Rhyme and Reason

Children are mean. Although our capacity for meanness might expand as our arsenal of witticisms and insults is reinforced by age, experience, and more developed mental faculties, most people, in time, put aside the relentless, bold, and piercing mockery that often characterizes childhood meanness. However, people never seem to lose the fascination with and enjoyment of rhyme that characterizes some of the most persistent of childhood jokes. Everyone knows the embarrassment of having his or her name inserted into the infamous “sitting in a tree/ k-i-s-s-i-n-g” jingle. We remember these nursery and schoolyard rhymes so well precisely because they are rhymes. Rhyme, whether it be in poems, jokes, or song lyrics, always reinforces memory. Likewise, the delight a cruel child finds in the rather clever rhyming of “tree” and “g” has a far more humane and universally enjoyable home in song lyrics and witty poems. 

At its best, rhyme is immensely satisfying. As the poet Timothy Steele says in All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification, a clever rhyme between two lines of a poem can “link the lines harmoniously together, hone the wit of the poem, and provide an aid to memory” (175). A wonderful rhyme plays on the tension formed by similar sounds and disparate meanings. A rhyme can emphasize the connection between two words even if they are not in successive lines of a poem. Consider this passage from one of Steele’s own poems describing a warbler trapped in an airport:

Although by nature flight-endowed,

He seems too gentle to reproach

These souls who soon will climb through cloud

In first class, business class, and coach.

(“In the Memphis Airport,” 9-12)

The rhyme of “flight-endowed” and “cloud” draws a delightful comparison between the bird and the travelers. Both are in places where they, by nature, should not be. There is a wonderful irony in the image: a flight-endowed thing is something capable of climbing “through cloud,” but the airport, a hub of artificial flight, has trapped the bird. By rhyming, Steele invites us to see the humor and strangeness of the situation; the rhyme is an assistant and guide in the reader’s analysis of the poem. 

A similar effect is found in all great rhyming poems. Rhyme can pair things that are not often paired, and this surprising union can change the way the reader perceives one or both of those things. A couplet from Robert Frost’s “To the Thawing Wind” exemplifies this:

Melt the glass and leave the sticks

Like a hermit’s crucifix;

(9-10)

There is a fascinating tension here between the simplicity of the word “sticks” and the complexity of the word “crucifix,” a term that bears immense cultural and religious weight. By bringing together the mundane and the spiritual, Frost compels us to reflect upon the relation between the smallest, most seemingly insignificant things and the things most wrought with meaning and import. 

The analytic value of rhyme, as true as it is, would be nothing if the human ear did not simply find immense satisfaction in the sonic qualities of rhyming words. Rhyme is pleasurable. Rhyme gives passion to our love songs and bite to our witticisms. It is a symptom of “our delight in verbal concordances and harmonies” (Steele, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, 178). Rhyme enriches language and provides for practically infinite wordplay. Rhyme lets us experience once again a childlike fascination with language, unspoiled, hopefully, by jokes about boys, girls, trees, and the ever humorous k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

October 2021