Whitman, feuille à feuille
| ,Me, After Me: Whitman’s Rhyme
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1“Rhyme and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away” writes Whitman in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (LG, p. 295), making a claim for the modernity of his writing, which, this line implicitly tells us, works without rhyme. Yet the line of course contains a rhyme of sorts, an internal rhyme, since midline “pass away” is echoed at line end. Such are the paradoxes of Whitman’s poetics of rhyme: the force of his writing relies on the way phonemic echoes link words and groups of words; and yet Whitman staked the political value of his texts on the exclusion of rhyme understood as the correspondence of syllables at line end. Rhyme, or the absence of rhyme, in this latter sense, is central to the way Whitman presents his poetry.
- 1 In “The Bible as Poetry,” published in November Boughs, Whitman makes the Bible a retrospective mod (...)
- 2 W. Whitman, “The Bible as Poetry,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 1140.
- 3 Milton, in his preface on “The Verse” to Paradise Lost, called rhyme “the Invention of a barbarous (...)
2There is of course nothing novel, in 1855, about making poems without rhymes; unrhymed poetry, as in the blank verse of Paradise Lost or The Prelude, is central to the English poetic tradition. It is the absence of rhyme and meter which specifies Whitman’s work, and makes a claim to innovation. Yet Whitman speaks more concretely about his rhymes than his rhythms; rhyme has, for Whitman, a paradigmatic status: by dispensing with it, he was implicitly making a claim for the epic scope of his writing, connecting Leaves of Grass with the unrhymed poetry of Homer, or, more suggestively, with the unrhymed, unmetered poetry of the Bible.1 Rhyme, for Whitman, stands for the “mere aesthetic, the principal verse-requirement of our day”.2 But, given a well-established view which, since Milton, sees rhyme as “bondage,” rhyme, or the absence thereof, also brings to a focus the ethical and political stakes of poetry, and it would certainly appear logical that the search for the “new free forms” which Whitman celebrates in the 1855 preface (LG, p. 625) would involve an emancipation from rhyme.3
- 4 Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Pri (...)
- 5 See The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., article “Equivalence,” p. 380. (...)
- 6 G. W. Allen, American Prosody, p. 221.
3Whitman’s dispensing with rhyme, however, should be seen as a problem – both poetically and politically. Rhyme, we are told—witness for example the article “Rhyme” in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—is a basic form of poetic “equivalence”;4 and equivalence itself is one of our most celebrated modern explanations of poetry—that of Roman Jakobson, who defined the “poetic function” as “projecting […] the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination”: equivalence, for Jakobson, was “the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry.”5 Forms of equivalence, or balancing, or tallying, are central to Whitman’s poetics, to the relation between his poetics and his politics. The poet, for Whitman, is “the equable man,” the “equalizer of his age and land” says the 1855 preface (LG, p. 620); the American bard, in the same text, is “he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself” (LG, p. 625). Equivalence is another word for parallelism, also one of Jakobson’s central concepts for poetry; and Gay Wilson Allen argued that “The first rhythmical principle of Leaves of Grass is that of parallel structure.”6 A central thrust of Whitman’s poetry involves affirming equivalence, of soul and body, of North and South, of male and female; and this he does by means of something like rhyme—as where, in section 15 of “Song of Myself” (l. 305- 308), he chimes “prostitute” and “President” (LG, p. 38). For all that Whitman abandons rhyme, a feature of his early poems, in 1855, rhyming appears to be central to his writing. How then, and what, does Whitman rhyme?
4In approaching this problem, I would like to make several points: first, that for Whitman, rhyme, as traditionally defined, is not only a poetic process but a political process, tracing a line of demarcation between poetry and language, between speaker and self. Whitman’s renunciation of traditional rhyme—that is, rhyme at line end—should rather be seen, then, as an extension of rhyme, a generalization of rhyme, which makes rhyme co-extensive with language, and makes speechsound patterning a central structural component of the verse line. Whitman, I will finally argue, fundamentally questions the traditional functioning and import of rhyme by inventing a practice of “identical rhyme,” closely bound up with the temporality of his poems, and specified by their grammar of enunciation.
