Internal Affairs

At various times in the past, I have featured bits and pieces from Judy Jo Small’s book “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme.”  I thumbed through the book again, and today I thought I’d share a bit in the book about Dickinson’s use of internal rhyme.

Here’s what Small wrote:

“While internal rhymes are not abundant in her poetry, there is a marked difference between the thoroughly conventional way they are used in the very early poems and the innovative way they are used in the poems of her middle and late career.  In the early verse, internal rhymes are chiefly ornamental appearing in the medial position and rhyming with the end word of the same line; this is what is sometimes called leonine rhyme (though in stricter usage the term is reserved for pentameters and hexameters).  The effect is one of a heightened formality, as for example in ‘Summer for thee, grant I may be.’”

​Small continued:

“In the later verse, however, internal rhymes are place irregularly and are usually aimed at particular expressive effects.  See, for instance, the jarring juxtaposition of ‘poured’ (an end word paired in a consonantal rhymed with ‘Bird’) and ‘Gored’ (the first word of the following line) in the middle of ‘His Bill is clasped – his Eye forsook.’”

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​Of this second poem, Small said, “The speaker’s outrage is underscored by the shock the reader experiences as expectations aroused by the mention of a ‘Joy…waiting to be poured’ are followed by a harsh enjambment to a stressed word with painful meaning and an abnormal clash of rhyme where rhyme does not belong.”