WORLD ATLAS OF POETIC TRADITIONS

Rhyme

As English speakers, we're used to rhyme. In our music and poetry, rhyme is dime a dozen all the time.

Rhyme, we normally think, is when the vowel of the last stressed syllable and everything after it is the same, but the consonant before it is different. "Happy" and "flappy" rhyme; "sad" and "mad" and "bad" rhyme; "tutor" and "computer" rhyme; "orange" appears to rhyme only with "sporange", an obscure word referring to the spore sacs of fern plants that not even botanists care to know.

But on another level, we don't seem to agree with this definition—at least not totally. In a recent video, the rapper Eminem successfully rhymes "orange" with "door hinge", "four-inch", and "syringe". None of these are rhymes in the traditional English definition. What gives?

Forms of rhyme

English already has a notion of perfect rhyme ("oranges and sporanges") and half-rhyme ("oranges on door hinges"). Look at the following stanza from an Emily Dickinson poem:

"Soul" and "all" are half-rhymes, but this hardly dints the artistic achievement of the poem. English poetry is permissive of rhymes that aren't perfect.

English half-rhyme works on an "I know it when I hear it" basis. In some languages, this is far more systematized.

Enter the wondrous world of Irish rhyme groups.

This allows for some interesting possibilities. In the following medieval Irish song with an ABCB rhyme scheme, English speakers would be inclined to see three perfect rhymes, one half rhyme (seng and chenn), and one stanza that doesn't rhyme at all (muir and luig).

NÁ LUIG

Ná luig, ná luig,

fót fora taí;

gairit bia faír,

fota bia faí.

Ná len, ná len,

in domun cé,

ná car, ná car

sel bec a ré.

Ná sir, ná sir

in saegul seng,

ná gab, ná gab

ná tuit 'na chenn.

Baí sunn indé,

ba gel a gné,

ní fil indiu

acht 'na chrú fó chré.

Atá 'na rith

mar théit in muir,

teich úaid i céin,

ná héir, ná luig.

THE WORLD

Take no oath, take no oath

by the sod you stand upon;

you walk it short while,

your burial is long.

Pay no heed, pay no heed

to the world and its way,

give no love, give no love

to what lasts but a day.

Have no care, have no care

for the meaningless earth,

lay not hold, lay not hold

on its gaeity and mirth.

A man fair of face

was here yesterday;

now he is nothing

but blood beneath clay.

The world is running out

like the ebbing sea;

fly far from it

and seek safety.

Anonymous. From Medieval Irish Lyrics, translated by James Carney, 1967.

Because Irish has a broader conception of rhyme, the poem is actually four perfect rhymes (three rhymes between vowels and one Group 5 rhyme) with an arguable half-rhyme ("-g" and "-r" are in different rhyme groups, but "-g" sounds close to "-gh" which does rhyme with "-r") to conclude.

Locations of rhyme

Just as the English conception of what a rhyme may be is relatively restricted, so is its notion of where a rhyme may go. In traditional English poetry, systematic rhymes almost always fall at the end of the line. But even within English, there are some inklings that this might not always be the case. Modern song lyrics use non-end rhymes extensively:

My squad is real and holds it down the hardest regardless

Besides of the largest, we polish the floor with the rawest hardcore artists

Flawless victory you niggas can't do shit to me

Physically lyrically hypothetically realistically

"Beware", Big Pun, 1998.

Hey Jude, don't make it bad

Take a sad song and make it better

Remember to let her into your heart

Then you can start to make it better

Hey Jude, don't be afraid

You were made to go out and get her

The minute you let her under your skin

Then you begin to make it better

"Hey Jude", The Beatles, 1968.

The first is an instance of internal rhyme, the second of hook rhyme (a scheme in which a line has two different rhyming parts, one rhyming with a line before it and the other with a line after it).

In the literary traditions of some languages, internal and hook lines are far more systematic and are emphasized by the meter itself. The Vietnamese epic poem The Tale of Kiều is written in the lục-bát meter that alternates iambic trimeters (six-syllable lines) with tetrameters (eight-syllable lines). The benefits of such a meter of alternating syllable length to hook rhyming are obvious.