Rhyme within language
- 7 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., p. 1053. The 2012 edition of the Pr (...)
- 8 Whitman’s English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins likewise assimilated the various forms of spee (...)
- 9 Article “rhyme,” Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in two volumes, New (...)
- 10 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, MA, Merriam-Webster, 1989, p. 1012.
5To speak of “Whitman’s rhyme” involves us in an equivocation: what we may read as rhyme in his poems, he perhaps would not have called rhyme; yet this situation presumably results, in part, from what Whitman did. For our purposes, it is helpful to refer to the above-cited article on “Rhyme” in the New Princeton Encyclopedia. T. V. F. Brogan, the author, gives two definitions: first, “the specific sense of the term,” according to which rhyme “is the linkage in poetry of two syllables at line end […] which have identical medial vowels and final consonants but differ in initial consonant (s)”; and secondly a broader sense, rhyme as “the phonological correlation […] of differing semantic units at distinctive points in verse.”7 Brogan’s point is that rhyme cannot be restricted to the first, strict definition.8 If we look, however, at the early nineteenth century state of affairs, this first or strict definition is what we find: in the 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary for example, rhyme is, in poetry, “the correspondence of sounds in the terminating words or syllables of two verses,” while a second definition refers vaguely to “[a] harmonical succession of sounds.”9 It seems likely that what Whitman calls rhyme corresponds to this first definition, which I will here call “canonical rhyme.” By contrast, the 1989 Webster’s Collegiate also includes in its definition of rhyme (sense 2c) “correspondence of other than terminal word sounds,” including alliteration.10 Since Whitman’s time the concept of rhyme has “broadened,” presumably because the practice of rhyme has; and we see this broadening at work, differently, in the poems of Dickinson and Whitman.
- 11 N. Selby (ed.), The Poetry of Walt Whitman, A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, p. 11. Webster (...)
- 12 Whitman can be seen here drawing on an existing condemnatory discourse on rhyme which, as Simon Jar (...)
- 13 W. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 1166.
6What seems to bother Whitman about rhyme is that rhyme is a device, “superadded” to language; and most visible as device, presumably, when it appears as canonical rhyme, as rhyme at line end. The exclusion of rhyme, as of other devices (see an undated note where he reminds himself to use, “in future Leaves of Grass […] No ornaments” [LG, p. 783]) would thus validate the myth that language in the poem proceeds directly from the poet, from “the free channel of himself,” as Whitman writes in the 1855 preface (LG, p. 624). The device superadded to language is compared, as language itself traditionally is, to clothing: an unsigned 1855 review of Leaves of Grass by Whitman proclaims: “Undecked also is this poet with sentimentalism, or jingle [that is, rhyme], or nice conceits, or flowery similes.”11 As “decking” or clothing, rhyme is associated with “modesty,” and thus with an unwillingness to come to terms with one’s own body, with an alienation at once from self and other: writing in the prefatory letter to Emerson in the 1856 edition, Whitman argues that poets in America must not be “a class set apart, circling only in the circle of themselves, modest and pretty, desperately scratching for rhymes” (LG, p. 644). Rhyme is thus excluded from the collective effort of war: “dainty rhymes” are denounced in “Eighteen Sixty-One” (LG, p. 236), “dulcet rhymes” in “To a Certain Civilian” (LG, p. 272). Like clothing, rhyme marks a social distinction, here defined in gendered terms: it makes a division in language, between poetry and ordinary speech, homologous to the divisions of the body politic12. Yet poetry, for Whitman, is coextensive with language itself, being, like slang, as he tells us in “Slang in America,” “the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language.”13 Discarding rhyme is thus a way of healing a rift in speech and society. It is in this sense that Whitman writes, in “Song of the Open Road,” “(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, / We convince by our presence.)” (LG, p. 131). Here it is the consonance of “convince” and “presence” which, precisely, “convinces.”
- 14 Henri Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie (1989), Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio « Essais », 2006, p. 255. (...)
