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One thing you’ll bring away from any visit to New Orleans is an appreciation of lagniappe, defined by most officialdom in terms of retail commerce—the thirteenth beignet in a baker’s dozen, a piece of candy given to a child along with a purchase of socks and underwear. But lagniappe is more than that. It’s the little bit more you weren’t expecting, that suddenly makes an occasion memorable. The one last song after the encore, where the band has left the stage and the singer sits down with her guitar and plays that one more. The little string of grace notes at the end of a solo that take it one more place. The extra chorus at the end of a zydeco or blues classic that suddenly makes it about you. The wonderful false ending to Count Basie’s “April in Paris,” where he calls out “One more time!” and the band swings into one more chorus…and that’s not the lagniappe. The lagniappe comes when that chorus ends, and the Count calls out “Now just one more once!” Rhyme in poetry comes in any number of combinations, but most familiarly, the couplet or the quatrain, a four-line stanza that can rhyme on the second and fourth lines, the way Keats does it in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
Rhyme always stops you just a little bit, saying “Listen to me!” Keats doesn’t want that micro-pause; he wants you to get right to the sweet moan, and he gets you there even faster by making the fourth line of the quatrain only two metric feet long. Shakespeare’s sonnets are complex and subtle, and the constant back-reference of an ABAB rhyme scheme keeps letting you know that you have to go back and consider each new line in the context of what went before: Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
But there are other stanzas than four-line stanzas, and there are other ways of using rhyme, including what I call lagniappe rhyme—a rhyme which takes the rhyme the poet has started with and pushes just a little farther, the way Robert Frost does in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
The third line doesn’t rhyme, but that’s OK; we know that not every line has to. But wait! The second stanza comes up, and that line that wasn’t supposed to rhyme suddenly becomes the rhyme sound of the second stanza: My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
And the poem goes on hooking unrhymed third lines from one verse into the next. The power of rhyme is rarely showed to better advantage than in the dueling scene from Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano is challenged by a pompous jerk. He tries to deflect the confrontation, but there is no way around it. So he says he will fight, but as he does he will compose an extemporaneous ballade. In Rostand’s French, it’s impeccable: Je jette avec grâce mon feutre,
Je fais lentement l'abandon
Du grand manteau qui me calfeutre,
Et je tire mon espadon;
Elégant comme Céladon,
Agile comme Scaramouche,
Je vous préviens, cher Mirmydon,
Qu'à la fin de l'envoi je touche!
The translator of the poem for the 1950 film with Jose Ferrer as Cyrano did an admirable job: Lightly I toss my hat away,
Languidly over my arm let fall
The cloak that covers my bright array—
Then out swords, and to work withal!
A Launcelot in his Lady’s hall…
A Spartacus, at the Hippodrome!...
I dally awhile with you, dear jackal,
Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!
And what do we have? A stupid man who fancies himself a master swordsman, suddenly up against an opponent who fights with skill plus intelligence. Cyrano baffles his opponent with words and inscouciance as he parries each thrust. And for the audience—Cyrano’s spectators on the scene, Rostand’s theater and Ferrer’s movie audience—a pure treat. If you’ve seen the play, or any version of the movie, you’ll never forget this scene. But the confusion of the hapless opponent, and the pleasure of the audience, is enhanced by the lagniappe offered by a ballade. As the poem goes on, not only does each succeeding verse have the same rhyme scheme, it has the same rhymes. So the hapless opponent is not only forced to listen to Cyrano improvising a mocking poem at his expense, but the mockery is built on seemingly endless variations on the same sounds: Where shall I skewer my peacock?... Nay,
Better for you to have shunned this brawl!—
Here, in the heart, thro’ your ribbons gay?
—In the belly, under your silken shawl?
Hark, how the steel rings musical!
Mark how my point floats, light as the foam,
Ready to drive you back to the wall,
Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!
Ho, for a rime!.. You are white as whey—
You break, you cower, you cringe, you… crawl!
Tac!—and I parry your last essay:
So may the turn of a hand forestall
Life with its honey, death with its gall;
So may the turn of my fancy roam
Free, for a time, till the rimes recall,
Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!
Prince! Pray God, that is Lord of all,
Pardon your soul, for your time has come!
Beat—pass—fling you aslant, asprawl—
Then, as I end the refrain…
(He lunges; Valvert staggers back and falls into the arms of his friends. Cyrano recovers, and salutes.)
Thrust home!
Terza Rima offers the continuous lagniappe of a three-line stanza with an ABA rhyme scheme, the unrhymed B line becoming the rhyming A lines of the next stanza. Dante managed the whole Divine Comedy in this form, but, as many have pointed out, that’s not so hard in Italian, when pretty much everything rhymes with everything else. But there are certainly rhymes in English, too, so it’s not impossible. Chaucer used terza rima, and so did Shelley. And Thomas Hardy, who did amazing things with formal verse, used it in a very interesting way in his poem “Friends Beyond.” The first and third lines of Hardy’s poem are 7-stress iambic lines; in other words, they are the “common meter” or ballad format, a four-stress line followed by a three-stress line, the old “Yellow Rose of Texas”/Emily Dickinson format. I discussed in an earlier column how Chuck Berry uses common meter in his song “Memphis,” but he deliberately puts an enjambment at the end of every fourth stress, so it comes out sounding like a seven-stress line. So Hardy’s first and third lines, the rhyming lines, are in common meter, and that’s a powerful poetic unit, one of the most powerful in English poetry, which is why it’s so widely used, and powerful enough that you almost don’t notice the little three stress line stuck in the middle of it: it’s short, it’s indented, it’s quite swallowed up by what goes before and after. But it suddenly gains prominence because it becomes the A rhyme for the next stanza. Wait…where did I hear that sound before? Oh, yes, that little inconsequential line in the middle. Maybe not so inconsequential after all. And all this is in the service of a poem by Thomas Hardy, master of pessimism, about how everything is inconsequential. William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!
