McGill University



Poetry Matters: What’s Wrong with Rhyme?Professor Maggie KilgourFriday, November 16, 2018What is right with rhyme? Rhyme can guide line length and organization, unify and embody the themes of a poem, bind meanings together through secondary meanings of words, and fulfill a sense of anticipation when the rhyme is completed. While critics of rhyme accuse it of simplifying poetry, the potential uses and effects of rhyme are endless—it is, however, difficult to master the art of rhyme in a way that takes advantage of its possibilities. John Milton uses rhyme in his earlier works to make complex connections between words and lines. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is the opening poem in Milton’s 1645 collection and the first of the half of the poems written in the vernacular, indicating that the foregrounding of the birth of Christ is especially relevant to Milton’s body of work. In the opening stanzas, Milton employs the rhyme royal, a poetic form from the Medieval period popularized by established poets such as Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Milton therefore inserts himself into this tradition of expert poets with the intent of making his own mark on English poetry. The ABABBCC rhyme scheme creates a major shift at the midpoint in each stanza with the B rhyme leading from one rhyme pattern to the next. Because the rest of the poem features a different rhyme scheme, the departure from the rhyme royal indicates Milton’s mastery over multiple forms as a method of proving himself as a strong poet. “Lycidas,” the final English poem in Milton’s collection, follows the structure of a pastoral elegy: the invocation of muses, the procession of mourners, the questioning of the gods, and a lament followed by a consolation. The rhyme scheme Milton chooses is unusually irregular, and some lines never rhyme whereas some rhyme patterns are repeated regularly throughout the poem. The rhyme is difficult to anticipate, reflecting Milton’s loss of direction following the loss of a friend. The poem ends in an ottava rima, from the Italian, which appears to indicate that Milton’s next work will be an epic poem, as Paradise Lost turns out to be, but the ottava rima implies that it will rhyme. Paradise Lost counters the dominant poetic form of his time, the heroic couplet, when Milton chooses to write in blank verse. Published decades after his first collection due to the consequences of the Civil War, Milton does not fulfill the expectation he created in 1645 when “Lycidas” anticipated a rhyming epic. As he explains in his note on the verse, rhyme acts as bondage to inhibit poetry whereas blank verse approximates the freedom and flexibility of spoken English. Blank verse can therefore reflect Satan’s independence and unpredictability. When Dryden adapts Paradise Lost for the stage in his heroic couplets, Satan becomes small, predetermined, and less intimidating. Samson Agonistes is Milton’s final work, and he returns to rhyme intermittently in the closet drama. Whereas the blank verse of Paradise Lost served as a rejection of the postwar ideologies that restricted Milton’s freedom, the Chorus at the end of Samson Agonistes uses rhyme in the final fourteen lines to attempt to impose a cathartic closure to the final actions. ................
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