7The problem with rhyme is then that, as device, it lies outside of language; it must be brought back “inside.” And this problem is ours, as well: Whitman excludes rhyme because it is a device; yet we cannot read poems without looking for the devices they invent and re-invent: device is fundamental to our idea of what poems do. Perhaps this relocation of rhyme in language would explain the allusion, in the 1855 preface, to another conception of rhyme, an “organic” rhyme which, the imagery suggests, “grows” out of the text: “The profit of rhyme,” writes Whitman, “is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme,” a rhyme which, the following sentence affirms, would be “impalpable to form” (LG, p. 621-622) —not identifiable, not marked out, we might say, as form “superadded” to language. Studying Whitman’s practice of rhyme, then, would involve seeing how it may be viewed as “organic,” as emerging from the writing as a whole; thus seeing how it interacts with other aspects of Whitman’s text, with syntax, rhythm, and grammar. We might read Whitman’s rhyme by following a suggestion made by Henri Meschonnic: “Modern poetry has generalized, diffused rhyme to the whole mass of the saying and the said. The disappearance of rhyme at line end is a passage towards a rediscovery of rhyme.”14 The problem is then to see how Whitman’s language specifies rhyme.
“Organic” rhyme
- 15 J. Hollander, Vision and Resonance, op. cit., p. 91.
8Essential to the poetics of rhyme is the way rhyme relates to other means of organizing language, in particular the verse line. The suppression of end rhyme is central to the free verse line Whitman invents; the generalization of rhyme as word linkage contributes to making the line a unit of semantic organization. A long-standing anxiety, in the English tradition, about the need for end rhyme as a marker of the line unit is noted by John Hollander; for Samuel Johnson, blank verse seemed “only verse to the eye.”15 Absent end rhyme, absent meter, internal “rhyme” becomes the basis of the line’s integrity: Whitman’s verse line is a frame for paronomasia, as we see in lines like “It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs” ( “Song of Myself,” l. 213; LG, p. 34, my emphasis), where the interesting adverb “tremblingly” is made more forceful by its seeming to contain what is touched (temples and ribs); or “Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d” ( “Myself,” l. 1049; LG, p. 66), where “dream’d” is key to the re-valuation of dirt, serving to underline the miraculous everyday.
- 16 D. Masson, “Sound-Repetition Terms,” op. cit., p. 190. The van – or outflow-echo links identical co (...)
9It is by displacing rhyme within the line that Whitman invents new possibilities for rhyme, possibilities which grow out of syntax. We see this, for example, in line 29 of “Song of Myself”: “The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun” (LG, p. 27). The line contains a syntactic ambiguity, in that it at least allows us to read either that “me” or “the song of me” rises from bed, thus isolating the phrase “the song of me” as a variant form of “Song of Myself”; Whitman’s general practice with of + object pronoun constructions also makes this reading possible. The result is that “me,” the fulcrum of two phrases, is or can be accented, and makes, then, a salient echo with “meeting,” with which it shares initial consonant and accented vowel. “Me” – “meeting,” which in David I. Masson’s terminology would be a “van echo” or “inflow echo” (as opposed to canonical rhyme, “rear echo” or “outflow echo”),16 would seem to constitute no less of a rhyme than what is specified by our “strict” definition, yet could not have appeared as traditional end rhyme. The correlation between “me” and “meet” specifies a relational “me,” a “me” defined through “meeting” others. We find a similar rhyme in the closing line of “I Am He That Aches with Amorous Love”: “So the body of me to all I meet or know” (LG, p. 93). In this line, it is the syntax of “the body of me” (contrast with “my body”) which makes the rhyme with “meet” possible; suggesting, again, that “the body of me” is something different from “my body,” having to do, precisely, with what meeting others does to “me.”
10Broadening and diversifying rhyme makes it possible for rhyme to play a role in what we might call the grammar of identity in Whitman’s poems. We find another example of rhyming on personal pronouns in section 33 of “Song of Myself,” where the speaker identifies himself with suffering others:
I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.
