Rhyme and meter, part 4a: "But still a ruby kindles in the vine."

The examples in my previous post may have been a little too anomalous, but they were partly designed to show that generally we don't even think about whether a line rhymes or not. We sort of know it. What makes things interesting, and what those examples were meant to bring out a little bit more than usually, is what it means to "sort of" know that a line rhymes. Or rather how much "sort of rhyming" just means the same thing as rhyming, and how much it doesn't.

What I am after is the experience we might have when we try to reconstruct a half-remembered poem. We might go wrong by trying to find a rhyme for an unrhymed line, or we might fail to remember that a particular line did rhyme. Form will help, of course: in a Spenserian stanza, all the lines rhyme; in a quatrain the odd lines could easily fail to. But sometimes the line itself will bring with it its own obscure metadata: this line rhymes; this line doesn't. How is that metadata compressed into, distributed over, the line itself? I've been giving examples where I think the "metadata" are more interesting, more ambiguous, than usual.

Take the line that I played with: "But still a ruby kindles in the vine." I suggested three prosodical contexts for it: in a blank verse quatrain, a quatrain rhymed xaxa, and one rhymed abab. I should have offered a fourth, and will do so here. The third of the four improvisations below is new:

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
The morning's freshness fills me with delight.
The promised evening soothes me with its rest.

or

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
The morning's freshness fills me with delight.
Its early, ancient jewels are ever new.

or

When with the sun depart the jewels of day
The jewels of night, though dark, are just as fine:
No glistering diamond shineth in the dew
But still a ruby kindles in the vine.

or

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
These star-flared jewels are gathered from no mine
But fall like sunlight, ever fresh and new.

The bolded stanza differs from the second by rhyming "vine," just as the last one does; but differs also in that it's the only one in which the line we're concerned about concludes the stanza. It's hard, as I say, not to feel that the attention we're paying to the line now alters how we feel about it, makes it difficult to say really how much attention we would have paid in the normal course of reading. But maybe the original context will be novel enough, after all of this, that you can read it with fresh eyes while noting, on the fly, the line's effect:

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows.

A Rubaiyat stanza, because it's one of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat. Note that it's the only line that doesn't rhyme. Rubaiyat rhyme aaxa, and this is the x-line. But generally we don't notice the x lines as different in rubaiyat: really, they seem a breath taken before the last, decisively rhyming line, and make that last rhyme feel all the more decisive.

So they contribute to rhyme, and the way they do so is metrical and rhythmical. And the concept that we might derive from them is this: the adjacency of the experience of true rhyme to that of the metrical setting up of, the metrical structuring of, the line that rhymes. This structuring can occur within a line (pretty obviously: the Indoeuropean rule for meter is: loose onsets, strict endings, and they are all the stricter for rhyming), but it can also occur from one line to the next, from an unrhymed line introducing a rhymed one, or even a rhymed line introducing another, either through alternation or even as a couplet. (I think Dryden's triplets often work the same way: the gentle shock of mild surprise at the unexpected continuation of a rhyme says something similar about how rhyme may be structured by elements outside the line it appears in.)

This structuring is what makes us feel (if we do) the unrhymed rhymes in Carrol's "Mad Gardener's Song," which I cited before:

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of life!"

He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
"Unless you leave this house," he said,
"I'll send for the police!"

he thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
"The one thing I regret," he said,
"Is that it cannot speak!"

Elephant, Buffalo, Rattlesnake don't rhyme. Their initial caps give them a certain solid dignity, though, and entitle them to be heard as cretics rather than dactyls, and indeed cretics verging on anapests: elePHANT, buffaLO, rattleSNAKE. They don't rhyme but the strongly suggest rhyme, if not their own than at least of the poem they belong to. And it seems that experientially the suggestion of rhyme and rhyme itself tend to merge.

Rhyme and meter, part 4: Does that rhyme?

Can you tell when a line rhymes? I don't mean can you tell when two lines rhyme: that's usually pretty. But consider this list of lines, drawn from different poems.  Don't look them up.  Just contemplate them for a while - and, if you can, remember, where they come from, or if you can, forget.

"Childe Roland to the dark tower came"

"Lay hidden in the small-slate colored thing"

"And thee, returning on thy silver wheels"

"And wash the dusk with silver.  Soon, full soon"

"And if thou wilt, remember"

"Or just some human sleep"

"The everlasting universe of things"

"Welcome, proud lady"

"They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds"

"The dying of the golden and the grey"

"Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs"

"But still a ruby kindles in the vine"

It's probably hard to stay in the right frame of mind to really be able to think about each line, but just try.

