On Rhyme

Naomi Levine's "The Burden of Rhyme" and the origin of rhyming

Why rhyme? Whence? Familiarity makes it seem, in one sense, natural to the process of verse: rhyme, so prevalent in poetry for centuries, contradicted to some extent by blank verse—Milton justified his repudiation of rhyme in Paradise Lost as a return to the purer poetic logic of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (‘this neglect then of Rhime is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing’)—and more recently by the prominence of free verse and unrhymed forms in the twentieth-century, but still present and important. Why does it persist? Where did it come from?

The other day, rereading Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (I was teaching him), I was struck, not for the first time, by the extraordinary final rhyme in that great poem:

The breath whose might I have invok’d in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

I think the force of that rhyme derives from the way its climactic position lands not on a substantive noun, or a major word, but a simple verbal expression of existence: ‘star’ is ostentatiously lyric-poetic, but ‘…are’ is a common part of speech, albeit one that speaks to existence, being, permanence, presence. The rhyme finesses its effect, sliding from substance to verb. It’s very clever. A century and a half later, Thom Gunn reuses this rhyme in ‘Tom-Dobbin’, from Moly (1971): in this poem Tom, sexually aroused by watching two horses mating, folds his own experience of, we presume, self-stimulated orgasm with that of the stallion upon which he is spying, the whiteness of emission coming at the very end of the poem: ‘only a moment, just as it is done:/A shock of whiteness, shooting like a star,/In which all colours of the spectrum are’. But Gunn is copying, or remixing, Shelley for a reason: because that ‘star’/‘…are’ rhyme, especially in its terminal position, is so eloquent, so resonant. It works superbly. But why?

I’ve just read—and enjoyed very much—Naomi Levine’s The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism and the Feeling of Literary History (University of Chicago Press 2024). It is an account of rhyme as nineteenth-century theory and practice with Levine arguing that for the Victorians rhyme was not (as it was for the later ‘New Critics’, and as it still is, perhaps, for many critics today) a mere technique or item of aesthetic form, but rather that it actualised a historical narrative ‘a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing’:

Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods.

Levine’s title plays on the meanings of ‘burden’ as both form and content: ‘a temporal figure of repetition and continuity (a refrain) and also a theme or idea … my title also suggests a long tradition, revived in the twentieth-century, of viewing rhyme itself as a burden—an impediment to creative freedom.’

The Victorian historical-critical narrative is that rhyme as such was rooted in specific Medieval, Italian and Oriental heritages. Levine’s account of these three sources, as historiographically construing rhyme as a Victorian praxis, is detailed, expert, insightful, and always grounded in nineteenth-century sources, particularly the critical writing of Sismondi (better known for his Marx-adjacent sociological and historical writing, but someone very engaged with the history of poetry and rhyme in particular) and Arthur Hallam, Tennyson’s bestie, concerning whose premature death In Memoriam A. H. H. was written—a poem about which Levine says some very interesting things. The Burden of Rhyme unpacks Hallam’s theories of the origin of rhyme and how those ideas fed through into Victorian poetic practice. That’s part 1 of the monograph. The second part is given over to case-studies: chapters on the ‘historiographic form’ of rhyme in Tennyson (a no brainer, given the importance of Hallam to Levine’s thesis), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris and Coventry Patmore. I can see why Elizabeth Barrett Browning is brought in, to leaven the lump of dead-white-mannishness, although it seems to me a shame her husband Robert is mentioned only in passing, because his use of rhyme is really interesting, especially his sui generis, strangulated, labyrinthine rhyming-coupleted epic Sordello. Other omissions struck me: Morris is a notable poet, popular in his day if not so much now, someone who composed poetry by the yard rather than the inch, but if we’re looking at later century poets who do the most interesting things with rhyme, I’d suggest Swinburne (whose poems often don’t just rhyme at the line-endings, but rhyme all the way along the lines too) and W S Gilbert, or Edmund Clerihew Bentley.

