Rhyme without reason: Equation of rhyme and poetry holds strong Final Edition

• Published in: Standard (St. Catherines)
• Main Author: Cox, Terrance
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: St. Catharines, Ont Torstar Syndication Services, a Division of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited 26.07.2002
• ISSN: 0837-3434

Likewise with poetry. By accepted public definition, poetry has to rhyme. Indeed, that poetry rhymes is what makes it not prose. Every non-poet who, on occasion, ventures a poem -- commemorative stanzas in obit sections; satiric verse in editorials; ditties of undying love; odes to nature"s beauties -- assumes some rhyme scheme. My poems do not rhyme, unless -- on rare occasion -- I want them to. I cringe at every chance encounter with contemporary "rhymster" verses: chugging, clanking, clunkers all, as cumbersome of sound as cliched in sense. I am saddened that still exists so limited an understanding of myriad possibilities for making "word music," apart from and beyond mere rhyme. I am sorry that our basic education about poetry is not only narrow in its conception of "words-as- music" but also false to its history. The greatest of English poets achieved the glories of his work without rhyme. Shakespeare"s plays are in "blank verse" -- five beats to a line, with a short-long stress pattern; they rhyme infrequently, usually as a couplet at scene's end to cue the actors. His songs and sonnets, of course, rhyme -- prodigiously, exquisitely.