Rhymes Don't Get Used Up

I once read some modernist poet asshole (think T. S. Eliot and his ilk) denigrate formal poetry because the vast majority of rhymes have all been used before. There have just been too many poems rhyming “flower” and “hour.” It’s done now. It’s clichéd. It’s all used up.

This is, of course, a problem for me, because not only do I write formal poetry, I use the same rhymes all the time. Sure, sure, sometimes I’m original: I doubt anyone’s rhymed “masturbation” and “permeation” before (though let me know if they have). But in Better Homes & Gardens Revisited I rhyme “youth” and “truth” in three different poems. In “Consolation” I rhyme “bed” and “dead” in two different stanzas. And don’t get me started on the perennial favorites: the then’s and when’s and again’s and other such get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Honestly, I think this critique stems from a misunderstanding of what exactly rhymes do, which in turns stems from a misunderstanding of what exactly literary devices do. We have this term “literary device” which includes things like (in alphabetical order, because why not):

• Alliteration

• Metaphor

• Meter

• Personification

• Rhyme

• Simile

Do you see the problem with lumping all those things together? The easiest way in the world to get confused is to have one term for two different things, and that list contains two very different things. So, if you had to split it into two lists, what would stay together and what would be separated?

.

.

.

I think metaphor, personification, and simile would be grouped together because they create meaning, and alliteration, meter, and rhyme would be grouped together because they create sounds. If you write, “He kicked like a horse,” the simile conveys meaning about how hard someone kicked. But if you write, “Of course, of course, / he kicked like a horse,” the meter and rhyme—the meter and rhyme as sounds independent of meaning, the things someone would hear even if they didn’t speak English—they convey…what exactly?

You could call these terms informative literary devices and sonic literary devices. And yes, I know, I know, sometimes a sonic device conveys meaning. In “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, the awkward falling meter of the word “difference” in the final line “And that has made all the difference” hints at the ambivalence of the poem. In “Toads” by Philip Larkin, the onslaught of slant rhymes hint at the speaker’s unhappiness, while the two perfect rhymes in the poem—“enough/stuff” and “getting/sitting”—occur only when the speaker is daydreaming about what he knows he can’t have. English professors love to talk about this stuff. But the fact is, for every sonic device that conveys meaning, there are ninety-nine that don’t. They’re just sounds. They don’t mean anything.

This might seem like an insult to sonic literary devices. I mean, it’s rarely a compliment to call something meaningless. If these things don’t have meaning, are they pointless? If they’re pointless, are they discardable? Was T. S. Eliot right?!

No, don’t worry—T. S. Eliot was never right.

Sonic literary devices are valuable because they create beauty. That is, in fact, what poetry is: writing that is equally concerned with the ideas of language and the beauty of language. A good novel might have a particularly moving turn of phrase, something people really love, something they’d happily tattoo on their body—but when you ask them to explore why they love it, they’re almost always in love with the beauty of the idea being conveyed rather than the literal sound of the words independent of that idea.

At any rate, to say sonic literary devices aren’t worth anything because they’re merely beautiful would be like saying Debussy’s Préludes aren’t worth anything because they’re merely beautiful. The songs don’t have to mean something the way an essay does: beauty justifies itself.

This finally brings us back to the question of whether certain rhymes can be overused. Once you see the distinction between informative literary devices and sonic literary devices, you see how silly the concern is: an idea can become stale; a sound cannot. And claiming a poem shouldn’t rhyme “flower” and “hour” because it’s already been done is about as sensible as claiming a song shouldn’t use F-sharp because you’ve heard that note before.