The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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 bentIn choosing words to force a wrenched accént.He has no sense of how the verse should singAnd tries to get away with wrenched rhyming.A bad wrenched rhyme won’t ever please the eye:Or find its place in proper poetry.

Where ‘poetry’ would have to be pronounced ‘poe-a-try’.³ You 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.

I think those two examples work superbly, and of course no reader of them in public would wrench those rhymes. However, we should not necessarily assume that since Yeats and Jonson are officially Fine Poets, everything they do must be regarded as unimpeachable. If like me you look at past or present poets to help teach you your craft, do be alive to the fact that they are as capable of being caught napping as the rest of us. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, as Horace famously observed: ‘sometimes even the great Homer nods’. Here is a couplet from Keats’s ‘Lamia’ by way of example:Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by,Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully

Again, a reader-out-loud of this poem would not be so unkind to poet or listener as to wrench the end-rhyme into ‘thoughtful-eye’. Nonetheless, whether wrenched or not the metre can safely be said to suck. The stressed ‘he’ is unavoidable, no pyrrhic substitutions help it and without wrenching the rhyme or the rhythm the line ends in a lame dactyl.Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully

Add to this the word order inversion ‘gainst a column he leant’, the very banality of the word ‘thoughtfully’ and the archaic aphaeretic⁴ damage done to the word ‘against’ and the keenest Keatsian in the world would be forced to admit that this will never stand as one of the Wunderkind’s more enduring monuments to poesy. I have, of course, taken just one couplet from a long (and in my view inestimably fine) poem, so it is rather mean to snipe. Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel, nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling worthy of admiring gasps. In fact, Keats so disliked being forced into archaic inversions that in a letter he cited their proliferation in his extended poem Hyperion as one of the reasons for his abandonment of it.

Wrenching can be more successful when done for comic effect. Here is an example from Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Motorcycle Song’.I don’t want a pickleJust want to ride on my motorsickleAnd I’m not bein’ fickle’Cause I’d rather ride on my motorsickleAnd I don’t have fish to fryJust want to ride on my motorcy…cle

Ogden Nash was the twentieth-century master of the comically wrenched rhyme, often, like Guthrie, wrenching the spelling to aid the reading. These lines are from ‘The Sniffle’.Is spite of her sniffle,Isabel’s chiffle.Some girls with a sniffleWould be weepy and tiffle;They would look awfulLike a rained-on waffle.…Some girls with a snuffleTheir tempers are uffle,But when Isabel’s snivellyShe’s snivelly civilly,And when she is snufflyShe’s perfectly luffly.

Forcing a rhyme can exploit the variations in pronunciation that exist as a result of class, region or nationality. In a dramatic monologue written in the voice of a rather upper-class character fearfully could be made to rhyme with stiffly for example, or houses with prizes (although these are rather stale ho-ho attributions in my view). Foot rhymes with but to some northern ears, but then foot in other northern areas (South Yorkshire especially) is pronounced to rhyme with loot. Myth is a good rhyme for with in America where the ‘th’ is usually unvoiced. This thought requires a small explanatory aside: a ‘sidebar’ as I believe they are called in American courtrooms.