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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: RHY-RON |
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RHYME , more correctly spelt RIME, from a Provencal word rim (its customary English spelling is due to a confusion with rhythm), a literary ornament or device consisting of an identity of sound in the terminal syllables of two or more words. In the art of versification it signifies the repetition of a sound at the end of two or more lines in a single composition. This artifice was practically unknown to the ancients, and, when it occurs, or seems to occur, in the works of classic Greek and Latin poets, it must be considered to be accidental. The natural tendency of the writer of verse unconsciously to repeat a sound, however, is shown by the fact that there have been discovered nearly one thousand lines in the writings of Virgil where the final syllable rhymes with a central one, thus Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos. It is more than doubtful, however, whether the difference of stress would. not prevent this from sounding as a rhyme in ou antique ear, and the phenomenon results more from the RHYME contingencies of grammar than from intention on the part of the poet. Conscious rhyme belongs to the early medieval periods of monkish literature, and the name given to lines with an intentional rhyme in the middle is Leonine verse, the invention being attributed to a probably apocryphal monk Leoninus or Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. This " history " is composed in Latin verses, all of which rhyme in the centre. Another very famous poem in Leonine rhyme is the " De Contemptu Mundi " of Bernard
Recent
instrument rhyme has held its own, at all events for non-dramatic verse, in the principal literature of Europe. Certain forms of poetry are almost inconceivable without rhyme. For instance, efforts have been made to compose rhymeless sonnets, but the result has been, either that the piece of blank verse produced is not in any sense a sonnet, or else that by some artifice the appearance of rhyme has been retained. In the heyday of Elizabethan literature a serious attempt was made in England to reject rhyme altogether, and to return to the quantitative measures
Cambridge , Gabriel Harvey (1545 ?1630). He considered himself a great innovator, and for a short time he actually seduced no less melodious a poet than Edmund Spenser to abandon rhyme and adopt a system of accented hexameters and trimeters. Spenser even wrote largely in those measures
There have, from time to time, been made experiments of a similar nature, notably by Tennyson, but rhyme has retained its sway as an essential ornament of all English poetry which is not in blank verse. There have been not a few poems composed, principally in the nineteenth century, in rhymeless hexameters, and even the elegiac couplet has been attempted. The experiments of Long-fellow, Clough, Kingsley and others demand respectful notice, but it is more than doubtful whether any one of these, even the mellifluous Andromeda of the last-named writer, is really in harmony with the national prosody. In Germany a very determined attack on rhyme was made early in the seventeenth century, particularly by a group of aesthetic critics in the Swiss universities. They attacked rhyme as an artless species of sing-song, which deadened and destroyed the true movement
Arnold
In French, two species of rhyme are accepted, the feminine and the masculine. Feminine rhymes are those which end in a mute e, masculine those which do not so end. The Alexandrine, which is the classical metre in French, is built up on what are known as rimes croisees, that is to say a couplet of masculine rhymes followed by a couplet of feminine, and that again by masculine. This rule is unknown to the medieval poetry of France. In Italian literature the excessive abundance and facility of rhyme has led to a rebellion against its use, which is much more reasonable than that of the Germans, whose strenuous language seems to call
Carducci are also worthy of admiration, and may be compared by the student with those of Heine and of Matthew Arnold
accent
See Joseph B. Mayer, A Handbook of Modern English Metre ( Cambridge , 1903); J. Minor, Neuhochdeutsche Metrik (Strassburg, 1893) ; J. B. Schutze, Versuch einer Theorie des Reimes nach Inhalt and Form (Magdeburg, 18o2). (E. G.)End of Article: RHYME If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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