Couplets

Rhyme isn’t always going to be used for comic effect, of course. I mentioned Robert Frost’s “Design” last time, and it’s a chilling poem about the unnatural and natural joined together by inexorable violence:

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right.

And you have the innocent-appearing nature of a simple whole rhyme (and a simple pun—I always have to go back and check each time to remember if it’s “right” or “rite”) in the service of something dark and twisted.

Rhyme may be comic, or it may be as menacing as Frost’s spider (or both, as in Ogden Nash’s news radio, “like a hyena ready to spring”), but it can always be counted on to do one thing, and that is to knit a unit of poetry together.

The tightest knit is the rhymed couplet, so that’s going to be the focus of this month’s disquisition: a unit of verse, generally but not always presented as part of a larger unit, which opens up an idea or an observation or emotional state or image in one line, and ties it down in the next.

Generally part of a larger unit, but not always. J. V. Cunningham, modern master of the epigram, found you could say a lot in two lines (plus a title, which, when your poem is only two lines long, attains a certain prominence):

EPITAPH FOR SOMEONE OR OTHER

Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.

The last thing in the world you’d think you’d be able to capture in only two lines is a person’s whole life, which is why poets attempt it so often. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s circle was fond of writing epitaphs for their contemporaries while they were still alive. A favorite target was Oliver Goldsmith, who was a genius when he sat down to write, but garrulous and nearly incomprehensible in conversation. Shakespearian actor David Garrick wrote this one:

Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,

Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll.

Lewis Turco is the contemporary master of the two-line epitaph, often for historical figures:

R.I.P. EDWIN MARKHAM

April 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940

“Man with a Hoe,” his greatest lay

Means something different today.

Most poems are more than two lines long, but the couplet will still begin and end a unit within the poem. Shakespeare will switch from blank verse to a rhymed couplet to signal – powerfully – the end of a scene. When MacBeth goes to kill Duncan, the signal that all is ready comes in the form of a bell. MacBeth hears it, and says:

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

A later scene ends with a series of rhymed couplets, but they lead up to the final, ringing challenge:

'Fear not, till Birnam wood

Do come to Dunsinane:' and now a wood

Comes toward Dunsinane. Arm, arm, and out!

If this which he avouches does appear,

There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.

I gin to be aweary of the sun,

And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.

Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!

At least we'll die with harness on our back.

So he goes from mournful couplet to even more mournful couplet to defiant battle cry, capturing the weight of MacBeth’s guilt and the fearless warrior that he once was.

Poetry for children often employs rhymed couplets:

And two little kittens

And a pair of mittens

And a little toy house

And a young mouse

And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush

And a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush”

Would you eat them in a box?

Would you eat them with a fox?

He wouldn't. Nor in the rain, nor on a train, and the litany of how and where he won't eat them keeps growing.

I could not, would not, on a boat.

I will not, will not, with a goat.

I will not eat them in the rain.

I will not eat them on a train.

Not in the dark! Not in a tree!

Not in a car! You let me be!

I do not like them in a box.

I do not like them with a fox.

I will not eat them in a house.

I do not like them with a mouse.

I do not like them here or there.

I do not like them anywhere!

And this tells us a few things. The purpose of poetry for children is to delight, and that is not a bad purpose for poetry at any age. Rhyme can delight. It can delight us with humor or with pithy truth, with familiarity or surprise. And with a couplet, the delight comes quickly…no deferred gratification. Deferred gratification brings its own rewards, but let’s not put down the rewards of not deferring it.

Here’s a short poem, all in rhymed couplets (with a rhymed tercet in the middle). Gerard Manley Hopkins takes all sorts of chances in this one, using complex and clever wordplay to express ineffable sadness, but his final couplet is simple and to the point:

SPRING AND FALL

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Each couplet ends with not only a closing rhyme but a closing punctuation mark, period or colon, telling you to stop and digest this before going on. Each couplet except one, and that comes right in the middle of the poem and not only changes the pace, it knocks it gollywompers—an enjambment followed by a rhymed tercet: don’t stop and digest this, just let it carry you along. Which you do, without knowing why, until you get to the strange line that stops the tercet: “You will weep and know why.” This is the story of our lives. We go from weeping without knowing why to weeping and knowing why. Cheer up, things could be worse. So I cheered up…and sure enough, things got worse.

And part of how Hopkins gets that across is by the way he sets up, and then varies, his rhyme.

Alexander Pope never varies. He stays with it, couplet after couplet, and at considerable length, as in his Essay on Man, of which this is just a small sample:

Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused, or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

The couplets work for Pope, and they’re also an excellent example of why it’s probably best not to try this at home. Each couplet is a separate little lesson, because Pope is a didactic poet, and that’s a type you don’t see much today, and with reason. We don’t trust authority that much any more, and if we were willing to take the risk, it would be hard to find anyone who could wear the mantle of authority with as much aplomb as Pope. Richard Hugo says:

When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are ...limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden.

Or Pope.

And Pope doesn’t stop with using his rhymed couplets to teach lessons. He uses it to tell a story – “The Rape of the Lock,” or one of the grandest (and longest) stories ever told in verse, The Iliad. Here’s some red-hot action from a battle sequence:

Then died Scamandrius, expert in the chase,

In woods and wilds to wound the savage race;

Diana taught him all her sylvan arts,

To bend the bow, and aim unerring darts:

But vainly here Diana's arts he tries,

The fatal lance arrests him as he flies;

From Menelaus' arm the weapon sent,

Through his broad back and heaving bosom went:

Down sinks the warrior with a thundering sound,

His brazen armour rings against the ground.

It’s not everyone’s idea of how to tell an action story, but it’s a pretty darn good idea. The closure brought about by the couplet form balances against the whirlwind action of the battle – and one Trojan after another gets killed in this section of the poem – in a way that’s oddly satisfying. There is so much more to say about Pope’s Homer, and I recommend this article in the New York Times by Garry Wills. Wills is not a poet or a literary critic, but he does what every critic should do, and few ever do: Help you appreciate a work of art more deeply. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/01/books/on-reading-pope-s-homer.html?fbclid=IwAR3c--Uz8ec7ddb_CvFwE4OcqXYEiGEdNgHPz3ANLCWjkSh5gM0KlSp8AVk

The closure effect of a rhymed couplet can also be muted. Chuck Berry does this regularly in “Too Much Monkey Business,” where the rhyme words are as simple and direct as those in “Essay on Man” or
“Bye Bye Love,” but they don’t seem that way. Berry distracts attention away from the end words by filling the line with caesuras in a series of staccato bursts:

Workin’ in the filling station—too many tasks

Clean the windows—check the tires—check the oil—dollar gas

or with internal rhyme:

Runnin’ to and fro, hard workin’ at the mill

Never fail, in the mail, here come a rotten bill

or both:

Pay phone—dime gone—something wrong—will mail

Oughta sue the operator for tellin’ me a tale

But mostly by swallowing up the closing word of the couplet with the refrain, which comes up immediately and does not rhyme:

Been to Yokohama, been a-fightin’ in the war,

Army shoes, army clothes, army chow, army car,

Too much monkey business, too much monkey business,

Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Every time a poet makes a formal commitment, he’s making a contract with the reader, and there are to things you can do with a contract: you can honor it, or you can break it. Both have their value. You can smash it to smithereens, like T. S. Eliot with his patient etherized upon a table, or you can subvert it subtly, like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Chuck Berry. Keep it or break it, smash it or subvert it, you’re making different demands on the reader, and you’re giving different gifts to the reader. All this in two lines with one rhyme. That’s why us poets get the big bucks.