The Tale of Kiều, Nguyễn Du, 1820, translated by Huỳnh Sanh Thông, 1973

The alternating meter accentuates the rhyme scheme, which goes that the end rhyme of an eight-syllable line should be rhymed in the sixth syllables of the next two lines, but thanks to the meter ends up meaning that every even syllable is hook-rhymed and links the whole poem together.

Alliteration

English speakers will also know what alliteration is: it's when someone speaks saying the same or similar sounds (especially consonants) again and again.

Poets and songwriters alliterate all the time for effect, but systematic alliteration isn't very common (this could be psychological; there are findings that American elementary schoolers grasp rhyme much earlier than alliteration). The best-studied example is traditional Germanic poetry, and in the "What is Poetry?" page we looked at an example from Old Norse.

But even with alliteration, our notion of "alliteration is when consonants repeat" isn't universal, any more than our understanding of rhyme is. Alliteration is systematic in Mongolian poetry (the first words of lines should alliterate), but in a much more restricted definition, in which the vowel must also match. "Sun" and "sea" don't alliterate in Mongolian, though "sun" and "sullen" would.

(Some leeway is given in that "i" and "e", "o" and "u", and "ö" and "ü" are considered the same vowel for alliterative purposes.)

Küseltei sonin udqa uyangya kemegči

Köke egüle salkin-a körbektu metü

Kümun-ü sedkil-i ködelgen ese čidabasu

Könggen bir-i kösin yaγu kimüi

If poetry, [though] lovely [and] curious,

Cannot move the human heart,

Like the winds roll the blue [sky's] clouds,

Why should one lift the light brush [to write]?

You feel like the "ke" in "kemegči" or the "ki" in "kimüi" should be red too... But they don't alliterate, at least not in Mongolian.

Meanwhile, alliterative techniques themselves can be a lot more elaborate than English's. Consider the Welsh principle of cynghanedd, or "harmony", which specifies the arrangement of consonants in a line.

"The Seagull", of which the first four lines are quoted below, is perhaps the most famous in Welsh literature. The first and fourth lines here show cynghanedd groes, "cross-harmony", which means that the order of consonants in the first half of the line repeats in the second. The second line displays cynghanedd draws, "partial cross-harmony", which means that there is a non-alliterated section in the middle of the line. The third line is in cynghanedd sain "sound harmony", which means that the first and second parts of the line rhyme, while the second and third parts alliterate.

(In Welsh, "w" and "y" are always vowels; the translation is prose):

"The Seagull", Dafydd ap Gwilym, 1340s. From A Celtic Miscellany, translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, 1951

Parallelism

Syntactic parallelism

We've examined Biblical Hebrew semantic parallelism in the relevant section of the "What is Poetry?" page. But some traditions have parallelism that focuses more on syntax and word order than Hebrew does. The Classical Chinese lüshi is an eight-line poem divided into four highly parallelistic couplets, as in this example, written by the poet Du Fu in an age when the capital of China was sacked by rebels and the country torn apart by civil war:

"Spring Gaze", Du Fu, 757. From The Selected Poems of Du Fu, translated by Burton Watson, 2002.

The parallelism is much clearer, and the poem's enhanced much enhanced, with a word-by-word translation. The caesura is marked with a bar.

In lüshi, the second and third couplets must be parallel, word-by-word both syntactically (in terms of parts of speech) and semantically (in terms of meaning). The use of parallelism in the first couplet is optional. All this is done expertly:

In this case of syntactic parallelism (and in Chinese poetry generally), only the structure is parallel, not the individual words. This isn't usually the case.

The Shona are the most numerous ethnic group of the country of Zimbabwe, with a language featuring two dozen noun classes (French, by contrast, has only two, masculine and feminine; German has just three, the French ones plus a neuter). Traditional Shona poetry demands a form of parallelism called linking. When two lines or stanzas are linked, the first unit of the second line repeats the first unit of either the first or last word of the first line. Most of the time, this unit is a prefix marking the noun class, with the effect that the main noun of the second line parallels the noun class of the first.

