Fresh Strange Music by Donald S. Hair

Author:Donald S. Hair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Creation’s self’s a poem, written

In lovelier rhymes than I can hit on;

And I was taught by winds pathetic

Thro’ shaken woods, to be poetic.

(BC 3: 236; also in WEBB 5: 534–5, lines 241–4)

The dove affirms that her mistress “still . . . learns in nature’s college, / And has a little sound Dove-knowledge” when it comes to rhyming.

Part of EBB’s practice of being “poetic” was her experiments with “double rhymes.” By that term she meant (what we would refer to as) feminine rhymes, where the rhyming words are disyllabic and the accent falls on the penultimate syllable. EBB’s attitude toward double rhymes was, at least on one occasion, itself double, for she told Mary Russell Mitford in October 1842 that the practice was one she tried to avoid, but at the same time she considered double rhymes “natural,” an adjective we can understand explicitly as fitting the character of the English language and implicitly as consonant with world harmony. “In these new poems,” she writes to Mitford, “a few double rhymes have escaped me – but they came so naturally that I cd. scarcely say ‘no.’ Miss Landon overflows with ‘double rhymes’ – & I do not quite understand the objection” (BC 6: 99). A week later she sent new verses to Mitford, saying that “They ran away from me with their double rhymes, before I considered properly; but as you did not object to the last I sent you, & as the double rhyme does certainly always seem to me to give an appropriate lightness to the short lyric, I venture to leave the verses as they are, – in their natural state” (BC 6: 110). The volumes of 1844, she told Hugh Stuart Boyd in August of that year, “have more double rhymes than any two books of English poems that ever to my knowledge were printed, – I mean, of English poems not comic” (BC 9: 96). Her defence of double rhymes rests upon their usefulness: “what an admirable effect in making a rhythm various & vigorous, double rhyming is, in English poetry.” At the same time, she reminds Boyd that, “of double rhymes in use, which are perfect rhymes, you are aware how few there are,” and hence she claims “a certain license” in pairing them, though not without “much thoughtful study of the Elizabethan writers.” Her final appeal, however, is to the nature of English itself: “And do you tell me, you who object to the use of a different vowel in a double rhyme, . . . why you rhyme (as everybody does, without blame from anybody) ‘given’ to ‘Heaven,’ when you object to my rhyming ‘remember’ and ‘chamber’? The analogy surely is all on my side – and I believe that the spirit of the English language is, also” (BC 9: 96).

Double rhymes affected EBB’s classification of verses. Hugh Stuart Boyd had objected to her calling lines of ten syllables “octosyllabic,” and she fired back by asking,

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