Internal Rhyme Research Articles

The Towneley Plays

This new edition of The Towneley Plays (c. 1500) replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called Wakefield Master from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines.

American Chronicle: J. C. Leyendecker's Icons of Time

As Christmas approached, the San was transformed. The halls were decked with ground pine and holly, a twentyfoot tree appeared in the lobby, everywhere you turned there was a spangle of tinsel, crepe paper and mistletoe. Dr. Kellogg had always made good and provident use of the holidays, from Groundhog Day to the Fourth of July, doing his utmost to co-opt the spirit of the day and turn it into a triumph of health advocacy, but at Christmas he outdid himself....It was all part and parcel of the Battle Creek experience. (Boyle 167) T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction, The Road to Wellville, captures a sense of time in the first decade of the twentieth century. As always, we seek calibration and registration of time's passing, an acknowledgment that one day is different from the preceding and the next. The holy calendar long provided such a chronicle, identifying the passage of time by holidays of special importance as well as by specific association. We observe in most parts of the world seasonal change, but we also need the inflection of times that stand out and serve as benchmarks, references and remembrances to the past both personal and collective. Early twentieth-century America observed the accelerated pace of social change and modern life from the vantage of an old calendar and one that remembered with a poignancy and keen sense of the bygone and of the present that we may have lost. Such a chronicle was provided by the mass-circulation periodicals that celebrated holidays with a fervor like that of Dr. Kellogg. Not only the covers and editorial content of many of the magazines such as Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post marked the rhythm of time, but even the advertising, then frequently synchronized to the schedule of holidays. Time's passing was not a dour calibration. Rather, it was a celebration, allowing for a joyful differentiation of the days even as life was becoming more modern-and, perhaps, more quotidian. Among all the tokens of early twentieth-century time, one of the most compelling and one of the most cheerful is J.C. Leyendecker's suite of images of the round of the year as magazine covers for Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Hearst Sunday newspaper supplement, The American Weekly, in a span from 1906 to 1950, years in which Leyendecker not only kept tempo with America, but also allowed for a cycle of remembrance, celebration, predictability, and renewal. This American artist knew how to treasure time in its transience and to give time a distinction even for a secular and modern world in which community might be established by an exultant sense of sharing occasions and concepts in the common place of time. Leyendecker created both distinct icons and winsome narratives for the many occasions that he celebrated. His most famous is the convention he established for the new year. In fact, Leyendecker did not invent the imagery of a Baby New Year and Father Time, but he became the preeminent artist of the image for The Saturday Evening Post covers for nearly forty years. Beginning with the December 29, 1906, cover, Leyendecker poses a Baby New Year, first anatomically uncertain and awkward on the orb of the world, writing out resolutions. This first child has wings as does her successor, the Baby New Year of December 28, 1907, accompanied by the stork. On the December 31, 1910, cover, Leyendecker records the new year-in this instance, with the Baby New Year in a kind of internal rhyme as a delivery boy for The Saturday Evening Post. Leyendecker's simplifying and icon-making glee eliminates Father Time thereafter, except for the return of this same image swiped from this image for the Post's in-house journal for its paper boys in 1913. The modification of the initial image refers both to the incorrigible Leyendecker choice for perceiving the positive, but image, even a traditional one. The unfailing adaptability of Leyendecker's image-and his personal propensity toward only the most optimistic in the icon-testifies to the artist's resourcefulness. …

The Devil's Slave (review)

