When They Don’t Rhyme
We were getting work done on the house we had just bought. I would talk to the various contractors for repiping, for windows, for shutters, and every time they asked me for a decision about color or placement, I would tell them I had to talk to my wife about it, along with the price and details and such. And they would make that face and say they understood because “happy wife, happy life.”
When I heard it enough times, I recollected a few thoughts on rhyme poetry during the early days of Modern English, when they were still contributing to the construction of the language we now know. This book was mentioning the power of rhyme when you were trying to place two ideas on the same footing. When words rhymed, it was to accentuate a connection they shared. I had never thought of that before, how in rhyming poetry, you could (and perhaps should) consider the words that are rhyming and their relationships within the wider canvas of stanzas and other words. I liked the idea, but the example of wife and life the book used could clearly not be used today without sounding hackneyed. The fact that those words rhyme give nothing if not that they happen to rhyme in English. What could have been a profound discovery four hundred years ago becomes nothing but a circumstance today, and the connections between the meaning of your life and how it is allied with a person you would call wife could no longer float.
This life-wife poetry is skipping across the surface of reality to make the fasteners that hold them together nothing more than incidental to a language. Perfect rhyme in old western poetry can mean one thing — and that is a strong binding; whereas slant rhyme might give us a slightly skewed meaning. But if the words you intend do not happen to rhyme — what then?