Rhyme's End

This essay examines the late, short poems of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge as examples of the ways in which fin-de-siècle poets tended to use short, rhymed lines to express consciousness of the compression of time at the century's end. The essay contributes to recent scholarship on Victorian prosody by demonstrating that the era's theories and practices of rhyme were as philosophically rich as its theories of rhythm. Remarks on rhyme and time by George Saintsbury, Andrew Lang, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge are-along with Coleridge's poems-compared to fin-de-siècle philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart's "The Unreality of Time" and to contemporary philosopher Giorgio Amgaben's "The End of the Poem."