A poetry lesson for Bartle
Richard Bartle has a little piece on the rhyming structure of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy.
Mrs Schofield’s GCSE
You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
said Portia to Antonio in which
of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
know what this means? Explain how poetry
pursues the human like the smitten moon
above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.
Sez Bartle,
Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m not reading this with the right internal accent, but calling this “rhyming” is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?
Not at all! In fact, this is a nice Shakespearean sonnet. Loosely, this can be termed half rhyme or slant rhyme, and she’s not even using all that aggressively. For example
- tragedy/why I would call a stretch because it is dependent on accent. “Wha-ee” is a valid pronunciation for “why” but part of rhyming in print, honestly, lies in the eye and people don’t “hear” the word that way when read.
- you/moon is a classic case of assonance, with a full rhyme on the vowels and not on the consonants. So is said/death; a trick with the “ed” and “deh” sounds — reversing them. Cute.
- nothing/begin. Again, if you say it more as “nuthin'” it rhymes fine, but is again somewhat accent-dependent. It’s also an imperfect rhyme because the rhyme is between a stressed and an unstressed syllable
More interesting to me was the way that internal rhyme and consonance is used in the poem to supplement the loose rhyming. For example, the tragedy/why rhyme is greatly helped by the internal rhymes, the hammering on the “which” sound — almost Manley Hopkins, there — and the lovely parellelism of “which I see? Which tragedy?” And of course, the actual flight of poetic language, the smitten moon. That doesn’t even get into what the poem is about.
In August 2008, her poem ‘Education for Leisure’ was removed from the AQA GCSE poetry anthology following a complaint from an external examiner. The complaint was on the grounds that it could prompt or glorify knife crime; in the poem, the narrator kills a fly and a goldfish (there are hints about the cat being threatened), and finally goes out onto the street with a breadknife – “… I touch your arm”. Schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology. Duffy countered this removal with a poem [this one] discussing how the teaching of fiction about violent themes does not necessarily spark copycat behaviour.
For every field there is its craft; guitarists seek percussive players or the careful bend, and coders elegance of algorithm. At this point, the few who play with formal verse are perhaps the only ones who can appreciate the way she broke her third quatrain, to place her prayer on the all-important couplet’s opening line; her sonnet’s structure, not Petrarchan, to do justice to the topic; or the way in which this paragraph is made of iambs.
19 Responses to “A poetry lesson for Bartle”
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“which -> wife -> witch” that sort of underhand secondary derision that Shakespeare liked to hide behind the crude and the obvious.
OH man, interesting!
How about:
tragedy->death->why
you->poetry->moon
we->nothing->begin
This probably can be allot like cloud watching, but it makes you wonder. Especially if you find a sort of pattern to it (which I don’t here, but I’m a noob).
Cool.
No it’s not… it’s pretty good, and maybe it’s my accent (or yours), but it doesn’t read iambic to me in way too many places. 😛
I cheated a few times, but in classic poetic ways. “ev’ry” “ope’ning”, and the stranger “al/go/ri/thm.” I broke it on “quatrain” where I talked about, well, breaking. 🙂
>Loosely, this can be termed half rhyme or slant rhyme
Yes, but that doesn’t mean it actually rhymes…
>tragedy/why I would call a stretch because it is dependent on accent.
I did question whether I might be reading it with the wrong accent. I don’t know what Carol ann Duffy’s accent is, though, never having heard her speak. If it’s that of Shropshire, where she grew up, I guess it’s possible that “tragedy” would be pronounced maybe “trad je day” which could rhyme with a “why” pronounced “way”, but even that would probably be a bit of a push.
>you/moon is a classic case of assonance, with a full rhyme on the vowels and not on the consonants.
I know what assonance is. I didn’t know it counted as rhyme, though.
>Again, if you say it more as “nuthin’” it rhymes fine, but is again somewhat accent-dependent.
Again, I said I could have been reading it with the wrong internal accent. However, the temptation to read “nothing” as if it ended in “ing” and not “in” is so strong that I’d rather have expected someone who wanted it to be read as “nothin” to have put in the apostrophe to tell us it wasn’t an “ing” ending.
