Reading current poems, I notice how rhyme seems mostly a thing of the past. Occasional rhyme and near rhyme can land felicitously nowadays, but when deployed lockstep it’s often noisy and distracting. To some degree the same is true with regular meter. Blank verse can still be persuasive when it doesn’t call attention to itself. Cascading rhymes, on the other hand, tend to yell, “Look at me!”

I indulge in doggerel, a tool of satire, more than I should, and doggerel enlists, for making light of something, or fun of it, those selfsame, singsong qualities which feel quaint in poems. A four-beat line with repeating end-rhymes is a ready mold in which to pour ironizing jello.

I’ve said more than I know, as granddad would tell me. It seems fair to cite an exception — i.e., an instance of rhyme and rhythm used well in modern times. It’s an elegy. I’ve memorized it. It starts:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues; […]

Here’s the highly formal ending, part three. Its power is enhanced by contrast with the deceptively informal, lilting discursiveness of the sections that precede.

III.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

(“In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden)

Ancillary reading: Heather Cox Richardson.

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