But this is to touch on absences in Levine’s analysis. Gilbert’s extraordinary facility with comic rhyme, his ability to tuck rhyme into the exacting rhythms of Sullivan’s music, speaks to an aspect of rhyme Levine really doesn’t consider. Comic rhyme, either by linking incongruities (‘Pope’/‘grope’ say), or else with the polysyllabic ingenuity of, for instance, Byron’s ‘But, oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual/Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?’ is doing something integral to rhyme as such, and it’s not an aspect of the subject Levine considers. To step outside the Victorian era for a moment, ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ gains from the elegant folding together of Lehrer’s ‘it's not against any religion/To want to dispose of a pigeon’. Or another Lehrer favourite of mine ‘The Vatican Rag’:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And—genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doing the Vatican Rag.

That kyrie eleison rhyme is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and works because of its precision, its unexpectedness, and because it links English and ecumenical Greek so neatly, folding the words beautifully into the downward trill of the music.

Comic rhyme might seem like a sidebar in the history of rhyme in toto, but it’s actually a major element of Victorian poetic praxis. Another, important manifestation of rhyme is also largely missing from Levine’s analysis: children’s verse, nursery rhymes, nonsense. Levine mentions Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market in passing, but as sensual writing, not children’s verse (‘there is deranged hungering, sucking, gorging, squeezing and mauling: the poem overwhelms with a profusion of anaphora, similes, and erratic rhythms and rhymes’ [126]): but there’s nothing on Lear’s limericks, on Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hood, Mother Goose. I’ll come back to this.

Levine starts by challenging the separation of history and form she considers characteristic of New Criticism, which regarded form ahistorically. She proposes instead a genetic formalism: the idea ‘that a form’s history determines and explains its aesthetic effects, that its genesis is the key to understanding it as technique.’

Rhyme was at the center of nineteenth-century genetic-formalist thinking. For Romantic-era literary historians, European rhymed poetry began in medieval Provençal lyric, and so the form of rhyme remains an embodiment of medieval, romantic feeling it was invented to express. [20]

Rhyme epitomizes and actualizes ‘the feelings of romantic love—its specifically medieval varieties of desire and longing.’ Levine touches on several nineteenth-century versions of this thesis. August Schlegel in 1808 talked of ‘the grand division’ of romantic and classical verse in what Levine calls ‘baldly genetic terms’: ‘the poetry of the ancients [unrhymed classical verse] was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours [rhymed romantic verse] is that of desire; the former has its foundations in the scene which is present, and while the latter hovers between recollection and hope’. Madame de Staël in 1813 considered rhyme ‘a modern discovery’: ‘the image of hope and memory. One sound makes us desire another, corresponding to it; and when the second is heard it recalls that which has just escaped us.’ Levine glosses this as rhyme being ‘a structure of erotic desire and loss. Sismondi argued that rhyme was not invented by medieval troubadours, but borrowed by them from its originators, Arabic poets: although their rhyme is also ‘the prosodic form of romantic longing’.

We might ask: is this actually true? Levine sidesteps this question: ‘while it may or may not be historical fact that rhyme developed in language of longing,’ she says, ‘it remains the case that the Victorians widely believed in this history of rhyme’ [25]. I mean, I think it probably does matter if it’s true or not, but it serves Levine’s purpose to look only at Victorian verse. Her argument is that it was because Victorians believed this, and worked their rhyming poetry on such belief, that New Criticism with its treatment of form as ahistorical objectivity and close-reading was unable properly to apprehend Victorian verse. Her long second chapter, ‘Arthur Hallam and the Origins of Rhyme’, explicates Hallam’s theory, ‘his passionate belief in the Arabic and Italian origins of English literature and his affective theory of rhyme’, and sources its contexts: ‘Hallam borrowed his idea of the migration of rhyme from Arabic to Provençal poetry and the cultivation of rhyme’s expressive possibilities by the troubadours from Romantic literary history writing, most directly from Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sisimondi’s Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe (1813).’ She considers Hallam’s well-known review of Tennyson’s lyric poetry (1831) but also his less well known ‘Oration on the Influence of Italian Works of Imagination on the Same Class of Compositions in England’ (1831). Rhyme, for Hallam, is more than just the sonic pairing of two words at the end of lines; it’s ‘a whole prosodic system organized around assonantal resemblance and stanzaic patterning’. In all this ‘Hallam hears a long historical itinerary from Arabic to Provençal to Italian poetry’ [50] and so on to Chaucer and the Elizabethan poets. Levine unpacks the Orientalism, in Said’s sense, of this theory, and spends a long time on one sentence from the Oration, a sentence that ‘has since Hallam’s death become of the utterances most closely identified with his myth’:—‘Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope.’