“Myself” l. 847-851; LG, p. 58-59
11 This passage apparently has no recourse to end rhyme, to rhyme in the canonical sense; yet it calls attention to hearing and voice, especially where Whitman rhymes “distant click” and “picks,” suggesting a correlation between speechsound and audible sound, playing on a sub-morphemic identification between stressed English /ɪk/ and sensory sharpness. The passage stages an “I” hearing other voices, as we see most strikingly in line 849: “Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades.” This line connects three words which appear there consecutively, “I,” “inspired,” “I,” through the echo of the vowel /aɪ/, stressed in “inspired”; and this connection appears significant in a passage where Whitman is asserting the speaker’s capacity for sympathy. We see that the sequence and rhyme “I-inspired-I” depends on a syntactic inversion ( “Heat and smoke I inspired”) placing subject and verb after the direct object, and that this syntax again has a rhythmic effect, displacing the accent from the direct object “Heat and smoke” to the verb (whereas the canonical SVO order would have placed it on the object); meanwhile the rhyme “I inspired” itself marks the verb. Poetic “inspiration” is thus inseparable here from poetic identification: the “I” is defined by a capacity to be “inspired” by other souls. The “rhyme,” if so we may call it, is organized by, and written into, the syntax and rhythm of the line.
12Building or structuring the verse line, rhyme also works inseparably from metaphor, as, for example, in the mystical language of section 5 of “Song of Myself,” where we read (l. 95; LG, p. 30): “And that a kelson of the creation is love”. This line is organized around a complex rhyme: “kelson” and “creation” are linked by their initial consonants and likewise by their final syllables /sən/ and /∫ən/, which, sharing medial vowel and final consonants, could be seen as an example of rhyme “strictly speaking”—except that these syllables are uncanonically unstressed. The rhyme is striking and effective, precisely, through the semantic difference it implies, associating shipbuilding and theology: a “kelson” being a longitudinal structure bolted to the keel of a ship in order to strengthen it. Love as “kelson” of creation would seem then to be a central piece of creation, holding it together; and this sense of “holding together” is forcibly suggested by the rhyme itself. Meanwhile, “kelson” is linked to the larger context of its stanza, especially if we read the text in the 1855 edition, where we find, in the three preceding lines:
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers.... and the women my sisters
and lovers,
LG, p. 665
13“Kelson” rhymes, then, with the odd word “elderhand” and with “eldest brother” (also with “elder,” the name of a plant which appears in the last line of the stanza); and, in a context which refers to universal familial relations between God and man and man and woman, includes the morpheme “son.” What this passage seems to show is how the visual, or visionary, quality of Whitman’s writing is inseparable from, or determined by, the activity of the rhymes: imaging love as a “kelson,” Whitman represents creation as a ship or voyage, in terms of the larger metaphors of voyage and translation which pervade Leaves of Grass; while building into the language of journeying the metaphor of family relationship. Kelson-creation would then provide an example of a rhyme which is not “superadded” to the text, but emerges from its sound patterning and metaphorical structure, as “organic” rhyme.
The metaphysics of rhyme
- 17 H. Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie, op. cit., p. 252.
- 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge MA, Belknap Press of Harvard Univ (...)
- 19 American Poetry, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. by John Hollander, New York, Library of Americ (...)
- 20 H. Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie, op. cit., p. 252.
14A rhyme like this one, however, shows us Whitman using rhyme in its traditional function, that of revealing order in apparent disorder: it is not for nothing that “kelson” and “creation” are both nouns. Rhyme, notes Henri Meschonnic in the above-cited essay, participates in an order of language which “evokes and mimes a cosmic order.”17 Based as it is on semantic unlikeness (rhyme requires “differing semantic units,” as Brogan notes), it implies a movement from difference to harmony, or from multiplicity to unity. The rhyming poem turns away from the prose of the world to rediscover an underlying harmony in nature. For rhyme is already in nature: “A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers,”18 writes Emerson in “The Poet,” and his poem “Merlin II” states: “Balance-loving nature / Made all things in pairs.”19 By implication, the rhyme within the poem is then secondary, derivative, separated from essence; as Meschonnic writes: “not only an echo from word to word, but, moreover, the echo of an echo which is its model.”20 But for Whitman the poem cannot be an echo of nature, for this would place it outside of nature: it participates in the combined processes of history and nature. Rhyme in Whitman, I would argue, is not, or not only, about reconciling difference or tracing unity in multiplicity. This is why we find Whitman working with forms of rhyme which are not apparently based on semantic difference, or where semantic difference is qualified by the implicit identification of self and other which enunciation entails.