>It’s also an imperfect rhyme because the rhyme is between a stressed and an unstressed syllable
So an imperfect rhyme still rhymes?
>the tragedy/why rhyme is greatly helped by the internal rhymes
Not enough to make it rhyme, though!
>the hammering on the “which” sound
Which gets to rhyme with the homonym “witch”. I was always taught that words can’t rhyme with homonyms, but I guess the rules could have been changed.
That, indeed, could be the problem here. When I did my English Literature O-level 30 years ago, we would look at close-but-no-cigar rhymes and try figure out why they were there. For example, in Blake’s “The Tyger” he rhymes “hand or eye” with “symmetry”, which doesn’t rhyme with “hand or eye” unless you mispronounce it. They didn’t used to pronounce “symmetry” as “simmer try” back then, so he must have done it deliberately. Was he just being slack, because he thought a close rhyme was enough? Well, no: every other line rhymes perfectly. Therefore, he must have been forcing the rhyme to make a point – something about the inexactness of the symmetry, perhaps?
If things have changed since then, and non-rhymes can be passed off as rhyme, well, OK, that would explain why I don’t think this poem rhymes and you do.
Richard
PS: I almost called my original post “Raph bait”, heh heh.
Hmm, I think I meant homophone, not homonym, back there…
Richard
Raph:
Richard, I have a poetry lesson for you. Never argue with poets. They cheat. 🙂
Morgan Ramsay>Richard, I have a poetry lesson for you. Never argue with poets. They cheat.
Yes indeed. They are also keen to tell you what rules they’re breaking, and especially eager to point out to non-poets what philistines they are.
My issue was with the headline-writer, not with the poet. Poets can write what they like: it’s poetry simply because it was written by a poet. Carol Ann Duffy is tipped to be Britain’s next Poet Laureate; I’m not going to argue over whether anything she writes that she says is a poem is indeed a poem or not. Personally, I see something of a discordance between choosing to write to a prescribed structure and then being lackadaisical with said structure, but it’s not me who’s writing the poetry.
My blog entry was complaining not about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, but the fact that The Guardian‘s headline said it rhymed. It doesn’t, except in a couple of places, unless you stretch your definition of “rhyme” to include “doesn’t actually rhyme”. Just because two sets of syllables sound almost the same if you hear them said through an inch of felt, that doesn’t mean they rhyme. They can nearly rhyme, but that’s not the same thing.
All that Raph had to say was that I was talking about perfect rhymes, and the headline-writer was talking about rhyme in a much looser sense. Fair enough; I knew that. Part of my motivation for blogging was to set myself against the gradual and casual devaluation of the word “rhyme”.
But no, instead we got “a poetry lesson for Bartle”. I don’t need a poetry lesson to instruct me on the basics of poetry. Bartle had plenty of poetry lessons at school. However, I don’t suppose many of the 331 people (as I write this) who read the post’s headline are going to come away with that impression.
Richard
I seem to have caused some offense, when I thought we were simply going back and forth in ongoing humorous needling. Your last remark on the poems was “I studiously avoid the music, because I have read the poems!” or some such… I took that as the same sort of teasing. No condescension was intended.
FWIW, the Wikipedia article on rhyme sums up my understanding pretty well — which is that “rhyme” is generally used for perfect rhyme, but when digging deeper into poems, there are many forms of imperfect rhyme, and using them is not at all considered out of bounds for the form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme#Types_of_rhyme
For that matter, the sort of syllabic elision I used and referenced as “cheating” is also extremely common in metrical verse and can be seen going back to Chaucer; the use of the apostrophe to indicate it seems out of fashion at this point.
Raph>I seem to have caused some offense
Nah, your poems aren’t that bad…
>when I thought we were simply going back and forth in ongoing humorous needling.
Yes, but that’s not how it was going to look to someone on their RSS feed, was it?
I knew when I posted Carol Ann Duffy’s poem on QBlog that it might catch your attention, and I almost entitled it “Raph Bait” because I was sure you’d have something to say about it so soon after I’d been dismissive of your own poetry. I decided not to, though, because that would have been an unnecessary dig.
