Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Peter McDonald (review)

Peter McDonald’s substantial, impressive study examines the significance of rhyme in the work of five poets: William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. What links these writers into a single, distinct tradition, according to McDonald, is their conscious reckoning with the philosophical conundrums that rhyme suggests; for them, “rhyme and repetition [are] issues that, rather than easing the flow of a poetic voice, present it with seemingly insuperable puzzles and obstructions” (14). Hence the absence from the book of two of the century’s most notable rhymers, Lord Byron and Robert Browning, whom McDonald considers exemplars of a separate tradition in which rhyme is made to seem “natural, unforced, or inevitable” (22). For the poets at the center of Sound Intentions, by contrast, rhyme inherently raises tricky questions about necessity and free will (since it is merely a matter of chance that two words rhyme, but it is the poet’s choice to make use of them and of their arbitrary connection), and about sameness and difference and their epistemological import. The main chapters, each of which focuses on a single poet, show how that poet uses the formal structures of verse to reflect on these questions. The analyses are expertly done, displaying a specialist’s knowledge of the full range of each writer’s work, as well as of his or her literary milieu. And the close readings that make up the bulk of each chapter are often superb. McDonald, who is himself a respected poet, has an unfailing ear for nuance; however intricate his reading of a lyric may be—and they sometimes extend for many pages—it is so well wrought as never to feel dubious or strained.

The past fifteen years have seen a resurgence of formalist criticism of nineteenth-century poetry, with a particular emphasis on prosody, but there has been no major work on rhyme to complement important recent books on Victorian meter. In this sense Sound Intentions offers a timely contribution. But McDonald does not try to position his work within current critical conversations. He seldom mentions contemporary critics (although he will occasionally quote one, often to good effect, on a particular point), and his references to broader critical trends are almost always dismissive. McDonald also explicitly denies the critical value of “theories of rhyme,” since “they cannot explain the major poems in any very useful ways—ways, that is, that allow us to deepen an appreciation of the actual poems, rather than of the theory by which they are encompassed” (14). What he offers instead is a chronological series of studies, all focusing on a set of shared themes—necessity and choice; intention; similitude and dissimilitude; the “intimacy” of rhyme and repetition—but without a central thesis or guiding argument, either for the book as a whole or for the individual chapters (11).

This approach has advantages and disadvantages. The concatenation of close readings often feels desultory, as a chapter moves from one poem to the next without a clear organizing principle. Even the analysis of a single long work, like Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), soon loses momentum, since there seems to be little sense of direction underlying the local readings. Yet more frequently the book’s loosely organic structure produces whole stretches of unexpected, sustained, and insightful analysis, often straying some distance away from the topic of rhyme in any strict sense. The best part of the Wordsworth chapter, for example, lies in a long central section on the poet’s purposeful use of verbal repetition in his blank verse (repetition being, as McDonald writes, another form of rhyme). Elsewhere the notion of rhyme expands to cover what would more usually be called influence or allusion. In particular, the book recurs repeatedly to the many echoes in later poetry of the major lyrics of Wordsworth and Keats; thus chapter 4 gives a revelatory reading of Tennyson...