15The idea that Whitman is not working with rhyme as cosmic echo might be grasped by looking at what he places at line end, in the canonical position for rhymes. In section 4 of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” the line end position is occupied by a series of expressions containing the morpheme “to” ( “to you,” “to me,” “to them,” and “to-night”). These lines reprise and refer back to line 3 and subsequent lines, built around the repetition of “to me”:
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
The men and women I saw were all near to me,
Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)
(l. 49-53; LG, p. 137)
16Here we see something different from the unity in multiplicity suggested by the rhyme “kelson” – “creation”: “to me” and “to you” rhyme, so to speak, because “me” and “you” are different but interchangeable terms, which, in the context of interlocution, may refer to the same “person”; they imply another conception and practice of language, not language as a set of names modelling creation, but language as a process of dialogue and mutual self-identification.
17Indeed, the passage associates, at line-end, a series of deictic expressions. “[T]o you,” “to me,” “to-day,” “to-night” point, not to a static, eternal order, but to the continually renewed activity of enunciation; meanwhile sounding a correlation between “to me,” which appears twice in the passage and is foregrounded elsewhere in the poem, and “time” (l. 53). These two four-letter expressions are associated all at once by eye-rhyme, frame-rhyme, and stressed-unstressed rhyme. Time, for Whitman, is “to me,” in the sense that it is not only a cosmic but also a subjective process, organised in and by means of speaking and writing, in and by means of the poem itself and its readings. And time is likewise “to me” because it involves a directionality: it leads to me, it is the process of me becoming me. This allows us then to understand the rhyme, or quasi-synonymy of “to me” and “to you” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: the “you” of the poem’s indefinite re-enunciation, is precisely the means by which “I,” translated, come to myself in time.
18Whitman is working here with end rhyme’s formal framework to create non-canonical end rhymes, gaining thereby in suggestive force. One might argue that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” closes with a form of end rhyme:
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
(l. 130-132; LG, p. 140)
- 21 Hopkins noted: “for there are two elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness or sam (...)
- 22 At l. 130, l. 2 and l. 66, “also” is a sentence adverb carrying not only stress but a pitch accent (...)
19Here “also,” via “small,” makes an echo with “soul,” and functions almost as an anagram of “soul.” In these lines Whitman achieves the excellence which, according to Gerard Manley Hopkins, is to be gained from the rhyming words being as different as possible in terms of meaning.21 Against that so weighty lexical noun “soul,” Whitman balances what we would be inclined to see as an “empty,” or grammatical word, the relatively abstract adverb “also,” and this is bewildering until we realize that “also” is a value word, a central motif in the poem’s statement of identification, appearing in line 2: “I see you also face to face” (LG, p. 135) and l. 66: “The dark threw its patches down upon me also” (LG, p. 138); it is relayed in this function by the series of lines beginning “I too” (l. 27, l. 57 ff., l. 71; LG, p. 136-138).22 The rhyme “also” – “soul,” then, identifies the process of soul-making with a process of enunciative identification.
- 23 New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., p. 555.
20What seems to specify Whitman’s practice of rhyme, if we look at speechsound echoes in the positions traditionally reserved for rhyme, is the repetition of the same word, or what is called “identical rhyme.” This, in its most radical form, involves “words identical in sound (and perhaps spelling) and grammatical class and meaning,” as Brogan tells us in his article on this term; it raises the question of “whether or not a word can rhyme with itself.”23 Dickinson does this, for example, in “I cannot dance upon my Toes”:
21But one would certainly have to recognize that the first “me” is not “identical” with the second, being motivated by “Man,” while the second is motivated by “Glee”—and that is clearly the point. What is at stake in identical rhyme is difference in sameness.