220BCom, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter 1990) lieve this monotony; but those forms too are not without pitfalls. In the original Spanish, Flores' breathless account of the villagers' murder of his master is almost indistinguishable from prose. Consider, for example, the following lines: "Llévanle a una casa muerto, /ya porfía, quien más puede, / mesa su barba y cabello, / y apriesa su rostro hieren" (1984-87). Dixon renders this as: They drag his carcase to a house, and vie persistently to tug and tear his beard and hair and mutilate his face (p. 185). The unremitting beat and the use of internal rhyme in the third line distract from the meaning and, in my opinion, give an inappropriate comic tone to the passage. Dixon's hope was that these shorter iambic lines would "evoke analogous associations in English," (p. 40) but the first analogue that came to my mind in reading this passage was: "I never saw a Purple Cow..." All these problems make me wonder whether verse translation is in fact preferable to poetic prose, which I believe can more closely approximate the tone of the original. I have noticed only a few minor instances where I disagree with Dixon's translation. In act two he has the Comendador address Esteban as "your worship ," while the Spanish has simply "alcalde." Similarly, when the peasants burst in to murder the Comendador, Dixon has him cry out: "Good people, wait," while in the original he simply says "¡Pueblo, esperad!" The Comendador is consistently arrogant from the beginning to the end of the play, and I think the note of flattery—or perhaps condescension—in Dixon's translation of these two passages is unwarranted. Michael McGaha Pomona College Mira de Amescua, Antonio. The Devil's Slave. Translated by Michael D. McGaha. Introduction by J. M. Ruano de la Haza. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, No. 16. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 114 pages. The past decade has seen a remarkable rededication by comediantes to the difficult art of translation. Unlike earlier, mostly British translations that attempted to keep the seventeenth-century flavor of the plays by casting them in a Reviews221 Shakespearean mode, these modern, North American translations have sought to reinvigorate the texts, making their interesting plots accessible to modern American audiences. A leader in the field has been Michael McGaha, whose insight , wit, and subtle abilities with both Spanish and English have given us first a translation of Lope's Lo fingido verdadero in 1986 (by Trinity University Press, whose unfortunate demise I need not belabor here), and now a thoroughly engaging translation of Mira de Amescua's El esclavo del demonio. McGaha's approach to Mira's complex play is to render the text in a straightforward way; his genius is to choose a middle ground between an overly literal translation that is ponderous and sluggish in its devotion to baroque conceits and word use and a breezy colloquialism that would deny to the English the poetry and imagery of the original. Most of the play is translated into prose, but he has cast the most lyrical passages (such as sonnets and songs sung by musicians ) into an iambic pentameter that is both poetic and flowing. As to the words themselves, it is quite common even in the best translations to run across words or phrases that faithfully render the original but which end up disturbing the flow of speech either because of their lack of common use in modern American English or because they reflect a belief or translate an idiom that really makes no sense anymore, such as Marcelo's assertion that "my old age is an elephant" on page 62 and dutifully explained in an accompanying footnote. In this superior translation, these obstacles to communication are blessedly kept to an absolute minimum. Moreover, McGaha has a good ear for different kinds of speech for different characters, and he even shows his mastery of dialect in his rendering of Domingo's rustic speech in Act 2, although I'm not sure why his substandard dialect was cast in such a way as to mimic Americans from the South ("I has to ax y'all . . ."on page...

Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo

Reviews 363 obvious relish for life, an undercurrent of glee. There is a free, unfenceable spirit here. Probably no western writer since Mark Twain has been funny in quite this way. Abbey loves good country, good food, friends, unbossed time — the old, normal, human range. This is behind everything he says, and we recognize it instinctively, genetically. Down the River makes one of the clearest statements of the wilderness corollary to the Turner thesis I have seen. If open land made Americans what they are, then what becomes of them when it’s gone? “Europe was saved,” Abbey writes, “from becoming a permanent prisonhouse by the open­ ing up of America. (And the forcible displacement of America’s original inhabitants.) But suppose we in America surrender our last remnants of wilderness to the demands of industrialism?” For Abbey, a most disturbing rhetorical question. His answer goes far beyond the meliorist accommoda­ tions of such conservationists as René Dubos (the essay containing these thoughts on wilderness is called “Thus I Reply to René Dubos”), into a radical, Abbeyan association of wild country, political freedom, and a full emotional and intellectual life — an ideal state which Abbey says could be called civilization. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Death and the Good Life. By Richard Hugo. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. 215 pages, $10.95.) For a first novel by an acclaimed poet, this is a lot of fun. The initial crime is imagined as occurring just after the victim snags two small rainbow trout at Rainbow Lake, in northwest Montana. And the plot, as involved with convolutions as the internal rhymes and rhythms of Hugo at his best poetic form, twists and turns and digresses across the Northwest from Plains (several allusions to Jimmy Carter), Montana to Portland, Oregon. And the hero, A1 “Mush Heart” Barnes, is, every inch of him, a good soul (as well as a good sole). The plot may be a bit bizarre (a frog farm in Albania?) but the characters are good and A1 Barnes is a very likeable hero. There is also a distinct poetic dimension to this detective story, from poetic colorings (“Sedge was receding in the lake now that the surface water was cooling and the big rainbows were coming up”) to poetic surprises (“Sometimes I’ve wondered why women don’t have a skid row. It’s like men reserved destitu­ tion and defeat for their exclusive use.”) to poetic slummings (“ ‘Yes. I wanted to be a poet.’ ‘Really? Cod, there are so many these days. Isn’t that a funny thing for a cop to want to be?’”) and poetic name droppings (“ ‘I see you’re reading William Stafford. . . . Do you like his poems?’”). Are there poet cops in Portland? Do nice men with kindly faces in exclusive clubs really read William Stafford? At least for the purposes of this 364 Western American Literature poet turned detective, the whole world comes together and has a reasonably good time — as good as can be had, with the bodies piling up and the crimes receding into a prehistoric, pre-liberal age of young and brutal cruelty. You just can’t read this detective story in the same way you would read a Christie or a Spillane or Hammett or Sayers—it just won’t work. The reason for the difference is not the poetic colorings nor the plot nor the characters— it’s A1 Barnes himself, who either keeps readers smiling or feel­ ing a somewhat mild disgruntlement. A1 “Mush Heart” Barnes is Sam Spade dug up, patched together, given a love for good cooking and a new eye for the poetic details in characters’ lives and in specific settings, as well as a big soft heart that wants everyone to live a long time and have a good time doing it. He is no hard-nosed, no-nonsense, “gray-mattered” steel-trap mind of indefatigible logic, nor womanizing cynic. “Mush Heart” Barnes’s heart is what leads him on — neither Poirot nor Eliot he. When a rookie cop, Barnes even had trouble getting his bureaucratic quota of speeding tickets. His Seattle superiors therefore gave him — astute superiors! — a police-community relations...

