There’s the rhyming of abducted words pressed into sonic servitude on a lick and a whim, screaming at the end of their lines. And there’s rhyme so poetically truthful you hardly notice it, yet would rue its absence.

You’ll know the one when you see it; here’s an instance of the other from a poem which is technically unrhymed:

“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather […”]

Here’s another truthful instance:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; […]

I think of Swinburne’s by-the-wayside rhyminess, alongside Hopkins’s brass-bottomed match-ups, as organic rhyme, versus what might be called synthetic, or chain-ganged, rhyme. On first reading of the Hopkins verses I took little note of the rhymes themselves (a dead giveaway of skill), caught up as I was in the jolt of unleaving, plus rhythm, alliteration and neologism. The rhymes fall weightlessly amid the musick and gamboling word-horde.

These two are dead poets, of course. There’s little organic rhyme going on among live ones. That’s not a lament. Time flows. You can’t miss a negative. Where rhyme hangs out these days is in jaunty verse where words pair off in the semblance of a saucy hokey-pokey. It’s wicked good fun with a message inside.

Sources
Kamran Javadizadeh, “The Eroticism of an IKEA Bed,” The New Yorker, 2-3-23.
“Hendacasyllabics” by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Referenced by Matthew Walther, “This Is Why I Hate Banned Books Week,” New York Times, 10-1-23.
“Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Quoted by Bret Stephens in The Conversation, “Kevin McCarthy Surprised Us All,” New York Times, 10-2-23.
Resurrecting the Trashcan Bard, WordPress blog.

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