“Gone,” I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads;
Yet at mothy curfew-tide,
And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,
They’ve a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide—
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave’s stillicide:
“We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote,
Unsuccesses to success,
Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought.
“No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress;
Chill detraction stirs no sigh;
Fear of death has even bygone us: death gave all that we possess.”
W. D.—“Ye mid burn the wold bass-viol that I set such vallie by.”
Squire.—“You may hold the manse in fee,
You may wed my spouse, my children’s memory of me may decry.”
Lady.—“You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take each household key;
Ransack coffer, desk, bureau;
Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the letters kept by me.”
Far.—“Ye mid zell my favorite heifer, ye mid let the charlock grow,
Foul the grinterns, give up thrift.”
Wife.—“If ye break my best blue china, children, I sha’n’t care or ho.”
All—“We’ve no wish to hear the tidings, how the people’s fortunes shift;
What your daily doings are;
Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat slow or swift.
“Curious not the least are we if our intents you make or mar,
If you quire to our old tune,
If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar afar.”
Thus, with very gods’ composure, freed those crosses late and soon
Which, in life, the Trine allow
(Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps beneath the moon,
William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly to me now.
A lagniappe rhyme, to a reader, is a little extra gift, to be ignored or appreciated, but there for you enjoy as you please. For the poet, too, it’s that little extra effort, one that forces you to create outside the box. If it’s a familiar lagniappe, like the interlocking rhyme of terza rima or the villanelle, it’s a challenge, and it can be a satisfying one if you make it work, but it’s kinda part of the box. But other forms, like the Spenserian stanza, may well fall farther outside our usual vocabulary of form. The stanza that Edmund Spenser used in The Faerie Queen: A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruel markes of many'a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead as living ever him ador'd:
Upon his shield the like was also scor'd,
For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had:
Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,
But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;
Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.
The rhyme scheme is ABABBCBCC. It’s almost not that different from Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” quatrain, with one line from the first quatrain hooking into the second quatrain. Except it’s more than two quatrains. It’s nine lines long, and that’s decidedly odd. Some free verse poets like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olson have described constructing a line of poetry as a breath unit—a line should be the length of what you can say without running out of breath. Well, for a formalist poet, or, like me, a poet who writes in forms some of the time, there’s something similar—structural units that reach their natural conclusion just as surely as a breath unit reaches its—more surely, because a breath unit can be anything you say it is. But a quatrain is a powerful structural unit. Poems tend to want to be in quatrains. You can cut them short, into tercets, but you know you’re doing it, and you’re at least sort of aware that you’re saying “See, this isn’t a quatrain. I’m wrapping things up much more efficiently.” But the bloody Spenserian stanza is like a soccer match, where the game ends but they keep on playing anyway, another five minutes or so till the referee tells them to stop. What do you do with that fifth line? It can’t really be starting a new unit, because it rhymes with the line before. And it can’t exactly be ending the previous unit, because that was a quatrain, and we already ended it. So this is a new kind of challenge. Well, that’s what we live for, especially in writing formal poetry, which is all about finding natural solutions to unnatural problems. How does Spenser do it? Wow. He starts right off, in the first stanza, by giving us a perfect object lesson. The opening quatrain gives us the war-weary (but gentle) knight, clad in mighty armor which is dinted with the marks of old wounds, wounds that were received in not just one, but many battles. But then…what? The entire picture is reversed in a single line: “Yet armes till that time did he never wield.” Then he cuts (it’s amazing how cinematic many of these early poets were) to the angry horse, and the beginning of an action scene. The Spenserian stanza was used by John Keats in one of the greatest narrative poems in the English language, “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Here’s how he uses that lagniappe fifth line in the stanza introducing the lovesick heroine, Madeline: They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
Keats balances the line between quatrains about as perfectly as you can balance it. The first four lines introduce us to the idea that virgins, on this special night, can have a sexual awakening through a vision…If…and the fifth line lets us know there’s a catch. There’s an if. It’ll only work if ceremonies are done aright. And then, in the succeeding quatrain, we will be told what those ceremonies are. And of course, in the second quatrain there’s another lagniappe rhyme—Count Basie’s “just one more once!” That line about the supine lily white beauties – ooh, la la ! – which is not Madeline’s voice, repeating the mantra of what she must do. Rather, it takes us back to the voices of those libidinous old gossips who are giving Madeline this advice, and cackling up their sleeves as they do. Finally, the second quatrain shifts, in its last line, from iambic pentameter to an alexandrine—a six-stress line, letting us know that now we’re really winding this unit up. I’m just finishing up writing a long poem in Spenserian stanzas, “The Lay of Bisclavaret,” which will be one of the poems in my forthcoming book, The Romance of Willem and the Werewolf and Other Medieval French Lays (eFitzgerald Press, this fall), so I’ve been wrestling with these challenges for a while, and they can become quite addictive. But a last word—just one more once! When you’re using the devices of poetry—rhyme, meter, lineation, repetition—to tell a story, all of these devices are in the service of the story, not the other way around. |