This isn't quite the same thing as alliteration. Shona noun class prefixes have a lot of variations and are sometimes even skipped entirely, but for the purposes of linking, all variations on the prefixes (even the null prefix where the prefix is omitted) for the same noun class are allowed. Not only that, the linking unit doesn't have to be a prefix—it can be a word or even longer. So Shona poetry counts as using syntactic parallelism, just of a sort utterly alien to someone like Du Fu.

Noun Class 1 prefixes are marked red, Noun Class 7 prefixes light blue. (The fourth line has no parallelism.) Hékaní "Thank you" is just a generic word to set up the stanza and does not count in linking:

Anonymous. From What is Poetry?: Language and Memory in the Poems of the World, Nigel Fabb, 2015.

Repetition

Some parallelistic structures do the complete opposite of Chinese; whole lines and even stanzas are repeated wholesale, adding further rhythm to the work. This is very common in English song lyrics, where specific lines are repeated as refrains.

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", adapted from "The Star", Jane Taylor, 1806.

Refrains do not have to have semantic content (i.e. mean anything), as seen in this Christmas carol:

"Deck the Halls", Thomas Oliphant, 1862.

This sort of parallelism goes to an extreme in the poetic traditions of some languages. In the very short Coast Tsimshian "Song of the Geese", said to be the call of geese who have had their sight restored by a deity, every line is repeated three times. This is echoed in the internal organization of each line, which is divided into three syntactic units (marked by bars) and sung in three eighth note-sixteenth note units separated by pauses.

"Song of the Geese". From "Structural Organization in Coast Tsimshian Music", John Mulder.

Paired words

Another very common form of parallelism is to have lines that are identical in all respects except for a few key terms. These key contrasting terms work together to emphasize the overall meaning of the poem.

These paired words are usually metaphors or synecdoches, sometimes self-evidently and in other cases requring cultural context. The following poem, a ritual recitation from the Indonesian island of Rote, has both. Paired words are bolded:

Se ana-mak?

  Na basang-ngita ana-mak.

Ma se falu-ina?

  Na basang-ngita falu-ina.

Fo la-fada lae

  Manu Kama dala Dain

  Ma Tepa Nilu eno Selan.

    Na basang-ngita ta enon

    Ma basang-ngita ta dalan.

Sosoa-na nai dae bafak kia nde,

  Bena,

    Ana-mak mesan-mesan

    Ma falu-ina mesan-mesan.

  De mana-sapeo nggeok

  Do mana-kuei modok ko,

    Se ana-ma sila boe

    Ma falu-ina sila boe.

Who is an orphan?

  All of us are orphans.

And who is a widow?

  All of us are widows.

They speak of

  Manu Kama's road to Dain

  And Tepa Nilu's path to Selan.

    All of us have not his path

    And all of us have not his road.

This means that on this earth,

  Then,

    Each person is an orphan

    And each person is a widow.

  Those who wear black hats

  Or those who wear green slippers,

    They will be orphans too

    And they will be widows too.

Anonymous. From "Manu Kama's Road, Tepa Nilu's Path", translated by James J. Fox, 1988.

The notion conveyed by pairing "orphan" and "widow" should be obvious. The point of pairing "black hats" and "green slippers" is less intuitive, but you can probably guess from context that they refer to what the rich and privileged would wear in a tropical island. With cultural context, you could also figure out that since these are both originally European clothes and green and black are colors associated with north and west in Rotenese, the two words are an allusion to the European masters of Rote during the colonial era.

Finally, there's one pair that's completely undecipherable without knowing Rotenese mythology: "Manu Kama's road to Dain" and "Tepa Nilu's path to Selan". Manu Kama and Tepa Nilu are two different names for an ancient hero, and Dain/Selan is the place where he was buried. The two terms thus mean something like "the hero's road to death".

The phrase "all of us have not his path" reminds the listener that even Manu Kama was doomed to die, even though the path of life Manu Kama led was more heroic than any of the listeners'. The destination—"the tomb-house on Selan / the earthen grave on Dain", as another chant says—is fixed, unchanging, unchangeable. And almost all of us, at the very end, are orphans and widowers.