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Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004) 377-425



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Rhyme

an Unfinished Monograph

Among the manuscripts and typescripts by Hugh Kenner in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin are a number of unpublished papers. The four chapters following constitute what is apparently an unfinished work on rhyme, published here by permission of the Ransom Center and with Mrs. Mary Anne Kenner's gracious support. Our text is based on a dot-matrix printout datable to 1983. Kenner published an article titled "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes" in 1974, perhaps indicating that he worked on and off at this project for several years. The chapters exist in multiple drafts (old typewriter, newer typewriter, word processor), and one or more of them may have originated as a lecture. Typographical and other small errors have been silently corrected, and minor changes have been made for stylistic consistency. Otherwise the text is as Kenner left it.
—Editor

I Reasonable Rhymes

...and Milton the unrhymer,

singing among the rest

like a communist

—William Carlos Williams

Rhyme, said John Milton, "the invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter."

If he sounds testy, it is because he has taken much trouble over Paradise Lost, [End Page 377] and there have been complaints. Some browsers in the first edition had trouble making out what was happening, and others objected out loud that what was on the page did not seem proper Heroick Poetry. When it was time for a second edition the printer therefore came round to ask of the formidable bard two favors. Would he kindly supply summaries of the story, book by book, for readers who got lost? Also, while he was at it, "a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not."

Milton made the prose summaries with a patience that is perhaps not surprising. They gave him occasion to traverse his great argument one more time, pointing out its felicities. A writer has few pleasures more sumptuous. But confronting anyone so benighted as to ask why the Poem Rimes not—like asking Picasso about both eyes on one side of the nose—he dons the mask of Jehovah to proclaim that it rimes not because no decent poem ever rimed:

The measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets,1 carried away by Custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance and constraint, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them.

There you have it. Homer and Virgil, who knew what they were about, did not rhyme; in a barbarous age people who did not know what they were about invented rhyme, to promote the illusion that something substantial was going forward; subsequently some famous modern poets, "carried away by Custom," have entangled themselves in what Milton went on to call "this troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing." He also called it "trivial and of no true musical delight," offering as it did nothing more than "the jingling sound of like endings." Rejecting rhyme is like rejecting incense and Mariolatry, in reversion to the Christianity of the Apostles.

It is perfectly true that Homer does not rhyme, a fact that comports with an idea of Homer congenial to us though unheard of by Milton, that he was an oral improviser whose stock of formulaic expressions helped him give metrical shape to his lines while the part of his mind that ran ahead of the line was seeing to the direction of the sentence. Improvised rhymes are almost sure to be trivial, because the part of the mind that runs ahead will be too preoccupied with foreseeing rhyme-words to concern itself much with the shape of what is being...

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