- 25 See for example Autrey Nell Wiley, “Reiterative Devices in Leaves of Grass,” p. 161-170; Wiley sees (...)
22In Whitman’s case, the repetition of a word at line end has been studied in the terms of classical rhetoric, in relation with “epanaphora” and “epanalepsis” as “terminal repetition”—as a formal effect then, not in terms of the “differing semantic units” of rhyme.25 Yet, for example, the reiteration at line end which begins “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” frames a semantic difference:
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
(l. 1-2; LG, p. 135)
23Here a complex system of equivalences is organized around the repetition of the internally-rhymed phrase “face to face” (perhaps a reference to 1 Corinthians 13: 12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”), which specifies the relation of enunciation and interchangeability between an “I” and a “you,” affirming the speaker’s “equableness.” At the same time, the reiteration, as punctuated, marks a difference in intonation and links two semantically distinct intonational gestures. The two lines correspond to distinct temporalities: the first is tidal flow and ebb, the second the sun’s movement across the sky, more clearly linear and connected to the human perspective of mortality—and the pitch accent on “also” marks this difference. What is at stake then is not simply a rhythmic “return” of the same, the completion of a cycle, but the way nature and time, the “dumb, beautiful ministers,” are brought into language, into the temporality of enunciation.
24We find other examples of “identical rhyme” working with intonation in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” At the beginning of section 9, Whitman writes:
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and
women generations after me!
(l. 101-103; LG, p. 139)
25What we note in this line is that Whitman has apparently altered the usual English syntax to place the direct object “me” after a prepositional complement, thus writing “drench with your splendor mé” rather than “drench me with your spléndor.” The result is an inhabitual accent on “me” and a correlation between this “me” and the “me” which ends the line: the caesura after “me” links these two occurrences of the pronoun in final position. Here again, syntax and rhythm work together to create “rhyme.” The point of this syntax and this echo is an equivalence between “me” and those coming “after me”: the equivalence conveys the suggestion that “after me” is still “me,” or allows us to read “after me” as a mode of “me,” functioning then, almost, as a noun phrase, designating a me-to-be, an “after-me,” applying then the difference-in-sameness of rhyme to the identity-in-otherness of re-enunciation. This suggestion is also conveyed in the subsidiary rhymes of the passage, which associate, by speechsound, “drénch,” “spléndor,” “mén,” and “women”; and, by spelling, “me,” “men,” “women,” and “me.” The parallel endings “me” and “after me” make a rhyme, then, because they take on a specific function and significance in the poem’s temporality, visualizing what Whitman elsewhere calls “translation.”
26Whitman’s rhyme, I have tried to show, is inseparable from the syntactical and rhythmic organization of his lines: it is this interaction which multiplies and diversifies the modes of phonological correspondence and semantic disjunction. Whitman’s rhymes might thus be linked to the unconventional rhyming practices of his contemporaries Dickinson and Hopkins. His rhymes are specified, however, by the way they replace the content words we associate most spontaneously with rhyme with grammatical words, and most particularly, personal pronouns, as we have seen: they apply the “equivalences” of rhyme not to the structure of reality but to the processes of intersubjectivity; chiming a word with itself, they make intonation, voice, and re-enunciation audible.
Notes
1 In “The Bible as Poetry,” published in November Boughs, Whitman makes the Bible a retrospective model for Leaves of Grass, quoting Frederick De Sola Mendes: “that rhyming was not a characteristic of Hebrew poetry at all. Metre was not a necessary mark of poetry. Great poets discarded it; the early Jewish poets knew it not” (W. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 1140). Whitman conceived of Leaves of Grass as a “New Bible” (note from 1857; LG, p. 784).
2 W. Whitman, “The Bible as Poetry,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 1140.
3 Milton, in his preface on “The Verse” to Paradise Lost, called rhyme “the Invention of a barbarous Age” and a “troublesome and modern bondage”; similarly Blake, in the preface to Jerusalem, refers to “the modern bondage of Rhyming.” See John Hollander, Vision and Resonance, Two Senses of Poetic Form, New York, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 93.
4 Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 1053.
