Rhyme or not to rhyme

The following paragraph (pg 163) comes from Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a marvellous book looking at the technical aspects of poetry, which Fry infiltrates and invigorates with his daft and witty sense of humour.   At this point he's just spent quite some time discussing rhyme, and by dint of using the terrible disastrous William McGonagall poem on the disaster on the Tay Bridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland (Hopkins is obviously a poet he admires a good deal), Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the sinking of the Titanic) and Tennyson's superb (if all too familiar) 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has shown how difficult it is to use good rhyme in a poem intended to commemorate a disaster.  

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail.   I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming.  Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry [Fry enjoys it when it's done well]  it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words.  It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting 'ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace...' when surely a proper poet should be thinking high pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus.  Well, yes.  But a rhyme is a rhyme and won't come unless searched for.  Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme.  To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas.  It is one of the things we do.

This paragraph resonates with me, of course, because much of my time in the last year has been spent finding that elusive note or chord for the musical I've been writing - Grimhilda! - and trying to find rhymes that make sense, fit and don't take the verse off in a direction that has nothing to do with the plot.

 

Artitsts and language

For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately, it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees. For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not work alone.

Madeleine L'Engle
Walking on Water

Dame Frevisse

Via the Books and Culture ezine, I learned about a series of murder mysteries by Margaret Frazer. They are set around a character called 'Dame Frevisse, a quick-witted Benedictine nun of St. Frideswide's Priory in Oxfordshire,' and have some similarities to the Brother Cadfael series, being set back in the 15th century.
The first in the series, which our library happened to have, is entitled, The Novice's Tale. The novice in question, Thomasine, is a rather irritating, overly-saintly teenager (the other nuns comment on it more than once) , whose harridan of an aunt turns up at the priory one day with her large retinue, has a conversation with Domina Edith (the equivalent of an Abbess) and Thomas Chaucer (an historical person, the son of Geoffrey Chaucer), and discovers something which sets her off to her other neice's home in such a fury that various unhappy events follow in the wake of her hasty departure.
The plotting is neat enough to keep you guessing - well, it kept me guessing, but I've never been very good at figuring out murder mysteries - and while Frevisse is a bit tart in nature (unlike Cadfael) you warm to her good sense and willingness to get herself in hot water if it will clear things up. Frazer knows her history and the details of the period, but doesn't stuff them down your throat (like the author Tim Severin, does in Buccanneer, a book I had to review but found to be so didactic in tone that the characters seldom came alive).
Apparently the seventeenth book in this series has just been published - The Apostate's Tale.
LaVonne Neff notes in her review of the book: The author, Margaret Frazer, actually started out as two women: mystery writer Mary Monica Pulver and amateur archaeologist/historian Gail Frazer, who met at the Society for Creative Anachronism, became friends, and wrote the first six Dame Frevisse novels together. When Pulver went on to other pursuits, Frazer continued the series on her own.
Unfortunately our local library is surprisingly short on books in the series: only the first two are in stock. Looks like a bit of hunting down of the other titles may be in order, now that I know the series is worth reading.