The Rhythm of Rhyme

Adam Piette

Derek taught us to revise practically all we thought we knew about rhythm in poetry, revise and think
again. His magisterial, patient dissection of lines, the clairvoyant and judicious parsing of the poems,
the fine ear hearing the detail and sensuous complexity of rhythmical work going on, the wonderful
analytic clarity with which he weighed the different forms (especially four-beat and five-beat verse)
rediscovered the rules of scansion and prosody we thought we had a handle on. He did so much (who
more?) to rescue close reading of poetry more generally from the impasse we’d all fallen into
somewhat in the dread interim created by theory’s demolition of the ruined citadels of New Criticism.
Listening to the sounds of the lines and the play of voice and metre became a joy again, and technically
enjoyable too. I’d like in this paper to dwell on a specific detail of line scansion and of Derek’s sense of
rhythm in poems (rather as he did in his wonderful paper on straight repetition of exact word/phrase in
the Swiss paper I saw him deliver many moons (many moons) ago) – a topic I haven’t seen dealt with,
though please enlighten me if I’m wrong about this: namely the effect rhyme may or may not have on
the rhythm of a line. I’m going to suggest rhyme, once the eye and ear register it on the page (and I’m
thinking of the printed voice here, though I’ll talk a little about performance values later), may semi-
consciously invite us to emphasise the phonemes of the rhymed word and to give it a peak effect which
slightly alters the cadence of that line. Equally, internal rhyming of a subtler kind may have a ripple
effect which flows across or reinforces the rhythm we might normally perform, prolongation of vowel
being one of the semi-conscious effects to the mind. Very minute levels of judgement are involved
here, and inevitably proof may be lacking short of wiring poetry readers up to bleeping machines and
brainwave visualisers. A lot of what I say has been entertained or suggested by Derek in his many texts
on rhythm in poetry: Rhythms of English Poetry talks about the ways form may put pressure on the
line, and demand rhyme (as with four-beat verse); and that that demand is tied up with expectations to
do with closure – so ‘some special device to achieve a feeling of closure’ is called for in complex five-
beat stanzas, for instance; four-beat verse ‘seems to invite a special marking of the final beat’ (137):
that inviting, that demand, the need to achieve a feeling: all this is bundled up into the pleasures and
perils of rhyme and how rhyme acts as a marker and device of desire. Rhyme, as in the heroic couplet,
may give us a fuller satisfaction than we realise, as Derek argues: the satisfaction experienced at the
end of the heroic couplet is in fact comprised of a ‘simultaneous completion’ of patterns of meaning,
syntax, metre, and rhyme, satisfying, then, expectations ‘emotional, narrative, syntactic, logical,
rhetorical, or formal’ (309). Rhyme, ‘an ancient aural signal of segmental division’ (‘Poetry Unbound?:
Observations On Free Verse’, 363), may reinforce the ways lines are structured by their rhythms, and
rhythm, that ‘presemantic carrier of speech, the rhythmic progression of stressed and unstressed
syllables’ (‘Language of Poetry’, 244), may create the demands for rhyming closure even in free verse.
And it gives a special prominence to the rhyme word, more obviously: it ‘gives the physical substance
of the word a particular insistence’.1 We take a step deeper into things, however, when we slow down

1
‘Rhyme in English and French’, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (OUP, 2015), , p. 62.

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and reflect on the affect written into the demands, needs and satisfactions: that emotional investment is
what I will also be trying to track down as the rhyme words jingle and chime.
I’d just to pick up a tiny suggestion Derek makes in Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction: at one point
he’s talking about how rhyme is often used to ‘[signal] the ends of the metrical segments’ and gives as
his charming example these sentences which are set out as prose in the book: ‘Send for the doctor,
make him be quick; John has a cold and he’s feeling sick. “Away with the doctor,” Johnny said. “All I
need is a week in bed!”:

if we encountered these sentences in a paragraph of prose, the chances are we would notice their
distinctive regularity. The usually fluctuating rhythm of the language would fall into a more
regular pattern, and we would find ourselves slightly altering our pronunciation of the words in
order to bring out that pattern (or else we would have to make a conscious effort to avoid it) (p.
51)

That slight alteration of pronunciation is what I’d like to track today but not in paragraphs of prose, but
in printed poetry, looking at examples from W.S. Graham and Basil Bunting (two poets with quite
spectacularly good ears): that slight alteration I’m going to christen rhyme-beat patterning. And just to
reassure you that this is not going to be a display of pure aesthete technē (or rather not only a display of
pure aesthete technē), just to remind you again of Derek’s list: expectations ‘emotional, narrative,
syntactic, logical, rhetorical, or formal’, to which I’d like to add unconscious, because all thinking
about closure needs to feel how the unconscious is also being solicited, whether it be libido or
superego, or the repressed desire culture wraps up into the backs of our minds, especially when dealing
with the anarchic ‘energy pulses’ of rhythm and their force within the line and on the page to ear and
eye.
‘The Nightfishing’ (1955) begins with a musical sound:

Very gently struck

The quay night bell.