There are a few of questions that can be asked about each one.

First of all, does it rhyme? I think in most cases, even if you don't know the poem, you'd have a pretty good guess. If so, what I'd like to ask is how you know, or seem to know.  (I think I'll try posting a sort of phenomenological description of each line, as well as the answer to the question, in a few short subsequent posts.)

Focusing on this question can give rise to further observations.  Would it matter if you knew the position of the line in the poem, or at least in a stanza?  Just for simplicity, let's distinguish between opening line, medial line, and closing line.  Can you tell which of these are last lines?

If you can tell where in a stanza each line goes, is it a sense that they rhyme, or don't rhyme, that determines where you place the line?  I ask it this way to be provocative, but also to try to get you to use fresh eyes, fresh ears.  The converse question is probably more obvious, so consider that too: would the placement of the line affect your sense of whether it rhymed?

Let's take the last line as an example: "But still a ruby kindles in the vine."  If you knew that it was the first line of a stanza, would you expect it to be an onset rhyme or not?  (Onset rhyme: the word we have in mind that a later word will resolve by rhyming with it.)  Let's be simplistic.  Which is most likely:

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
The morning's freshness fills me with delight.
The promised evening soothes me with its rest.

or

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
The morning's freshness fills me with delight.
Its early, ancient jewels are ever new.

or

But still a ruby kindles in the vine;
A glistering diamond shineth in the dew.
These star-flared jewels are gathered from no mine
But fall like sunlight, ever fresh and new.

It probably matters what order you read them in: form and rhyme prime us for more of that form, and if there's rhyme, for more rhyme.  But try to think of them independently, or of the line independently.  At the start of a stanza, will it rhyme?

How about in the midst of one?  At the end of one?

So try these exercises with all the lines quoted above:

First say of each line whether you think it's opening, medial, or closing.

Then try to say of each line whether it rhymes, and decide whether its place in the stanza makes a difference to whether you think it rhymes.  What kind of work, or what kind of attention, do you have to do to make it seem rhymed?  To make it seem unrhymed?

My simplified guess is that you'll be able to tell the rhymed lines just by their form in most of the cases here.  And I guess as well that the deceptions will be systematic: that some of the lines here will strike a large majority as rhyming when they don't, or as not rhyming when they do.  The ones that are deceptive in this way are all the more interesting for that.

To be continued....

Rhyme and meter, part 3: What we can hear, and what they could

I'll want to return to my previous set of examples in a future post; here I want to start by considering one more.  A naive historian of rhyme might think that what doesn't sound like a rhyme to us ("hand or eye / symmetry") would have been more natural in a different dialect or pronunciation.  True we can hear eye as diphthongized (as the unlovely linguistic term has it): the slow-motion pronunciation would decompress it to "ah-ee" (the way Mark Twain or Kate Chopin might write it).  That tweak would turn this into a natural rhyme, which sounds forced only to those who pronounce as we do, here, now.

But it's harder to say the same of the near parallel, and very frequent rhymes on internal "i" sounds.  Shakespeare and Donne, to quote the two most obvious examples, rhyme such words as wind and mind. (The doggerel rhyme to Rosalind in As You Like It in my first example has taught generations of actors how to pronounce her name: majority rhyme seems to win, though I think it would be interesting to go with the early returns that turn out to be the minority: Ind and wind.)

From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no fair be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind. 

* * *

If a hart do lack a hind,
Let him seek out Rosalind.
If the cat will after kind,
So be sure will Rosalind.
Winter garments must be lined,
So must slender Rosalind.
They that reap must sheaf and bind;
Then to cart with Rosalind.
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind,
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love's prick and Rosalind. 

-----------------

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Remember that Wyatt, too, knows where is an hind, though in a net he seeks to catch the wind.  Nor let us forget Arlo Guthrie's great motorcycle song, which has him, as needed, rhyming pickle with motor-sickle, and die with motor-sigh- / (cul), as his folk rock pronunciation allows.

So wind/mind is okay, but you'll never find (I do not think) weened/mind, though that would seem a closer parallel to eye/symmetry or (say) we/my.