>I took that as the same sort of teasing. No condescension was intended.
It was teasing, yes, although not without reason – I really don’t read your poems any more. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but hey, you asked! I kept my comments on the matter short, though, because if I went into details I could have come across as being hurtful, which was not what I wanted at all. If you want to write poems, hey, that’s your prerogative – the last thing I’d want to do is to put you off. If you want to publish them on your blog, well you can publish what you please on it, it’s yours and it’s you. Just because your poems are not to my taste, that doesn’t mean you should stop writing them. It’s only when you yourself find no drive to write them that you should take notice.
>FWIW, the Wikipedia article on rhyme sums up my understanding pretty well — which is that “rhyme” is generally used for perfect rhyme, but when digging deeper into poems, there are many forms of imperfect rhyme, and using them is not at all considered out of bounds for the form.
Well, I’d suggest that it depends on the form, but that’s beside the point. The word “rhyme” generally does (still) mean perfect rhyme, but that headline in The Guardian was drifting away from this.
Here’s the deeper background, which you might not know. We saw in the UK a move away from “structure” in English literature the 1980s, because it was regarded as a constraint on creativity. This covered everything, with allowing bad spelling at one end to stories with no story at the other. It was believed that children would be better able to express themselves if they were freed from rules. Of course, the opposite happened: children became less able to articulate their thoughts – having to think “how to say it” at every turn got in the way of “what to say”. One of the things children were told was that poems didn’t need to rhyme, which is true but it meant that it took rhyme out of their toolbox. They’d get marks for “rhyming” the words “luck” and “love”, but told off for rhyming “luck” and “book” (which, believe it or not, in my accent are a perfect rhyme – “luck” and “look” sound identical when I say them). The pendulum is swinging back the other way now, although it won’t be going far in the opposite direction (we’re not going to be teaching children grammar any time soon – that had been dropped even in my day).
The damage has been done, though. So when I see a front-page headline proclaiming that something rhymes when no, actually it doesn’t, I’m going to complain about it. If you relegate perfect rhyme to just one of a basket of casual rhyming possibilities, it takes away its power. I don’t want that to happen. That’s what was behind my QBlog post.
Two things irritated me about your post. The first, which you probably weren’t to know, is that the assumption that I’m ignorant about the arts touches a raw nerve. As someone from the north of England who lives in the south, I’m used to being stereotyped as someone who must have no concept of high culture (I recall one of my university colleagues laughing in disbelief when I told him I’d read Chekhov). It annoys me, though. Now sure, I don’t know as much about poetry as you do, but I knew everything you said. What made you think I wouldn’t know it?
If that was all there was to it, I probably wouldn’t have commented. The second thing that irritated me, though, was the fact you dedicated an entire blog entry, entitled “A Poetry Lesson for Bartle”, to it. Now, people who read that are also going to think I’m ignorant! It may have been intended as humorous needling, but no-one would know that unless they’d read the comments section 7 posts earlier. Now, I had to say something, otherwise people would think it was true, so I did. I wasn’t meaning to be malicious or anything – I apologise if it came across that way.
Richard
This has been a pretty damn interesting topic. As someone who’s basically uneducated in the arts, but trying to cram allot in due to a personal goal, it’s been more informative than some of you may realize.
Personally, I love to see this kind of “spat”. They bring out allot of stuff that is very informative to anyone who’s listening with an ear towards picking up a thing or two.
I am with Dr. Bartle. Totally. And would go much further with it. Way too many people use their own “Private Language” where believed connotations already taken over the denotations. When it doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t rhyme. (which isn’t exactly the same). Well, let’s not bend words around. There are probably combinations of letters left to make up a new word for this specal kind of sorta-rhymes-somehow. It’s perhaps easier to have that established than to convince everyone that something that clearly doesn’t rhyme does rhyme — actually. Aside, I am not a native english speaker (I should note that in a commentary about language, where I dare to criticise language with imperfect english).
