Recent posts have been about the tonal quality of rhymes, specifically the sound of full, traditional rhymes as compared to slant or partial rhymes.
Yesterday’s post also included a few lines from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson which emphasized the poet’s “peculiar sensitivity to such acoustic shifts.” Here’s one line from that letter where she is talking about seasonal changes:
“These Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music – shifting when it ease us most.”
In her book “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhymes,” Judy Jo Small spoke of the “phonic shifts of (Dickinson’s) rhymes” – and how these shifts revealed her “intuitive grasp of their affective value.”
One example where Small highlighted the poet’s “own sensitivity to the minor mode” was with the opening lines of poem 248:
Why – do they shut me out of Heaven?
Did I sing—too loud?
But—I can say a little "Minor"
Timid as a Bird!
“It is tempting to speculate about connections she might have made between partial rhyme and the ‘Minor.’ Did partial rhyme seem to her more ‘Timid,’ more hesitant and tentative, than full rhyme? Probably.”
Yesterday’s post also included a few lines from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson which emphasized the poet’s “peculiar sensitivity to such acoustic shifts.” Here’s one line from that letter where she is talking about seasonal changes:
“These Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music – shifting when it ease us most.”
In her book “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhymes,” Judy Jo Small spoke of the “phonic shifts of (Dickinson’s) rhymes” – and how these shifts revealed her “intuitive grasp of their affective value.”
One example where Small highlighted the poet’s “own sensitivity to the minor mode” was with the opening lines of poem 248:
Why – do they shut me out of Heaven?
Did I sing—too loud?
But—I can say a little "Minor"
Timid as a Bird!
“It is tempting to speculate about connections she might have made between partial rhyme and the ‘Minor.’ Did partial rhyme seem to her more ‘Timid,’ more hesitant and tentative, than full rhyme? Probably.”
 | In this poem, Dickinson did employ full rhyme in the second stanza (“more” and “door”), but kept to partial rhyme in the first and final stanzas: (“loud” and “bird,” and “Robe” and “forbid”). I’ll have another poem that plays on the word “minor” tomorrow -- and that poem rhymes "low" with "typify." LOL! Stay tuned! |
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