So here's the passage I want to think about, from Sidney, the octet of Atrophel and Stella 86:

Alas, whence came this change of lookes? if I
Haue chang'd desert, let mine owne conscience be
A still felt plague, to selfe condemning me:
Let wo gripe on my heart, shame loade mine eye,
But if all faith, like spotlesse Ermine ly
Safe in my soule, which onely doth to thee
(As his sole object of felicitie)
With wings of Loue in aire of wonder flie....

Note that the rhyme scheme is obvious here abbaabba.  But this isn't inevitable: some of the sonnets rhyme (in their octets) abababab, and if eye can rhyme with me, it would seem that some could argue that the latter rhyme scheme governs here as well. We're facing here an example of the sort of thing that Wittgenstein ponders when he considers the problem of rule-following: there is a rule that can justify any sequence.  (My favorite recent example is the sequence that begins sweetly enough as 0, 1, 2, but whose fourth member (scroll down if this isn't of tremendous interest to you) is

260,121,894,356,579,510,020,490,322,708,104,361,119,152,187,501,694,578,572,754,183,785,083,563,115,694,738,224,067,857,795,813,045,708,261,992,057,589,224,725,953,664,156,516,205,201,587,379,198,458,774,083,252,910,524,469,038,881,188,412,376,434,119,195,104,550,534,665,861,624,327,194,019,711,390,984,553,672,727,853,709,934,562,985,558,671,936,977,407,000,370,043,078,375,899,742,067,678,401,696,720,784,280,629,229,032,107,161,669,867,260,548,988,445,514,257,193,985,499,448,939,594,496,064,045,132,362,140,265,986,193,073,249,369,770,477,606,067,680,670,176,491,669,403,034,819,961,881,455,625,195,592,566,918,830,825,514,942,947,596,537,274,845,624,628,824,234,526,597,789,737,740,896,466,553,992,435,928,786,212,515,967,483,220,976,029,505,696,699,927,284,670,563,747,137,533,019,248,313,587,076,125,412,683,415,860,129,447,566,011,455,420,749,589,952,563,543,068,288,634,631,084,965,650,682,771,552,996,256,790,845,235,702,552,186,222,358,130,016,700,834,523,443,236,821,935,793,184,701,956,510,729,781,804,354,173,890,560,727,428,048,583,995,919,729,021,726,612,291,298,420,516,067,579,036,232,337,699,453,964,191,475,175,567,557,695,392,233,803,056,825,308,599,977,441,675,784,352,815,913,461,340,394,604,901,269,542,028,838,347,101,363,733,824,484,506,660,093,348,484,440,711,931,292,537,694,657,354,337,375,724,772,230,181,534,032,647,177,531,984,537,341,478,674,327,048,457,983,786,618,703,257,405,938,924,215,709,695,994,630,557,521,063,203,263,493,209,220,738,320,923,356,309,923,267,504,401,701,760,572,026,010,829,288,042,335,606,643,089,888,710,297,380,797,578,013,056,049,576,342,838,683,057,190,662,205,291,174,822,510,536,697,756,603,029,574,043,387,983,471,518,552,602,805,333,866,357,139,101,046,336,419,769,097,397,432,285,994,219,837,046,979,109,956,303,389,604,675,889,865,795,711,176,566,670,039,156,748,153,115,943,980,043,625,399,399,731,203,066,490,601,325,311,304,719,028,898,491,856,203,766,669,164,468,791,125,249,193,754,425,845,895,000,311,561,682,974,304,641,142,538,074,897,281,723,375,955,380,661,719,801,404,677,935,614,793,635,266,265,683,339,509,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 --

a number with 1,747 digits. But there's a rule for that.*  Wittgenstein wants to know what makes a rule the right rule to follow, when there's no rule that could make it the right rule to follow that couldn't itself be followed in an infinite number of different ways.  His answer, more or less, is practice ratified by the relationship of learning and teaching the belongs to "agreement in forms of life."  Hannah Ginsborg, more or less in agreement with Stanley Cavell, calls such agreement in forms of life "primitive normativity."

Anyhow, back to our example.  Sidney likes partially ambiguous forms.  The famous "night and day" sonnet has only two rhyme words:

Now that of absence the most irksome night,
With darkest shade doth ouercome my day;
Since Stellas eyes wont to giue me my day,
Leauing my Hemisphere, leaue me in night,
Each day seemes long, and longs for long-staid night,
The night as tedious, wooes th'approch of day;
Tired with the dustie toyles of busie day,
Languisht with horrors of the silent night;
Suffering the euils both of the day and night,
While no night is more darke then is my day,
Nor no day hath lesse quiet then my night:
With such bad mixture of my night and day,
That liuing thus in blackest winter night,
I feele the flames of hottest sommer day.