No rhyme but a clear three beat rhythm: but note how, gently, the lines strike another rhythm that
crosses the line break, a rhythm generated by the e-repetition running from ‘Very’ through ‘gently’
through to ‘bell’: that triplet accompanies, as it were, the three beat form of the individual lines: it
strikes three too. But it also adds musical echoic emphasis to ‘bell’, to my ear: the ‘e’ in ‘bell’ resonates
because the same sound has already been twice struck: ‘very gently bell’ – the natural inclination
slightly to prolong a sound that culminates the sentence or semantic unit is given gentle force by the
reverberation.
Graham goes on after a pause:

Now within the dead

Of night and the dead

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 Of my life I hear
My name called from far out.
I’m come to this place
(Come to this place)
Which I’ll not pass
Though one shall pass
Wearing seemingly
This look I move as.

Straight repetitions, as Derek has argued in that Swiss paper, are odd because they raise not only
questions about what to do with the repetition (should one perform the repetition without inflection,
with a crescendo or diminuendo, or with different tonality? whatever one does, he argues, the bare fact
of the overt repetition2 ‘represents a resistant moment in the text, a moment where the mobile forward-
moving energy that animates almost every literary work is suddenly thwarted’ [on Hamlet’s thrice-
repeated ‘except my life’]. Here Graham’s straight repetitions ‘the dead’, ‘come to this place’ and
‘pass’ play variations on that resistant thwarting. The repetition of ‘the dead’ enters difference into the
equation through the line-break change: ‘the dead/Of Night’ turns to ‘the dead/Of my life’, striking
semantic difference into being: the name is being called from far out within time (the dead of night as
witching hour) and from an ancestral crowd beyond the grave. The repetition plays up difference
zeugmatically.
The second variation plays an Eliotic game: ‘I’m come to this place /
(Come to this place)’ recalls ‘There is shadow under this red rock / (Come in under the shadow of this
red rock)’, the parenthesis miming a sinister whispering, of a figure resembling Death itself. Graham’s
repetition, then, charges ‘this place’ with Waste Land spookiness, making it a liminal zone of the dead,
and the repetition also plays up difference, not only tonally with the whispering borrowed from Eliot by
way of allusion, but also with the shift from past tense to the imperative. What seems to be an arbitrary
choice turns out to be an answer to a hidden invitation. The echo is not neutral, therefore: it invites us
to accept quite specific performance directions and determinations.
The third repetition is more mysterious, closer to the thwarting effects Derek outlined: ‘Which
I’ll not pass/Though one shall pass’ sets up a distinction between the poet’s determination not to cross
the border between life and death, like Odysseus in Hades, and some future actor, some second self, it
seems, if we follow the logic of subsequent lines:

This staring second

Breaks my home away
Through always every
Night through every whisper
From the first that once

2
‘The movement of meaning: phrasing and Repetition in English Poetry’, Repetition edited by Andreas
Fischer, SPELL 7 (1994), 61-83, (p. 76).

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 Names me to the bone.

