Rhyme and Reason

All men are dancers, and their treadGoes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

—W. B. Yeats

Why do poets rhyme? Or, rather, why did they?

Perhaps they hoped one rhyming word would suggest another, and sometimes it did. In couplets either line may be conceived first, and it is sometimes possible to guess which. As a motive for inspiration that may sound a trifle undignified; but poetry, like ordinary speech, has its strategies and (for those who fail) its penalties, and rules in the end are a blessing. "No vers is libre," said T. S. Eliot, "for the man who wants to do a good job."

It is by virtue of laws that forbid theft and murder that we walk free and keep what is ours, and in poetry, as in conversation, there are formalities to observe. Without formality, after all, there could be no informality, no intimacy, no laughter, no surprise; and we should lose far more than poetry in losing all that.

Poets need constraints, in a word, in order to be free. "The practice of an art," Donald Davie once wrote, "is to convert all terms into the terms of art." Rhyme is a lot less ancient than some people think. The Greeks and Romans did not use it; nor did the Anglo-Saxons. Even in the fourteenth century Chaucer and Gower shared the scene with two alliterative poets, Langland and the Gawain-poet, and rhyme did not dominate poetry till Tudor times, and not even then in the theater. Elizabethan plays are written mostly in blank verse, which comes fast off the pen; and at the height of his career Shakespeare, who was writing two or three plays a year, must have needed it, as actors must often have needed their prompts: a rhyming couplet could close a scene and alert actors when to enter and when to leave.

There is another possibility, seldom discussed, that rhyme might liberate the muse. In Don Juan Byron casually remarks that "note or text / I never know the word which will come next" (ix.41), but rhyme may often have helped him to find it, and his love of the outrageous may have led him on. His wife saw the point unmercifully. A monarch of words, she called Byron, one who uses words "as Bonaparte does lives, for conquest, without regard to their intrinsic value"—with more regard to sound than to sense, she probably meant. Rhyme makes free of meaning, at times, by briskly and ruthlessly demeaning it. Byron may have seen the meaning of words better than most people, but he used words on occasion by audaciously letting them use him.

That could lead to thinking of the second line before the first, like W. S. Gilbert in his patter songs. Gilbert once made a major-general rhyme lot of news with hypotenuse, a word he undoubtedly thought of first. Byron did not write Beppo till 1818, a thirty-year-old in exile, using ottava-rima stanzas, which end with a rhyming couplet, to mimic the comic masters of sixteenth-century Italy. A year later Don Juan began to appear, which though unfinished remains the greatest comic poem in the language and probably the least read of all its masterpieces. It soon inspired Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1823-31), whose translation by Charles Johnston in 1979 prompted Vikram Seth, before he ever wrote a novel, to write The Golden Gate (1986)—an unexpected little triumph that can happily claim Byron as a grandfather.

The Golden Gate is set in San Francisco, where Seth went after Oxford to study economics. Two years later (London Review of Books, September 29, 1988) he writes how he skipped a year of economics at Stanford to attend Donald Davie's course on poetry, in which a student would read out his poem, already distributed, and then hear it discussed. I remember telling Donald about this article, which he had not seen, and he was deeply excited by it. He longed with good reason to influence the course of English poetry, and he did.

A generation has passed, and...