Some of my recent posts have focused on Dickinson’s rhyme, her placement of words, her rhythm, her “tightly compressed style” – her “deliberate art.”
When it comes to Dickinson’s rhymes, various scholars have referred to them as “strangely deviant” as well as “unexpected,” “disruptive” and “unsettling.” Her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggested that she strive for a more traditional approach; however, she persisted in rhyming in her own way: “I could not drop the Bells whose jingling cooled my Tramp,” she wrote to Higginson in 1862.
Some researchers have suggested that due to Dickinson’s end-line rhymes, “the sound of a poem will somehow correlate with the ideas and feelings in the poem.” For example, one scholar, Henry Wells, held that “in the richly modulated music of her lyrics, full rhyme may be compared to the musician’s major mode, half-rhyme to the minor mode.”
Others, though, doubt “the possibility of drawing conclusions about rhyme beyond the level of individual poems.”
In her study of Dickinson’s rhymes, “Positive as Sound,” Judy Jo Small noted, “The recurrent idea that full rhymes indicate happiness or confidence while partial rhymes indicate sorrow or doubt has a strong appeal to common sense; the idea is elegant in its simplicity.”
“But,” she added, “as critics have seen, this appealing theory does not work very well unless we are willing to choose poems that accord with the theory and ignore many others.”
Case in point: Check out “There’s a certain Slant of light” – a poem with full rhymes in abcb arrangement even though it deals with despair.
Below: "There's a certain Slant of light" -- and be sure to check out the changes made to the poem by the editors when it was first published in 1890.
When it comes to Dickinson’s rhymes, various scholars have referred to them as “strangely deviant” as well as “unexpected,” “disruptive” and “unsettling.” Her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggested that she strive for a more traditional approach; however, she persisted in rhyming in her own way: “I could not drop the Bells whose jingling cooled my Tramp,” she wrote to Higginson in 1862.
Some researchers have suggested that due to Dickinson’s end-line rhymes, “the sound of a poem will somehow correlate with the ideas and feelings in the poem.” For example, one scholar, Henry Wells, held that “in the richly modulated music of her lyrics, full rhyme may be compared to the musician’s major mode, half-rhyme to the minor mode.”
Others, though, doubt “the possibility of drawing conclusions about rhyme beyond the level of individual poems.”
In her study of Dickinson’s rhymes, “Positive as Sound,” Judy Jo Small noted, “The recurrent idea that full rhymes indicate happiness or confidence while partial rhymes indicate sorrow or doubt has a strong appeal to common sense; the idea is elegant in its simplicity.”
“But,” she added, “as critics have seen, this appealing theory does not work very well unless we are willing to choose poems that accord with the theory and ignore many others.”
Case in point: Check out “There’s a certain Slant of light” – a poem with full rhymes in abcb arrangement even though it deals with despair.
Below: "There's a certain Slant of light" -- and be sure to check out the changes made to the poem by the editors when it was first published in 1890.
RSS Feed