Two rhyme words, but what's the rhyme scheme?  I think it's too easy to stay with just a and b: most sonnets in Astrophel and Stella have four or five different rhyme pairs, typically rhymed abbaabbacdcdee, sometimes, e.g. the sonnet previous to this one, ababababccdeed, and again sometimes, as in the one before that, ababbabaccdccd.  I think it would be better, and more natural, to "chunk" the night and day sonnet as rhymed abbaabbacdcdee: the rule of the sonnet form seems to require that.

Note that we're already chunking by taking homoteleuton (or repetition of endings) as rhyme.  "Night" doesn't rhyme with "night," not even richly.  It repeats the word (as in a sestina, the form Sidney introduced into English).   You might almost call it a duina, at least the part that cycles night day day night night day day night. (On the relation of n-inas to prime numbers, see this short paper which proves that if an n-ina cycles, 2n+1 is prime: 5 in the case of a duina, where n=2. The converse doesn't hold, though.) In Dante, except for the repeated endings on "Christ" - which must not be adulterated by the arbitrary similarity of rhyming words - repetition is always rime riche: this is a principle of interpretation, so that you can understand an ambiguous word (such as torna, palma, and pianta, all rhymed with homonyms in Paradiso IX) as requiring difference in meaning between its orthographically identical homonyms, which can help solve the ambiguity.

The point is that in reading rhymed poetry we assess similarity pretty subtly, and assess as well the difference that prevents similarity from just being identity. Rhymes have a lot of give, but (as with stress) how much give they have is always contextualized by the rhyme scheme that determines them, and by the rhymes that surround them.  Night and day rhyme with themselves because they belong to a sonnet with a familiar rhyme scheme; piante and piante rhyme because they belong to a rhyme schemes that eschews self-rhyming, so that they therefore don't mean the same thing.

And this allows us to return to sonnet 86, where we can have no doubt that the rhyme scheme is abbaabba. Why no doubt?  Why not abababab?  Because the prosodical context and the closeness of sound brings out, here, the difference between I and be, me and eye.  Sidney takes pains to prevent our being misled by the conventional rhyming of, say, me and eye, by making sure that the first, the a, rhyme-pair is homophonic: I/eye. We then have to work to separate them via their different meanings, and that very work of separation (as in Dante) pairs them: very similar but still different.

Sidney's fearless symmetry makes sure we keep track of what's rhyming with what, even when doing so requires some involved and subtle distinction.

And here's the payoff of the always pain-in-the-ass subtlety of following a formal analysis.  Making us keep track of the rhymes, especially in a fairly monochromatic context, is a way of infiltrating our sense of rhyme with a sense of meaning and vice versa.  These are considerations that we're used to understanding when it comes to poetic meter, where the interaction of metrical and semantic stress contributes to our understanding of what's being said.  It's interesting that there's a subtle analogue of this in rhyme as well, which suggests that the interaction, both prosodically and semantically, between rhyme and meter is closer than has usually been suspected.

-----
*viz., 0 followed by 0 bangs = 0; 1 followed by 1 bang (1! or 1 factorial) = 1; 2!! (2 factorial factorial, 2 followed by 2 bangs = 2; 3!!! (3 factorial factorial factorial) = 720! = the foregoing.

Rhyme and meter, part 2: Non-regular rhyme

Try this little experiment.  Read these passages of rhymed poetry:

Girls and boys, come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day;
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come with your playfellows into the street.
Come with a whoop, come with a call,
Come with a good will or not at all.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A half-penny roll will serve us all.
You find milk, and I'll find flour,
And we'll have a pudding in half an hour.
                                                              --Mother Goose

* * *

Hush-a-by baby
On the tree top,
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And down will fall baby
Cradle and all.
                                 --Ibid.

* * *

He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
                                     --Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

* * *

Your pain still hangs in air,
Sharp motes of it suspended;
The voice of your despair —
That also is not ended:

When near your death a friend
Asked you what he could do,
"Remember me," you said.
We will remember you.

