 01:21:39,700 --> 01:21:43,660 It has been centuries since I felt anything for you. You have been left. 518 01:21:44,140 --> 01:21:49,180 Look around. Why does the owl rest on a goddess's shoulder while you wait? 519 01:21:49,180 --> 01:21:58,360 So the very charming poem, um, Richie Hoffman in this, um, same conversation, also namechecks the Landing. 520 01:21:58,840 --> 01:22:03,309 This is his wonderful illustration from Percival, dedicated to JD McClatchy. 521 01:22:03,310 --> 01:22:09,340 So you see that connection very clearly here. Our enigmatic rhymes are steady and dusty. 522 01:22:09,760 --> 01:22:20,490 Scarlet to clear its spread turns into drakes, golden into land treasure for us dearer tress rests, 523 01:22:20,500 --> 01:22:26,830 beard bred past taps tapered predate and veil live. 524 01:22:28,210 --> 01:22:32,950 I wrote illustration from Parsifal while staying at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. 525 01:22:33,430 --> 01:22:40,780 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, 526 01:22:41,200 --> 01:22:46,720 the phenomenon feels supernatural or divine to me, and it feels Marillion, um, in that house. 527 01:22:46,870 --> 01:22:51,250 His books were full of scrawls on the pages that were full of anagrams. 528 01:22:51,580 --> 01:22:58,000 One memorable instance was Merrill's transformation of Phyllis Thomas to Hot Ladies Man. 529 01:22:59,140 --> 01:23:05,770 Um. Uh. It's a nod to morals and a dramatic play, but the anagram rhyme poem I knew was JD McCloud. 530 01:23:05,770 --> 01:23:06,399 Tis the landing. 531 01:23:06,400 --> 01:23:15,370 So the landing takes this discovery that was sort of almost forgotten and carries that maybe to a new generation of experimental poets. 532 01:23:15,850 --> 01:23:19,360 Um, words that are anagrams of one another share the same sonic building blocks. 533 01:23:19,360 --> 01:23:25,959 And this is what's kind of alchemical about it. We think of, um, alchemists changing substance from one to another, 534 01:23:25,960 --> 01:23:31,090 but also because perhaps that substance is already there and a rearrangement of the building blocks, 535 01:23:31,360 --> 01:23:34,660 the sound effects that result are really interesting and beautiful to me. 536 01:23:35,020 --> 01:23:40,540 Um, the recombine relationship of their vowels and consonants in a way that feels original and forceful and striking. 537 01:23:40,780 --> 01:23:47,649 It's like painting a new subject with the same palette. Whatever shapes they take, they share a kind of primordial essence. 538 01:23:47,650 --> 01:23:56,379 They're made of the same stuff. Um, and Merrill himself, with his poem The Changing Light of Sand over um, 539 01:23:56,380 --> 01:24:04,930 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. 540 01:24:04,930 --> 01:24:09,940 There's constant talk about alchemy, um, about live Olympics. 541 01:24:10,300 --> 01:24:13,810 Um, uh, and you get this sense there's the spirit. 542 01:24:13,990 --> 01:24:17,170 Sol. Is that the soul? Is that the sun? 543 01:24:17,560 --> 01:24:22,840 Um, the idea of watching anagrams. Um, uh, come in and out of the page. 544 01:24:23,470 --> 01:24:32,770 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. 545 01:24:33,100 --> 01:24:38,200 Um, but very much suits our theme processional by James Merrill. 546 01:24:38,650 --> 01:24:45,760 Here we have another sonnet. It's an unusual sonnet. We usually think of eight and 6 or 3 quatrains in a couplet. 547 01:24:46,120 --> 01:24:51,160 Here we have six, six, and we have a couplet at the end. 548 01:24:52,060 --> 01:24:57,230 It's about, uh, the transmutation of matter. 549 01:24:57,250 --> 01:25:04,900 We have a drop of water and what it turns into, perhaps think what the demotic droplets felt. 550 01:25:05,830 --> 01:25:14,380 Translated by a polar wand to keen six pointed Mandarin all singularity. 551 01:25:14,590 --> 01:25:21,940 It's developed on of a hitherto untold flakiness gem like nevermore to melt. 552 01:25:22,540 --> 01:25:27,850 But melt it would and look become now bird glance. 553 01:25:28,060 --> 01:25:39,430 Now the gingko leaf span light to the same tune, whereby immensely old slabs of dogma and opprobrium, exchanging ions under pressure, 554 01:25:39,730 --> 01:25:55,660 bred a spa of burnt black anchorite, or in three lucky strokes of word golf, led once again turns loathed goad to gold. 555 01:25:56,980 --> 01:26:45,980 They. There's a lot of stuff. 556 01:28:18,860 --> 01:28:51,190 It's. It's very dangerous. 557 01:29:01,330 --> 01:29:15,420 Yeah, that's. While this. 558 01:29:40,050 --> 01:30:07,660 Most of us. Yeah. 559 01:30:12,290 --> 01:30:18,060 Right. Yeah. 560 01:30:18,180 --> 01:30:30,900 So? I was sitting there. 561 01:30:37,910 --> 01:30:45,650 Materialistically. And I'm sure they don't say. 562 01:30:56,020 --> 01:30:56,360 I.