5 See The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., article “Equivalence,” p. 380. Both quotations from Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, in Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, New York, MIT and John Wiley & Sons, 1960, p. 358.
6 G. W. Allen, American Prosody, p. 221.
7 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., p. 1053. The 2012 edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (no longer “new”) reprints Brogan’s account.
8 Whitman’s English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins likewise assimilated the various forms of speechsound correspondence to “the principle of rhyme,” placing all under the general heading of “Lettering of syllables.” See “Rhythm and Other Structural Parts of Rhetoric—Verse” (1873-1874), in The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Humphry House and Graham Storey, London, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1966, p. 283-288. —Any doubt as to the arbitrariness of restricting the continuum of rhyme to the “specific sense” in English given by Brogan, i. e. the repetition of a stressed vowel + final consonant group at line end, is easily laid by consulting David Masson’s article “Sound-Repetition Terms” in Poetics, Poetyka, Warsaw, Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe; S. Gravenhage, Mouton & Co., 1961, p. 189-199.
9 Article “rhyme,” Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in two volumes, New York, S. Converse, 1828, n. p.
10 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, MA, Merriam-Webster, 1989, p. 1012.
11 N. Selby (ed.), The Poetry of Walt Whitman, A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, p. 11. Webster’s 1828 defines “jingle” as “correspondence of sound in rhymes.”
12 Whitman can be seen here drawing on an existing condemnatory discourse on rhyme which, as Simon Jarvis shows, flourished even in the rhyme-ridden 18th century, and which conceived rhyme in terms of gender, religion, and nationhood; Jarvis quotes, for example, Edward Young describing rhyme, in 1759, as “that effeminate decoration” (italics in original; Simon Jarvis, “Why Rhyme Pleases”, in David Caplan (dir.), On Rhyme, Liège, Presses universitaires de Liège, 2017, p. 103). Simon Jarvis likewise questions “any sharp distinction between terminal-rhyme or ‘rhyme-proper’ and [...] intra-linear rhyme”; for, he notes, “in the experience of reading, rhyme and assonance are intimately linked” (ibid., p. 118).
13 W. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 1166.
14 Henri Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie (1989), Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio « Essais », 2006, p. 255. Meschonnic also notes: “The pairing [of rhymes at line end] is only a particular case, which in our culture has hidden from us all the rest.” (p. 256). Translations from this text are mine.
15 J. Hollander, Vision and Resonance, op. cit., p. 91.
16 D. Masson, “Sound-Repetition Terms,” op. cit., p. 190. The van – or outflow-echo links identical consonant + vowel sequences at the beginnings of syllables.
17 H. Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie, op. cit., p. 252.
18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 233.
19 American Poetry, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. by John Hollander, New York, Library of America, 1993, p. 297. The preceding lines (1-2) read: “The rhyme of the poet / Modulates the king’s affairs”; and l. 20-21: “The animals are sick with love, / Lovesick with rhyme.”
20 H. Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie, op. cit., p. 252.
21 Hopkins noted: “for there are two elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of meaning, and the last is lessened by any likeness the words may have beyond that of sound” (Journals and Papers, op. cit., p. 286).
22 At l. 130, l. 2 and l. 66, “also” is a sentence adverb carrying not only stress but a pitch accent (compare: “There is also perfection in you”); it is thus a way of bringing speech accent, intonation, into the line. The same goes for the functioning of “I too.”
23 New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., p. 555.
24 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston, Little Brown, 1960, p. 154. Another example is found in “Because I could not stop for death –”, l. 15-18: “We paused before a House that seemed/ A Swelling of the Ground – / The Roof was scarcely visible – / The Cornice – in the Ground –”, J 712, p. 350.
25 See for example Autrey Nell Wiley, “Reiterative Devices in Leaves of Grass,” p. 161-170; Wiley sees such reiterations as substituting for rhyme. Similarly, Gay Wilson Allen commented on Whitman’s use of “final reiteration” to “produce cadence,” “band lines together into strophes and stanzaic divisions” and “achieve purely oratorical effects” (American Prosody, p. 231).
© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2019