The ‘staring second’ is both the catastrophic moment (the very second when his home is broken away
from, or is actively broken) and also the second self who will cross over into the realm of death in the
future. Note too that the Eliotic whisper we heard in the parenthesis is foregrounded and takes aural
form as an impossible voicing of dream night language, an inner prompting out there in the dark sea as
ghost voice of the dead heard as calling, as naming, as summoning to step over the line.
Returning to the previous passage: the repetition of ‘pass’ has an oddly unsettling effect
because it also half rhymes with ‘place’, so we have an end-rhyme effect half there as though
whispered on the air – ‘place’-‘(place)’-‘pass’-‘pass’. It also has difference written into its flat
repetition: the ‘I’ will not pass, the other ‘shall pass’. What is heard is the tolling of the same sounds,
miming the tolling of the bell, which sounds like the calling of the same name over and over again, a
re-sounding. Here the verb becomes reverb, the passing overlaid with an extra sinister emphasis, the
‘one shall pass’ drawing prophetic intonation into the lines (as in the Biblical phrase ‘And it shall come
to pass’, or NT’s repeated ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’
Matthew 24:35).3 This mysterious other who will pass over, the ‘staring second’ self, will be wearing
the same ‘look’ as the poet’s; but how strange it is that the look is something worn which the poet
moves as. The syntax is a jumble that needs untangling, as if there is a demand coming from
somewhere to unravel the knots and see what’s there. This might take the form of paraphrase, so: ‘this
place I’ve come to which Death has prompted me to travel to by calling my name must be the sea of
Lethe - only the dead pass over this sea: that bell tolling is tolling for me, its music calls my name
again and again. But I’ll not pass over now, some other ‘I’ will do that in the future, not tonight. The
other ‘I’ will look like me because he will be me, he shall be my dead self, the bone self that bears my
name. The dead self wears the same appearance I have now within this place (‘seemingly / This look’ =
he will have the same outward appearance as I do, he is my ‘semblant’) but I resist the thought, cannot
face the idea of my own death, this other self is a stranger, the same look is a trick of the light, only
seems so.’ Or we can unravel by tending to the syntax quite tightly, maybe working backwards: ‘I
move as this look: this look will be worn, it seems, by the one who shall pass this place.’ If we turn it
this way then ‘I move as’ means something like (to adapt Derek) ‘my mobile forward-moving energy
assumes this “look”, takes this form and shape’. If we allow that sense into the line, we need help,
however. And help comes from rhyme-beat patterning, which in terms Graham’s own practice has here
defined, means the tolling repetitions that name identity over time, over all time even beyond death,
from mother naming me to the name on the tombstone: the naming draws ghostly force from the
atmosphere into the present tense voice. The whispering name is inhabiting these lines and stalling the
mobile forward-moving energy: but it also paradoxically stresses that same energy. The rhyme-beat
patterning here takes this shape: I suggest that having experienced the ‘place’-‘(place)’-‘pass’-‘pass’
end-rhyme effect, acoustic emphasis is placed, in ghostly form, on ‘as’ that the ordinary syntax and
rhythm would seemingly deny. It invites us to see ‘as’ as stressed even though it can’t really be in

3
Exodus 33:22: ‘And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of
the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by’

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performance without sounding awkward. ‘Wearing seemingly / This look I move as’ – the triple
rhythm here would be a returning to the triple rhythm Graham had initially set up, the very-gentle-bell
rhythm we might call it, which had been turned away from in favour of a two-beat from the ‘come to
this place’ lines on). If the triple rhythm is allowed to occur through the inner prompting of the
rhyming, this invites somewhat different meanings. ‘This look I move as’ means something like ‘this
appearance I inhabit whilst I move’, but the offhand ‘as’ would point to how uneasy the poet is here,
only half-acknowledging what the mind would rather not contemplate. The poet doesn't really want to
go there, and deliberately muffles the vision of his own dead self. ‘This look I move as’, however, does
start to mean something: stressing ‘as’ would bring out the potential phenomenological sense to the
line, as in ‘this form my mobile forward-moving energy is assuming as my identity’. The whole section
ends:

Yet this place finds me

And forms itself again.
This present place found me.

The habit created by the straight repetitions marks another out here, of ‘me’ and ‘me’ together – that
identity has been formed by ‘this place’ and this place has resolved itself into a liminal zone in contact
with the dead, but also, creatively, as a zone of echo, the zone of echoic poetry, where one’s words are
ghosted by the dead repetition of the past, and yet where identity, the ‘I’-voice, can be formally found:
the poem names anyone who reads it as ‘I’ – I read it and adopt and inhabit Graham’s subject position
on the dark sea of language. I move as the look of the words on the page; and their seeming, once
heard as an acoustic phenomenon, their heard look finds / always already found me as rhyming
prolongation of the dead identity left there on the page as ghost voice. The triple rhythm set up by the
very gentle bell of the poem returns if and only if I allow the whisper of rhyme to single out this
supplementary emphasis. If I allow the rhyme-beat patterning to scan the line as ‘This look I move as’,
then the ghost of a possibility of the following scansion becomes plausible to my eye and ear:

Yet this place finds me

And forms itself again.
This present place found me.