Once when you went to see
Another with a fever
In a like hospital bed,
With terrible hothouse cough
And terrible hothouse shiver
That soaked him and then dried him,
And you perceived that he
Had to be comforted,

You climbed in there beside him
And hugged him plain in view,
Though you were sick enough,
And had your own fears too.
                                           --Thom Gunn, "Memory Unsettled"

* * *

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of life!"

He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
"Unless you leave this house," he said,
"I'll send for the police!"

he thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
"The one thing I regret," he said,
"Is that it cannot speak!"
                                       --Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song."

* * *

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
                                                              --Wyatt

* * *

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
                                                              --Dickinson

* * *

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
                                                              --Blake

* * *

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Vpon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.
                                                               --Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos

* * *

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
                                                               --The Intimations Ode

Each of them contains what Pope (the purest of English rhymers) would regard as a false rhyme.  And not only Pope, but Pope can set the standard.  How quickly do you notice them?  What words did you think rhymed that didn't, at least by what you might call standard standards?

Anyhow, I am going to propose that we call these non-regular rhymes ("irregular rhymes" would be misleading, since we're used to talking about as irregularly rhyming poems, e.g. poems, Lycidas).  Non-regular rhymes would be pairs that register as rhymes the way irregular past tenses register as past tenses, without our generally noticing them.

In my next post I want to think about how and why they work.

Here I'll just draw attention to the way Auden's rhymes are sometimes an anthology or cento of rhymes like those above:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful. --Auden, "Lullaby"

We sense rhyme here, and it takes a while to figure out what rhymes with what.  That's an interesting perceptual combination.

The second in a series of short posts about rhyme's relation to meter

Rhyme and meter, part 1: Occasional irregularity

In grammar we talk about irregular verbs (and sometimes nouns: child/children, e.g.). Steven Pinker points out that children learn the past tense of irregular verbs very early, before they learn the rules for forming past tenses. They know that the past tense of "go" is "went" in just the same way that they know that the past tense of "talk" is "talked." When they get a little older, though, they twig to the rule, and start applying it to irregular verbs: "I goed to the playground." They use irregular verbs correctly before we use them incorrectly, and then we have to relearn the irregularities.

Here's how I would describe the phenomenology of this piece of grammatical knowledge: we learn past tense (or aspect) and fully internalize it. "Went" is as fully the past tense of "go" as "talked" is of "talk." Or it would actually be better to reverse the order: "Talked" bears the same, completely transparent, relation to "talk" as "went" does to "go." First we learn transparency.

Then, scientists in the nursery, we develop the rules of this transparency. Not that we specify them for ourselves. The rules are transparent too. They too are natural, and unspecified (cf. Witggenstein on rule following and Hannah Ginsborg on "primitive normativity"). We go for what "sounds right." But then we misapply the natural and give up on an earlier natural, internalized, disposition to say "went." Two natural and transparent rules come into some conflict, and we go with the one that's more recent and has a wider application: that one too sounds right, at least for a while.

But our elders correct us.  We relearn the irregular verbs, and return to a more archaic natural transparency in their use. How much this is a return, and how much a newly internalized rule, can probably not be quite determined, but I suspect that the irregular verbs hang on, like all very basic pieces of language (e.g. the near-universal preservation of the proto-Indo-European word for hand in Indo-European languages), because they occur so early in our own individual experiences of language.  I think that we return with a sort of archaic relief to the familiar irregularities of our early childhood.

It doesn't matter very much whether that's true or not, but if it is, it may shed some light on what will follow in my next post - where I will propose adding a new term to the lexicon of rhyme.

This is the first of a series of short posts about rhyme's relation to meter.

Characters and agents in fiction, a post provoked by thinking about Richard III's boasts

One thing that fiction makes possible, and that makes fiction interesting, is the way it can show how what feels, in real life, like a simple and unified interaction with others occurs on several channels at once. Fiction mutes some of those channels, and therefore focuses our emotional attention, our attentive emotion, on those that remain.  And it focuses the theorist's attention (as here) on the differences between those channels that remain open and those that are muted.

For example: in a play we and several hundred other people in an audience can be in the presence of a character who is entirely alone. The channel of their presence to us is open; the channel of our presence to them is muted (although not entirely). At a movie we can hear everything that one lover whispers to another in the absolute privacy of some erotic sanctum. (Our presence to the characters is completely muted, though our presence to the actors only partly so.)  The way these figures are present to us when we are not present to them is what I mean by the separation of one channel from another. Usually, in the real world, presence is a commutative relation. If I am present to you, you're present to me. (Even sleeping isn't a counterexample: If I'm asleep and you're awake, neither is present to the other.) But in fiction this apparently axiomatic double relation is no longer one (that is what makes it fiction).

