The Romance of Rhyme

The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed.

Certainly most men take pleasure in it, whether or not they are ashamed of it.

We see it in the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a song with syllables like “rumty tumty” or “tooral looral.”

We see it in the similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth is objective or subjective, or whether a reform is constructive or destructive, or whether an argument is deductive or inductive: all bearing witness to a very natural love for those nursery rhyme recurrences which make a sort

of song without words, or at least without any kind of intellectual significance.

But something much deeper is involved in the love of rhyme as distinct from other poetic forms, something which is perhaps too deep and subtle to be described.

The nearest approximation to the truth I can think of is something like this: that while all forms of genuine verse recur, there is in rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place.

All modes of song go forward and backward like the tides of the sea; but in the great sea of Homeric or Virgilian hexameters, the sea that carried the labouring ships of Ulysses and Æneas, the thunder of the breakers is rhythmic, but the margin of the foam is necessarily irregular and vague.

In rhyme there is rather a sense of water poured safely into one familiar well, or (to use a nobler metaphor) of ale poured safely into one familiar flagon.

The armies of Homer and Virgil advance and retreat over a vast country, and suggest vast and very

profound sentiments about it, about whether it is their own country or only a strange country.

But when the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes “the bonny ivy tree” to “my ain countree” the vision at once dwindles and sharpens to a very vivid image of a single soldier passing under the

ivy that darkens his own door.

Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme with identity.

Now in the one word identity are involved perhaps the deepest and certainly the dearest human things.

He who is home-sick does not desire houses or even homes.

He who is love-sick does not want to see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love.

Only he who is sea-sick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind of land.

And this is probably why sea-sickness, like cosmopolitanism, has never yet been a high inspiration to song.

G. K. Chesterton, Fanciesversus Fads, London, 1923.

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