Eh. I’m of the school that everyone has a personal language, in the strictest (philosophical, not academic) definition of the word. From accents to vocabulary to idioms to the geographical and cultural mobility of modern people, it gets really hard to pin down any kind of “perfect” language, unless there’s an arbitration committee writing down a manual.
Besides, any half-assed study of linguistics will tell you that language drifts. Yes, muddling the definition of a word makes it hard to use it meaningfully, but if you say “there are probably ways to arrange letters into new words”, then go ahead. Do it. Use it. Convince others to use it.
If you don’t care enough to do that, then why should anyone else?
http://www.dictionaryevangelist.com/labels/neologism.html
http://abriefmessage.com/2007/10/17/mckean/
It might at this point be worth my mentioning that I have nothing against poems that don’t rhyme per se. My objections are to calling things rhyme when they’re not – because that undermines the meaning of “rhyme”, and therefore the meaning of what rhyme is used for. If you think that a near rhyme is as good as a perfect rhyme, for a start you’ve lost the aesthetic and memorability features of perfect rhyme, and you’re also hacking at the poem’s structure. If you choose not to rhyme for a form that demands rhyme, then it ought to be for a better reason than your thinking that it did rhyme (or, worse, that it was too hard to find a perfect rhyme but close-rhymes are just as valid so it’s OK). Poetic forms are there to provide constraints that concentrate what you say, so you’re forced to distil your thoughts and emotions to fit. If you decide they don’t have to fit, well the truth is that you didn’t distil enough.
As I said, though, poetry can be poetry without rhyming. Indeed, one of my favourite poems (Breaking the Rule, by Julia Copus) has only the vaguest suggestions of resonances where you might expect rhyme; it’s this way for a reason, though. Incidentally, this poem was what finally put me off trying to write poetry myself: it reads as if it came so easily, yet my own efforts were always titanic struggles. I can write verse, yes, but poetry is just too hard to get to say what I want to say. I can articulate myself much better (and with appropriate ease) in virtual worlds, games, screenplays and novels.
Richard
That really is a pretty fantastic poem, Richard.
I suppose that to me, given that all those other terms about rhyme are always swirling around in my head, when I read “rhyme,” I read it in that context, where there are many sorts of rhyming.
The prevailing poetic standards these days have drifted pretty far from rhyme in general over the years (though the rise of New Formalism and the like pushed the pendulum back some) and when you do see rhyme, it frequently is not full rhyme all the way through. But it has been that way since the 19th century. So I don’t really fight the use of the term, particularly when there is so much specific vocabulary around the many flavors of slant, close, and half rhymes.
These aren’t new words, nor is what I wrote a private language. See the Wikipedia article I linked — all those terms are common poetic terms, generally lumped under “rhyme,” — and in fact, they are on the “rhyme” page in Wikipedia.
I wonder if any of you would indulge me and say what you think of this poetic story I wrote for UO, about an in-game happening. See, I’m trying to write a book, and I’m working on my skills as I develop the story. (I’ve joined an online writing club also.) Mainly, I’m curious how I did on this a few years ago.
Ballad of the Battle of the SinTax
There once was a time, many years ago, before three dark hooded watchers pointed up in the night.
Uttering not a single word, they fortold moonstones falling from the sky, the comming of Trammel and the order held within it’s sight.