This general idea allows us to see that first person narrative, at least since the nineteenth century, will frequently involve a narrator presenting herself to us in written words that she has never been supposed to have written. The written words are the way she's present to us; her never having written them is the way we're not present to her, since she never addresses us in her world. The channel in which her words exist is the channel we receive on, not the channel she receives on, even if she's writing.

It might be useful to establish a couple of preliminary distinctions in our vocabulary to help keep us clear on this issue. First, distinguish between a true first person narrator and a false one. What I am calling a false first person narrator is really just another character (focalized as much as you like) whose utterance a third person or omniscient narrator reports. Clarissa reports the letters that it collects, and all the first person narrative in those letters may be thought of as quoted discourse.  (The true first person narrator of Clarissa, the narrator who addresses us or such as us, is the putative editor of this correspondence.)  Poe quotes the full MS that Arthur Gordon Pym has written.  But Ishmael addresses us directly in Moby Dick.  We can then establish a pretty strong boundary (it's not absolute, but its breach, as in Proust, is always interesting) between what it may be useful to call true narrators and reported narrators.

Let's also distinguish between a character (in the sense of personality) and an agent.  Usually this distinction will count most when applied to a true narrator.  The narrator will do things in the work she narrates, will be an agent in that narrative (interacting with other agents, as, for example, when Nick brings Daisy and Gatsby together).  Insofar as she does that, she's an agent as well as a character or personality.

All agents are characters but the two terms are not synonymous.  We can separate off the idea of character by noting that part of out sense of her as a character (part of the fiction's presentation of her as a personality) is established or nuanced or complicated by what she says to us, even though she does not say these things in the world she lives in, wholly lives in, as an agent. The shocking moment that Nick talks of Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality" tells us much about Nick, but doesn't affect the plot of the book.

So a narrator's tone, judgment, voice, expectations, and so on, all affect our sense of the narrator as a character and so also affect our sense of the narrator as agent, even though these things do not belong to her as an agent within the fiction.

This leads to interesting and I believe somewhat unexpected insights.  I've noted elsewhere how interesting it is that despite the fact that we can make the distinction between narrator and agent it's not quite absolute.  It almost always seems to violate fair play to have a true narrator die (as in Susannah Moore's Whiteness of Bones [highlight if you don't mind the spoiler: not a great book, but still]).  Ishmael must escape to tell us, even if he doesn't tell us as an agent.  How else could be be narrating?  It doesn't matter that we don't expect the narrator to have ever written the words we read, perhaps none of them. We still require that the voice which addresses us belongs to a character (NB: not to an agent) who is still alive, still exists, still can speak. Usually, in a written text, we require that it belong to a literate character, one who could write what we're reading. (Norman Rush's dialect works may provide a counterexample, but it's also possible that we process works narrated in a dialect we know not to be the author's as narrated by what I called a false first person narrator.)  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd offers more to think about: the narrator just sounds too different from the agent designated by the same first-person pronouns for everyone to feel comfortable with the trick Christie plays.  True first person narration occurs in some modal, subjunctive world.

Not, though, a possible world: the point is in no world does the frue first-person narrator actually write the narrative.  We see no contradiction in such last sentences as: "She asked me to promise I would never tell anyone any of this [what we've just read], and that's a promise I'll always keep."  But in no possible world could that sentence seem innocuous. It always and knowingly bridges two worlds (as Lewis says we mustn't).

Borges's "Secret Miracle" is relevant here, at least as an emblem of what I mean, or perhaps its reciprocal converse.  The miracle is the work; the secret is its non-existence in the world in which it's written.

I'll note one minor but interesting effect of this muting of full commutative communication between fictional addressor and us real addressees: It makes a certain kind of boasting possible.  Richard III and Iago, in their various soliloquies, rejoice in being able to act like the "formal vice, Iniquity," rejoice in their own cleverness, in being tricksters.  Had they boasted as agents, in the worlds they inhabit, they would, by the laws of narrative (in our culture anyhow), inevitably fail.  Boasters get shown up.  Soft-spoken understaters surprise.

But the boasting they do is not boasting in their world.  They boast to us, not to their compeers.  And so they are setting forth the parameters of the challenges they will meet, doing it for us.  The magician's relish they take in difficulty is something we need to know.  It wouldn't work in their world, but it does in ours.  The difficulty and boasting are present to us, but not a presence in the world they inhabit.

