Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

Yowser! In the sixties the Liverpool School of poets, who were culturally (and indeed personally, through ties of friendship) connected to the Liverpool Sound, were notably fond of assonantal rhyme. Adrian Mitchell, for example, rhymes size with five in his poem ‘Fifteen Million Plastic Bags’. The poets you are most likely to find using assonantal slant-rhymes today work in hip-hop and reggae traditions: Here’s ‘Talking Turkey’ by Benjamin Zephaniah. Have fun reading it out à la B.Z.–Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmasCos’ turkeys just wanna hav funTurkeys are cool, turkeys are wickedAn every turkey has a Mum.Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,Don’t eat it, keep it alive,It could be yu mate, an not on your plateSay, ‘Yo! Turkey I’m on your side.’I got lots of friends who are turkeysAn all of dem fear christmas time,Dey wanna enjoy it,dey say humans destroyed itn humans are out of dere mind,Yeah, I got lots of friends who are turkeysDey all hav a right to a life,Not to be caged up an genetically made upBy any farmer an his wife.

You can see that fun/Mum, alive/side, time/mind, enjoy it/destroyed it and perhaps Christmas/wicked are all used as rhyming pairs. The final pair life/wife constitute the only ‘true’ rhymes in the poem. Assonantally rhymed poems usually do end best with a full rhyme.

Now let us look at another well-known nursery rhyme:Hickory, dickory, dock ,The mouse ran up the clock .The clock struck one ,The mouse ran down !Hickory, dickory, dock .

The one/down rhyme is partial too, but here the end consonant is the same but the vowels (vowel sounds ) are different. This is called CONSONANCE: examples would be off/if, plum/calm, mound/bond and so on. Take a look at Philip Larkin’s ‘Toads’:Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life?Can’t I use my wit as a pitchforkAnd drive the brute off?Six days of the week it soilsWith its sickening poison–Just for paying a few bills!That’s out of proportion.

The whole poem continues for another seven stanzas with loose consonantal para-rhymes of this nature. Emily Dickinson was fond of consonance too. Here is the first stanza of her poem numbered 1179:Of so divine a LossWe enter but the Gain,Indemnity for LonelinessThat such a Bliss has been.

The poet most associated with a systematic mastery of this kind of rhyming is Wilfred Owen, who might be said to be its modern pioneer. Here are the first two stanzas from ‘Miners’:There was a whispering in my hearth,A sigh of the coal,Grown wistful of a former earthIt might recall.I listened for a tale of leavesAnd smothered ferns;Frond forests; and the low, sly livesBefore the fawns.

Ferns/fawns, lives/leaves and coal/call are what you might call perfect imperfect rhymes. The different vowels are wrapped in identical consonants, unlike Larkin’s soils/bills and life/off or Dickinson’s gain/been which are much looser.

In his poem ‘Exposure’, Owen similarly slant-rhymes war/wire, knive us/nervous, grow/gray, faces/fusses and many more. His most triumphant achievement with this kind of ‘full’ partial rhyme is found in the much-loved ‘Strange Meeting’:I am the enemy you killed, my friend.I knew you in this dark: for you so frownedYesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.I parried: but my hands were loath and cold.

Here is the complete list of its slant-rhyme pairs:

All (bar one) are couplets, each pair is different and–perhaps most importantly of all–no perfect rhymes at all. A sudden rhyme like ‘taint’ and ‘saint’ would stand out like a bum note. Which is not to say that a mixture of pure and slant-rhyme is always a bad idea: W. B. Yeats frequently used a mixture of full and partial rhymes. Here is the first stanza of ‘Easter 1916’, with slant-rhymes in bold.I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth century houses .I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words,Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words,And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club ,Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn :All changed, changed utterlyA terrible beauty is born .

Assonance rhyme is suitable for musical verse, for the vowels (the part the voice sings) stay the same. Consonance rhyme, where the vowels change, clearly works better on the page.

There is a third kind of slant-rhyme which only works on the page. Cast your eye up to the list of para-rhyme pairs from Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. I said that all bar one were couplets. Do you see the odd group out?

It is the hair/hour/here group, a triplet not a couplet, but that’s not what makes it stands out for our purposes. Hair/here follows the consonance rule, but hour does not: it looks like a perfect consonance but when read out the ‘h’ is of course silent. This is a consonantal version of an EYE-RHYME, a rhyme which works visually, but not aurally. Here are two examples of more conventional eye-rhymes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It :Blow, blow thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind …Though thou the waters warp Thy sting is not so sharp

It is common to hear ‘wind’ pronounced ‘wined’ when the lines are read or sung, but by no means necessary: hard to do the same thing to make the sharp/warp rhyme, after all. Love/prove is another commonly found eye-rhyme pair, as in Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’.Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove.

It is generally held that these may well have been true sound rhymes in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s day. They have certainly been used as eye-rhymes since, however. Larkin used the same pair nearly four hundred years later in ‘An Arundel Tomb’:…and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.

In his poem ‘Meiosis’ Auden employs another conventional eye-rhyme for that pesky word:The hopeful falsehood cannot stem with love The flood on which all move and wish to move .

The same poet’s ‘Precious Five’ shows that eye-rhyme can be used in all kinds of ways:Whose oddness may provokeTo a mind-saving jokeA mind that would it were An apathetic sphere :

Another imperfect kind is WRENCHED rhyme, which to compound the felony will usually go with a wrenched accent .He doesn’t mind the language being bent In choosing words to force a wrenched accént .He has no sense of how the verse should sing And tries to get away with wrenched rhym ing .A bad wrenched rhyme won’t ever please the eye: Or find its place in proper poe try.

Where ‘poetry’ would have to be pronounced ‘poe-a-try’. 3You will find this kind of thing a great deal in folk-singing, as I am sure you are aware. However, I can think of at least two fine elegiac poems where such potentially wrenched rhymes are given. This from Ben Jonson’s heart-rending, ‘On My First Son’.Rest in soft peace, and asked say, ‘Here doth lieBen Jonson his best piece of poetry.’

Auden uses precisely the same rhyme pair in his ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’:Let the Irish vessel lieEmptied of its poetry.