The Achehnese Metre sanja' and the Thai KLƆ:N P∈:T

Almost half a century ago I pointed to the similarity between the national Achehnese verse form sanja' and a related Cham verse used in the song of the kadhar (a musician-officiant) at the ceremony of the sacrifice of the buffalo (Cowan, 1933). It will be useful to recall here the main points of that paper.The Achehnese sanja' in its simplest form consists of lines of eight dissyllabic metrical feet or rather four pairs of such feet, whose two middle pairs rhyme with each other, while the final syllable of each line rhymes with that of the following line. Or in other words it is a double-eight-syllable metre with an internal rhyme on the eighth syllable of the first and the fourth syllable of the second half of the verse line, and with a final rhyme at the end of each line. Thus:

Further Aspects of Sound-Patterning in the Poema de Mio Cid

PROFESSOR Smith's article on sounds in the PMC develops interestingly the topic raised by de Chasca.' The former's position is somewhere between the latter's and that of Professor Michael in his review of de Chasca's book and in his own edition of the poem.2 Smith is very concerned to attribute a degree of artistic consciousness to the poet, in keeping with his views on learned or literate intervention in the work. Michael is by no means antagonistic to general artistic views on the PMC: his opinion here is merely concerned with internal rhyme, which he rejects on grounds of unverifiability and the likelihood of simple coincidence. Smith, of course, introduces several additional points on sound patterns, beyond that of internal rhyme, but I will start again at that phenomenon. De Chasca's table of figures for internal rhymes and repetitions lead to the conclusion that something in excess of 20% of the PMC contains these elements. Some room should be left for sheer coincidence: there are sixteen vowel combinations in the list, which really means that there is a 1:16 chance of a repeated type, since every line must contain a caesura word from that range of terminants. There are a very few further combinations such as -u in Calatazt (572, 626, 633, etc.), which do not appear in

Syair and Pantun Prosody

Many characteristics of the Malay syair and pantun have become standard items in handbooks and textbooks concerned with classical Malay literature.1 These works uniformly agree that the syair consists of a series of quatrains containing an ongoing story. The final syllable of each line (kerat) within a stanza (bait or rangkap or untai) rhymes with every other final syllable of that stanza (aaaa, bbbb, ....). Furthermore, the line generally consists of four words with a more or less definable caesura (jeda) after the second word. The pantun has all the features of the syair quatrain except that the final rhyme is of the abab type,2 and there is often an alternating internal rhyme (cdcd) between the precaesural syllables. Although pantuns may be linked to form a pantun sequence, most are independent. Also, pantuns may range from two to twelve lines although these are rarer than the four-line variety. The primary difference separating the syair form from that of the pantun, however, is that while the syair has a continuous story throughout the quatrain--and between quatrains--the pantun divides into two parts, the first half (pembayang maksud) having specific, concrete images3 to describe nature or the human world, the second half (maksud) using abstract words to state an observation or maxim.4