Since I think this situation, this non-commutative presence, is the key issue here, we can say that all these moments: narration, boasting, the privacy and unawareness of figures in fiction, are paradoxically enough, versions of the same thing.  Richard's boasting and Isabel Archer's silent thinking are really different manifestations of one relation to us. 

Note:


It's no wonder if this seems like our beliefs about our parents' attitude towards us.  For in real life, that non-commutative relation to others is what the child believes about its parents.  I am not fully present to them.  They transcend me.  Yes, they sometimes ignore more and sometimes boast to me and sometimes rebuke me and sometimes tell me about themselves.  But in none of those cases am I interacting with them in the world they truly live in, as agents.  All the evidence that they give me of being focused on me is worth as much or as little as the evidence that fictional agents give of being aware of me.  Fiction is possible, in part, because it repeats a relation we have to those greatest of fantasy figures, the actors in the family romance of which we are in the end spectators (so we think).  And fiction shows how the family romance can work, through the separation of those things that serious adults, living real lives among real people, forget don't always come together, not, anyhow, in the awe-struck, humble eyes of the child, all absorbed in the fantastic world it is not and cannot be part of.

Tasks and answers

(A short post to keep my hand in, while I write the two overdue things I'm writing and finish up the semester....)

One of the great and difficult things about King Lear is its fairy-tale quality.  Writing gripping and unmotivated situations - nothing seems easier, but nothing is harder. Even the Mariner's shooting of the albatross doesn't quite do it, as Coleridge himself acknowledged when Anna Letitia Barbauld complained of the story's want of moral point:

Mrs Barbauld tole me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the
Genii's son.

It's worth remembering that Barbauld was an innovative and charismatic teacher as well as poet, and that she wrote a good deal, and successfully for children. But Coleridge was after that near-impossible quality: gratuitous narrative that brings you in so quickly that you don't have time to wonder why or how such situations should ever arise.  To see what I mean notice how well Kafka achieves something akin to the great beginning of the Grimms's "Town Musicans of Bremen" --

A man had a donkey, who for long years had untiringly carried sacks to the mill, but whose strength was now failing, so that he was becoming less and less able to work. Then his master thought that he would no longer feed him, but the donkey noticed that it was not a good wind that was blowing and ran away, setting forth on the road to Bremen, where he thought he could become a town musician 

-- in the opening of the Metamorphosis:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.  He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely.  His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flimmered helplessly before his eyes. [Nabokov's modified translation of the Muirs with one reversion to their version; "flimmered" is his portmanteau of flickered and shimmered]

Shakespeare achieves what Coleridge doesn't at the beginning of King Lear.  His source -- the Chronicle History of King Leir -- has the King set the love contest up as a trick.  He is sure that Cordella will vow her absolute love and obedience to him, which will then enable him to require her to marry the husband he has picked for her rather than the man she loves (cf. the less fairy-tale-like Midsummer Night's Dream).  In Shakespeare's version, Lear simply asks the question:

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?

He means the question to set him up as the judge of their answers - a finely fatherly thing to do. But the question is deeper than that, I've just been realizing: it's the question of the play.  Which daughter will he say loves him most? And the answer comes only at the end, when he finally says that it's Cordelia.  That question is answered for us, but for her also: "Which of you?" The second person matters: it's when he says it to her that the question is answered.  We wait, and she waits, for the answer during the whole play. It is then that he gives the answer to the question he has unwillingly posed himself.  He had no idea that the question was not simply the catalyst of what comes next but the question of the play.  Will he say it? About Cordelia? When?

The "shall" turns out to indicate the whole temporal span of the play: Lear's fairy tale question and fairy tale crisis also shows him setting himself the task that it will take the whole play to fulfill: saying who loves him most.  And when he does that, everything's over.  But the second person also matters because he's setting her the task (in proper Proppian form): make him say it.  And that takes the whole play and her whole life, and his whole life too.

I think this is all obvious, and yet I think somehow it's not: that the story is simpler and deeped than anything in Tolstoy, which is why he (Tolstoy) disparaged it.  The best fairy-tale writer of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy's works have the fairy-tale slyness of the Chronicle History of King Leir.  Perhaps they sometimes rival the the austere complexity, that is to say the simplicity, of King Lear.  But it's King Lear that they rival.