That is, the present place of echoic poetry and its formal repetitions (‘forms itself again’) invite the
reader, therefore, to become the ‘I’: the surprise at this actually happening, especially if we factor in the
fear of death implicit in the haunting transfer of Graham’s mobile forward-moving energy, would then
be there as the emphasis on ‘me’. And remembering how each straight repetition in the previous
examples introduced difference too: we are equally invited to think of the ‘me’ as two, as both present
‘I’ and the ‘staring second’ self among the dead. What ordinary rhythm and syntax would perform as a
feminine falling away, with the rhyme-beat patterning becomes the fuller ending that acknowledges the
reader’s involvement in the form.

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My second example is from Bunting’s Briggflatts: in the preface, Bunting had stressed the importance
of the acoustic system of his work: ‘[with] an ear open to melodic analogies[,] I have set down words
as a musician pricks his score, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may, sometimes, be
pleasing’. The opening section begins with a thirteen-line stanza that ends with a couplet, so formally
speaking, the stanza foregrounds rhyme which since it is invisible as end-rhyme in the nine-line core of
the stanza, points, I think, pretty clearly to internal rhyming effects as important to the way the thing
works. Those effects are everywhere to be found: the style is richly textured acoustically, so the
wonderful opening:

Brag, sweet tenor bull,

descant on Rawthey’s madrigal

has more than pleasing sound patterns: they create a dizzying aural field. The sound-repetitions are a
rich mix: vowels æ (brag-descant-madrigal), e (tenor-descant), i: (sweet-Rawthey), ʊl - syllabic l (bull-
madrigal), consonants b (brag-bull), l (bull-madrigal), r (Rawthey’s-madrigal), t (sweet tenor –
descant), n (tenor-descant-on), d (descant-madrigal), g (brag-madrigal). The tight internal rhyming
signifies that this is the music that Bunting is playing to rival the double music of bull and river. In
particular it is the word ‘madrigal which is most ‘rhymed’: every phoneme has its run or string of
sound-repetitions bar m and I, though even here, the m picks up on the n-repetition and the i on ‘-
they’. The polyphonic parts of the madrigal have their analogue in the phonemic iterative lines of
sound. Note too how the effect is also to slightly alter the pronunciation and therefore the rhythm once
we ‘see’ the rhymes and hear the patterns they trace on the air. The rhythm ought to run, classically:

‘Brag, ,sweet ‘tenor ‘bull,

‘descant on ‘Rawthey’s ‘madrigal

But the subsidiary stress in the first line there on ‘sweet’ invites one to hold a four beat pattern in the
air too:

‘Brag, ‘sweet ‘tenor ‘bull,

‘descant on ‘Rawthey’s ‘madri‘gal

Rhyme-beat patterning invites us to lay at least subsidiary stress on the ‘al’ of ‘madrigal’ too with the
pull of end-rhyme habit (bull-madrigal) and the gravitational force of the æ-repetitions in particular
(brag-descant-madrigal). This possibility acts as an acoustic manifestation of the counterpointing that
‘descant’ invites: we are invited to counterpoint the rhythm with this other cross-pattern. The extra
stress does not make much difference semantically: except it underlines the sense already suggested
that ‘madrigal’ has been musicked by the sonic work of the preceding words; and that music aids and
abets the rhythmic potential set up by ‘tenor bull’. As such, it feeds in to the theme developed

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throughout Briggflatts of the relation of text to voice: on this particular May day of the sighting of the
bull by the Rawthey, a mason is chiselling a name onto a marble gravestone, the same chilling naming
that Graham meditates on in Nightfishing: ‘naming none / a man abolished’. That marble deathly
naming is compared to the ‘[g]entle generous voices’ of lovers making love on the marble slab that
night, ‘words to confirm and delight / till bird dawn’. The double nature of art is at stake: the marble
monumental chiselled words of classically ‘dead’ immortal poetry; and the living language of desire of
the sexy lyric. The bull and the river play out the opposition to a certain extent: the river’s sounds
signify a liquid endlessness, language that aspires to the marble immortality of the mason; the bull is
male desire, subject to time and death (the section ends with a bleak vision of spring’s ending when the
‘bull is beef, love a convenience’), yet nervily vocal with bellowing life. Briggflatts with its fusing of
this maytime scene with memories of Bloodaxe and his ancient battles gestures towards a fusional art
both marble / river and bull / lover’s discourse: ‘letter the stone to stand / over love […] to trace / lark,
mallet, / becks, flocks / and axe knocks’. The extra acoustic force given ‘madrigal’ by the fusion of
rhythm and internal rhyming sings the fusional art: we see ‘madrigal’ for ever a printed word-object on
the page that will last as long as culture will; and we are invited to hear it voiced in a descant of two
ways of reading, one of strict order and logic, one of desirous heart open to the lines of delightful music
along the lines.
What the beat resolution does not merely do is stress that this is a rhyme: it happens when the
acoustic pattern set up by the rhyming strings of phonemes sets up a potential counter-rhythm. The
third stanza of the opening section of Briggflatts will serve as example, of the range of effects that
come under ‘melodic analogies’ for Bunting:

Decay thrusts the blade,

wheat stands in excrement
trembling. Rawthey trembles.
Tongue stumbles, ears err
for fear of spring.
Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone.
The mason says: Rocks
happen by chance.
No one here bolts the door,
love is so sore.