——————
It was a time of chaos and of lawless flaw
A time when the sword and the spell ruled over all
Many warlords rose and many also fell
Lord British himself could not stop deaths knell
From these ashes one rose above all
A mighty warrior and his followers from his hall
A warlord to Lord British he would pay no heed,
He was BoneDancer, by name and by deed
Ruling the dungeons, the forest, and the dell
They left safety to Lord British’s cities swell
By the waste of others they did feed
They were Sinister, by name and by deed
And as fate would have all come to pass
These folk of evil times would amass
To look upon their glimmers and fortunes held fast
And say to themselves it is not enough vast
They would challenge British’s law and decree
They would make all pay them fee
Issued from BoneDancer and guild Sinister
It was taxes they would wage and administer
Now stood there a tower to freedom and trade
Where the peoples of our land met and deals there were made
Auctions and sales done under watchful and security
Where free trade could be held for assurety
It was RedDevil’s tower of old and of fame
And all who came were treated the same
Where much gold changed from hand to hand
And here where Sinister would make their taxes stand
But this is where the fates make their promise
For live in their plan and be treated with hospice
But overstep this grand plan the fates do set
And you surely will feel the wrath they beset
So the fates set in motion a thing to behold
And warriors and mages dreamt not to fall fold
Of a warlord and clan whose bounds did not know
And a doom was made in a seed the Fates would sow
A cry for freedom arose from the people
“No More SinTax” was yelled from a steeple
And the cry was heard by many far and wide
Taken up it was by a host of massive tide
A night was chosen to do battle and wage war
The numbers did gather before RedDevils tower and store
Clans and guilds gathered around their campfires
And waited the night to battle for their desires
And ever they came, on through the night
Fire and camp were set by the stars light
Many and more they filled the wood
Five Hundred strong they would count to be stood
On through the waiting night stories were told
Of great battles past and how they unfold
But none would match this battle in size
The epic battle would join when a new day to rise
The new day rose with a fog and a mist
The warriors of Sinister raised clenched fist
And shouted with fury their battle cry’s bray
Thunder arose as they charged to the fray
They came like a vice from north and from south
Two attacks divided to swallow like gorging mouth
Not knowing what fate had for them in store
They were about to become of legend and lore
The battle was joined and Sinister fought like demons
Wasting lives and calling deaths beacons
Cutting down more than they themselves fell
Great warriors and mages ringing evil Hades’ bell
Five Hundred strong awaited them there
And it matters not how terrible they fare
For they were outmatched by numbers if not skill
And it wasn’t long before they saw fates wanton will
The retreat was ordered by BoneDancer and clan
Regathered they did to form a new plan
And next they came with murderous fury
All in one like a wedge driven flurry
And battle rejoined and warriors blead
The Five Hundred stood strong and firm in their stead
They would not bend to tyranny by might
Much blood was shed under this dreaded sight
The good peoples of Sosaria stood in the end
Victorious they were after battles mend
Hells mouth had swallowed many souls on that day
Destiny showed it would have it’s way
Sinister met doom and BoneDancer his fate
RedDevil’s tower stands in historic gate
The virtues triumphed by the jealous design
Of the Fates who guard destiny’s sign.
Reading it again I already see some things I’d change now. And it doesn’t seem to flow as well as it should. I needed to spend more time on it. I guess what I’m asking is, is it any good at all?
Must have left ’em speechless. hehe
Well, Raph — I wasn’t saying that you personally came up with the idea that non-rhymes are rhymes. I am certain that this has established somewhere. I was more amazed how some institution could (apparently successfully) label something ‘a rhyme’ when in the sense of the word, the key characteristics aren’t met. There are probably eight reasons for this idea, like underlying patterns or something the like. I am just wondering why they thought it’s a good idea to seize another word which is already well established. That’s were new words come in. Academia folks could call this new rhyme idea ‘hurglemurgle’ and make it a subset special case of rhyming etc.
Their idea is more in line with keeping the bible in latin, so that the crowds are effectivly kept outside. So if outsiders want to join the conversion, they can’t because the ‘Insiders’ created their own language, where UP means DOWNS and rhyme, means maybe-rhyming.
@Michael Chui
Of course language is most likely never totally exactly the same from individual to indivual, but certain key elements are. I think it’s reasonably isomorphic (at least). The idea is that certain ‘patterns’ are kept in ‘sound’ and that you can evoke those same ‘patterns’ in another individual by referring to them (as both use the same refering system) by creating a certain sound (or by writing a combination of letters etc.) …
So when I say “a tree that doesn’t stop growing”, you know what I mean, even though you certainly don’t see the same tree. But you know what kind of category of things I am reffering to. Now, think about rhymes. 🙂
The same reason you use “establish” to mean something other than “keep a building from falling over”. Why didn’t you make up a new word for “a word definition that has been in use longer than I can remember” and instead subverted a perfectly good word that already had a solid meaning?