Rhyme Patterns Research Articles

Reading the Harley Lyrics: A Master Poet and the Language of Conventions

Before the late fourteenth and fifteeenth-century lyrics of Chaucer and the so-called Chaucerians, little has survived in English of the great flowering of medieval erotic poetry stimulated in Europe by Latin and Romance models. The major exception is a dozen or so texts among the English poems of an important miscellany (which includes Latin and French texts), collected by an unknown scribe in the first half of the fourteenth century: MS Harley 2253. Most of these lyrics are written in a style whose aggressive alliteration and complex stanzaic rhyme patterns show a distinctive and vigorous attempt to fuse native and Romance elements in a new, elegant synthesis. The Harley lyrics, despite their clear links with earlier and later poetry, provide a lively contrast with the smoother, aureate style of most later English love lyrics, and have earned high praise from critics since their earliest publication.1 But the reader first grappling with these poems, familiar with either Renaissance or medieval European amorous poetry, may well be frustrated as well as charmed. The force of much exuberant imagery and passionate statements of desire and despair seems often dulled by mechanical or indiscriminate schemes of elaboration, catalogues or amplifications, or worse, dissipated'by clumsy shifts of theme that render character or situation incoherent. Earlier critics often charitably judged the results naive, along with much other medieval literature. But as respect for and understanding of medieval poetry has grown, scholars have returned to the Harley

The Dialectics of Movement in Keats's “To Autumn”

“To Autumn” should not be read merely as a static poem expressive of perfection and sadness. All kinds of mutation can be recognized in it: temporal changes (within the season, within the day), changes in space and angle of view, in the kind of biology and sociology alluded to, in syntax and rhyme patterns. These can be recorded as a series of curves, each of which differs from the others in direction or shape. Critical interpretations of the poem result from the combination of several of these curves. However, most interpretations ignore the background of the curves, the solid and encompassing, if inarticulate, “nature in process” on which the curves are superposed. Although still more interpretations, such as a sociopolitical one, could be devised by combining individual curves, none of them will be fully significant unless it takes into account the deep, vast, indifferent voice of nature itself slowly passing, which Keats managed to summon to a background presence.

Word coding: The role of intrinsic and extrinsic features

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the effect of extrinsic cues in processing words. In a serial anticipation task, starting position was constant or varied and the stimulus words were phonetically distinct, highly similar, or highly similar and arranged into a rhyming pattern. Reliance upon external features, temporal constancy cues, was greater when items were phonetically similar than when distinct. Furthermore, rhyming pattern served as an effective external cue, even when practice did not begin on the first item of the sequence on successive trials.

Some observations on Estonian and Russian versification

My paper deals with some problems involved in the transfer of a versification system from one language to anotheran exceedingly common phenomenon. In modern Estonian poetry at least seven different systems of versification are presently current:1 three tonic systems (syllabotonic, accentual, vers libre); three quantitative systems (traditional folk verse; classical quantitative meters used with great success in translations of Greek and Latin poetry, most recently by Ants Oras in a beautiful rendition of Vergil's Bucolics ; and linear-quantitative verse used with equally great success by Aleksis Rannit, a. o.); finally, syllabic verse, which has been used in translations of Romance syllabic poetry with good success. All of these systems, except, of course, that of folk verse, a quantitative trochaic tetrameter, were borrowed at one time or another from the poetry of foreign languages. Today Estonian poetry is flourishing both in Soviet occupied Estonia and in emigration. Emigr/ poets, naturally, gravitate toward the poets of the English-speaking world and the Romance nations. Estonian poets back home are inevitably exposed to a great deal of Russian influence. To begin with, they cannot help becoming familiar with Russian poetry. Many of them translate Russian poetry into Estonian. All the better known Estonian poets are being translated into Russian. Last but not least, the all-pervading pressure of Russification promotes all tendencies toward acculturation, and convergent tendencies in poetry might by expected to be among them. Russian poetry is still dominated by rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse, while the poetry of the West has largely abandoned traditional metric and rhyming patterns. Therefore, a prevalence in Estonian poetry of rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse would a priori represent a tendency toward acculturation, while the use of quantitative verse and vers libre would be a tendency in the other direction. In this paper I would like to confront some apparently parallel prosodie traits of Estonian and Russian verse, and try to determine their actual relationship. Let me begin with some statistics. A recent study by J. Pftldmae 2 suggests that in the 19th century 84% of all Estonian Kunstdichtung was still trochaic, and of this 85% in quatrains, 70% with abab rhyme: while in the 20th century, with 71.3% of all poetry syllabotonic, iambs represent 41.5% of the total and trochees a mere 16.8%. I did some counting of my own, using Paul Rummo's large anthology of Estonian poetry (1967) for this purpose.

Syntactic and Semantic Categories of Echo Words in Persian

The entire Persian-speaking world, including Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, has had a very long and colorful tradition in oral literature. Since memorization has long been an integral part of Persian culture, rhyming as an aid to memorization has been especially prevalent in Persian literature. Because of this, and because of the oral tradition in general, Persian speakers have long been especially conscious of rhyming patterns. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate what morphological and syntactic devices are used to form rhyming patterns (as well as alliteration and assonance patterns) in Persian, and to investigate the effect that these rhyming patterns have on Persian grammar. In addition, the paper will attempt to determine what semantic categories are especially amenable to echo-word formation.The least significant, and probably the least deliberate of syntactic devices for echo-word formation in Persian, is the use of various suffixes and prefixes.

Melodic Lines in Goethe's Verse

I am not the first to observe that the practice of reading aloud, once a favorite form of entertainment, is rapidly becoming extinct, and that even the ability to read aloud shows a marked decline: the number of American adults who cannot read aloud an ordinary bit of prose without stumbling or making it unintelligible is already alarmingly large. Regrettable as this development is bound to be in general, it takes on a more serious aspect when we consider the entire field of poetry, more particularly those departments of poetry which involve patterns: patterns of rhythm, patterns of rhyme, patterns of both combined. For all such patterns are essentially auditory in nature. It is the poet's ear which sets up the original pattern, and it is the listening ear which confirms its effectiveness. Indeed, if we are able to apprehend the auditory pattern through the transmitting eye, that is only by virtue of a sort of recall deriving from repeated auditory experiences. We are still listening while we look, just as we can read aloud without making a sound. But all this transfer presupposes a full set of auditory experiences on which the reader can draw. Both the patterns of rhythm and the patterns of rhyme are protected, as it were, by the external forms of verse. Rhyme, indeed, is even evident to the eye, and both English and German recognize what are conveniently called eye-rhymes, such as goodblood, or full-dull. While the controversy over the legitimacy of so-called impure rhymes in German continues to rage, there is no denying the fact that German poets, including Goethe, have actually used such rhymes and are still doing so. Although rhythm cannot be actually seen, it too is externally manifest in the normal speech patterns of which it is composed. Even such a line as: With how sads steps, 0 Moon, thou climb'st the sky (Wordsworth, 1802), although every word in it is a monosyllable, and all are words of nearly equal weight, excepting only the, no reader of experience will mistake it for other than it is, an iambic line of five feet.