This is sung by the mason-as-death, comparable to the dark music heard by Graham on his nightfishing
boat. The rhythm set up initially is a strong three-beat:

De’cay ‘thrusts the ‘blade,

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 ’wheat ’stands in ’excre,ment

But the anapaest ‘excrement’ is already troubling things, and its enjambement ‘in excrement /
trembling’ further breaks the three-beat rhythm set up by the first line. ‘Rawthey trembles’ is left
isolated though repeating the wheat’s verb and motion; rhythmically the isolated two beats are later
picked up in the short two-beat lines (‘for fear of spring’; ‘happen by chance’; ‘love is so sore’).
Instead of full descant we have decay, signalled by a falling away from the bragging sweet music of
bull descanting on the river-sound to this broken music. It is most broken, of course, with the lines:

Tongue stumbles, ears err

for fear of spring.

These are difficult to scan, mimetically so; how to perform ‘Tongue stumbles, ears err’ : as four or
three beat? Four seems possible (‘’Tongue ‘stumbles, ‘ears ‘err’), but the two-beat of ‘Rawthey
trembles’ is infectious and the ear and eye see this pattern emerge: ‘Tongue ‘stumbles, ,ears ‘err’.
What helps, though, is rhyme-beat patterning which here plays a reinforcing role. The repetition of
tremble in the previous line (‘trembling’-‘trembles’), the t- and m-repetition fostered by this, picking
up the sounds of the shocking ‘excrement’, give equal sonic emphasis to ‘tongues’ and to ‘stumbles’;
and ‘tongues’ is half-rhymed with ‘spring’ giving it more weight in retrospect. The two words ‘Ears
err’, more subtly, gain force by the eye registering patterns: even though the ‘r’ in both ‘ears and ‘err’
is silent, yet the words on the page stir with the visible line running through excrement-Rawthey-
trembling-trembles to ‘for fear’. The half rhyme ears and err is reinforced by the ears-fear rhyme. The
net effect of this networking of the four words by the previous and following lines is to invite a full
four-stress reading of the line, a reading that has the virtue of slowing the voice down and delivering
the words as tongue-twister difficult. The effect is to produce a double two-beat that chimes
rhythmically with ‘Rawthey trembles’ and ‘for fear of spring’. The fear of spring is Bunting’s own
borrowing from Eliot, comparable to Graham’s parenthesis in that it draws similar sinister force from
The Waste Land’s combination of death and sex. That fear becomes a difficult music in this stanza, a
broken music of stumbling rhythm, uncertain listening. The counterpoint rhythm that the rhyme beat
resolution secures counters this decay-effect by enabling rich rhyming to occur as a rough lively texture
that goes against the mason’s ruthless and cynical rending and erasing. What delights is the satisfaction
of multiple desires by this rhyme-beat patterning: it enables a descant to occur among the lines even
within an excrementally impoverished scene; it invites us to voice the lines differently with desirous
accents; it begins to lilt and swing according to a voicing that does not err or stumble but enjoys the
patterning. It opens another sense of trembling; not the trembling of fear of the sexual energies of
spring, but a trembling of sounds in and among and between the words that anticipates and relishes the
gentle generous weaving of voices in love. Derek remarks on Blake’s Poison Tree’ in the Swiss paper
that:

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 Syntax and semantics have to be considered together […] in their relation to the metrical
patterning of the poem, if we are to understand the production of ‘true musical delight’; and if
this is the case, an understanding of the poem’s musicality cannot be separated from an
understanding of its play of meanings (69)

I would only add that acoustic patterning be added to ‘syntax and semantics’ when registering the
rhythm of a poem. Sometimes internal and end-rhyming alter the ways we hear the rhythm of a line;
and it is that rhyme-beat patterning that I put forward as my small contribution and tribute to Derek’s
wonderful work on prosody; and it is, of course, a contribution that is itself indebted to that work.