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 for the next few days I’ll share a few of Small’s comments about specific poems.
One interesting “little verse the poet sent with a cocoon to her young nephew” (just three-years old at the time) reads as follows:
Drab Habitation of Whom?
Tabernacle or Tomb –
Or Dome of Worm –
Or Porch of Gnome –
Or some Elf’s Catacomb?
Small points out that the poem opens with two rhyming syllables, “Drab” and “hab,” and that they also rhyme with the opening syllable of the second line, “Tab.” Then, with just nineteen words in the entire poem, there are also end rhymes, internal rhymes, consonantal rhymes, eye rhymes and more.
“Such abundance of rhyme…” wrote Small, “is in part exploitation of the sound of language for its own sake. It is the sort of thing that delights children, and it delights in adults a residual fascination with the alogical acoustic element of language, those teasing things of meaning that elude the grasp of consciousness.”
Small continues, “Here, where full rhymes and partial rhymes intermingle without any pre-set pattern, the intricate phonic play offers a mysterious pleasure of its own that is particularly apt in a poem about the miracle of life-in-death that the cocoon enacts and the riddle that the cocoon spells as a possible emblem for those other catacombs, far more drab, that humankind contemplates. There is something haunting and something merry about this slight but forceful poem, both in its theme and in its modulations of rhyme-sounds.”
Small asserts, “Sometimes (Dickinson) seems to pile on sound effects almost for pure delight.”
I, for one, am delighted.
Tomorrow: Dickinson’s poem “most heavily laden with full rhyme.”
One interesting “little verse the poet sent with a cocoon to her young nephew” (just three-years old at the time) reads as follows:
Drab Habitation of Whom?
Tabernacle or Tomb –
Or Dome of Worm –
Or Porch of Gnome –
Or some Elf’s Catacomb?
Small points out that the poem opens with two rhyming syllables, “Drab” and “hab,” and that they also rhyme with the opening syllable of the second line, “Tab.” Then, with just nineteen words in the entire poem, there are also end rhymes, internal rhymes, consonantal rhymes, eye rhymes and more.
“Such abundance of rhyme…” wrote Small, “is in part exploitation of the sound of language for its own sake. It is the sort of thing that delights children, and it delights in adults a residual fascination with the alogical acoustic element of language, those teasing things of meaning that elude the grasp of consciousness.”
Small continues, “Here, where full rhymes and partial rhymes intermingle without any pre-set pattern, the intricate phonic play offers a mysterious pleasure of its own that is particularly apt in a poem about the miracle of life-in-death that the cocoon enacts and the riddle that the cocoon spells as a possible emblem for those other catacombs, far more drab, that humankind contemplates. There is something haunting and something merry about this slight but forceful poem, both in its theme and in its modulations of rhyme-sounds.”
Small asserts, “Sometimes (Dickinson) seems to pile on sound effects almost for pure delight.”
I, for one, am delighted.
Tomorrow: Dickinson’s poem “most heavily laden with full rhyme.”
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