Alexander Blok's "Of What the Wind Sings" and Other Poems

ALL four poems are from Blok's Book the Third. Though ultimately forming the Introductory to the cycle Homeland (Rodina), No. I earlier appeared under the motto: Thou art far, in the fields-and forever, So-Hallowed be Thy Name! (The Unexpected Joy)1 Historically, it thus forms an essential link in the chain of Blok's development, the motto consisting of the opening lines of the Introductory to the Second Book.2 No. II3 originally appeared under the title A Simple Song. The trochaic lilt and internal rhymes of the original create a musical charm all their own.

Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. by Norman Weyand, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition by W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of his Poetry by W. A. M. Peters

BOOK REVIEWS 289 Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by NoRMAN WEYAND. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949. Pp. 4lH, with indexes. $5.00. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. By W. H. GARDNER. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Pp. 304, with index. $4.00. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of his Poetry. By W. A. M. PETERS. New York: Oxford University Press, 194.8. Pp. 213, with index. $4.50. Immortal Diamond, a phrase drawn from one of Hopkin's poems, is a collection of studies by, eleven American Jesuits. It is a very uneven book not in the sense that some of the chapters are sound while others are superficial , but in the sense that the separate studies are suitable to different levels of readers. Several of them serve as an introduction to the poet for those making a first acquaintance while others presume an audience which is already initiated. Herein lies both the strength and weakness of Immortal Diamond. Among the very general introductory studies is, for instance, a biographical sketch of Hopkins in his relation to the Society of Jesus which in a very rounded and balanced manner gives the story of his life from the time of his conversion until his death. It draws heavily on primary materials, especially on the letters, as indeed it should. Occasionally there is some facet which needs illumination. When, for instance, Hopkins at Oxford was considering Rome he wrote in his diary: "Note that if ever I should leave the English Church the fact of Provost Fortescue is to be got over." This is quoted but without any attempt to determine just what "the fact of Provost Fortescue" was, and it·would seem to be a not unimportant hurdle in the story of his conversion. From the essay we do learn one very important new fact: that Hopkins' spiritual diary which has not survived was mistakenly returned to his family after his death and that acting on instructions written on the :flyleaf , his two sisters burnt the diary without reading it. For the past two decades critics have speculated-and sometimes very wildly indeed-as to its whereabouts or the reasons for its destruction, and it is good to have the matter finally settled. A further general essay is d!lvoted to Hopkins as a poet· of nature and of the supernatural and still another to him as a poet uf ascetic and religious conflict. The writer of the latter does not underestimate the gravity and acuteness of such " conflict " but he concludes that all sad portraits of Hopkins cramped by the stern discipline of Jesuit life and living out dismal days of broken hearted frustration among the Jesuits 290 .BOOK REVIEWS may be viewed with a smile of gentle, not to say profound, incredulity. In contrast to these introductory essays is such a study as that entitled "Greco-Roman Verse Theory and Hopkins" which presupposes far more than a superficial knowledge of the theory and practice of classical prosody. Hopkins believed that there were strong similarities between his rhythms and those of the Greek choruses. The writer's thesis is that Hopkins' misunderstandings of Greek and Latin rhythmic usages, which derived for the most part from mistakes of scholars of his age, led his speculation on classical meter over unsafe ground. The essay is challenging and can finally be evaluated only when one takes into consideration Hopkins ' own experiments in Greek poetry which were very recently-certainly too recently for them to be considered here-printed for the first time in the third edition of his poems. The longest study-some eighty pages-is also one of the most valuable. In " Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry " Walter Ong attempts to account for Hopkins' sprung rhythm and his practice against a general pattern of development in English verse. Aware of the tremendous intricacies of the problem, he demonstrates very persuasively that interpretive or sense-stress rhythm demands alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, dramatic suppression of words, telescoping of grammatical structure as invaluable and necessary helps in bringing out the intended meaning. One concludes...