Levine has a lot to say about this idea, unpacking it in detail, and contextualising it. She reads Provençal poet Jaufré Rudel, whom Sisimondi discusses: ‘Rudel has heard reports of a beautiful and virtuous Countess of Tripoli and fallen in love with her sight unseen. The lovelorn Rudel sets out on a boat to find his countess but gets sick on the journey [and dies] … Rudel was buried at Tripoli, beneath a tomb of porphyry, which the countess raised to his memory, with an Arabic description’ (Levine notes that that last Sisimondi’s sentence, in its 1823 English translation, is a ‘faintly rhyming formulation’, which is a nicely observed). She quotes Rudel’s verse as indicative of this amour de loin, loving from far away, love from afar, adding: ‘the poem doesn’t just describe amour de loin: it convinces us that rhyme intrinsically is amour de loin—a kind of long-distance longing.’ [73]

[A Romantic portrayal of Rudel singing to the Countess of Tripoli. the frontispiece of Étienne-François de Lantier’s play Geoffroy Rudel, ou le Troubadour (1825)]

This is worked into Levine’s major argument: that literary histories like Sisimondi's made Victorian poetry what it was.

Literary-historical ideas are legible in the shape of Victorian poems, in their lines and rhymes and stanzas. What has become merely, opaquely “form” was once transparently (or at least translucently) historical. [77]

In chapter 3 Levine reads In Memoriam in these terms: Tennyson's ABBA rhyme-scheme as embodying “amour de loin”: In Memoriam is a consummately romantic poem, a love poem patterned on the love poems ... of Petrarch, Dante and Rudel. Tennyson's elegy is about impossible love, the erotic amplification of long-distance desire and the blurring of desire and grief.’ The chapter on Barrett Browning demonstrates how carefully she read Hallam, and her ‘vexed relationship’ with his ideas, ‘particularly his accounts of Spanish assonantal poetry and of the historical convergences of epic and sonnet in English and Italian’; and she reads not just Barrett Browning’s rhymed verse, but shows how rhyme haunts her blank verse. The fifth chapter, ‘William Morris’s Fleshly Rhymes’, looks at the ‘conflation of rhyme and romantic love’ in a pre-Raphaelite context: attending particularly to the eroticism of rhyme in ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). Chapter 6, ‘Coventry Patmore’s Passionate Pause’ concentrates not on The Angel in the House but on Patmore’s elegiac odes, The Unknown Eros (1876).

There’s a great deal of fascinating and stimulating stuff in The Burden of Rhyme, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It has given me a new perspective on poets I thought I knew well—I’ll read Barrett Browning differently going forward, because of Levine’s analysis—and the book is full of brilliant insight and close-reading. But, to return to what I was saying above, I wonder about the main argument. Amour de loin is an element of Victorian poetry, no question; but there’s a lot more to Victorian poetry than that, in terms of topic and form.

It's maybe because I am re-reading Sordello at the moment that I’m struck how poorly Levine’s argument fits that poem—despite the fact that Browning’s elaborately rhymed epic is precisely about an Italian troubadour poet. Here’s the opening:

Who will, may hear Sordello's story told:
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The man, pursue his fortunes to the end,
Like me: for as the friendless-people's friend
Spied from his hill-top once, despite the din
And dust of multitudes, Pentapolin
Named o' the Naked Arm, I single out
Sordello, compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.
Only believe me. Ye believe?
                                                   Appears
Verona ... Never, I should warn you first,
Of my own choice had this, if not the worst
Yet not the best expedient, served to tell
A story I could body forth so well
By making speak, myself kept out of view,
The very man as he was wont to do,
And leaving you to say the rest for him.
Since, though I might be proud to see the dim

The ‘friendless-people's friend’ is Don Quixote, and Browning is right from the get-go identifying his epic as (he says so in a marginal note added to later editions) ‘a Quixotic attempt’, the subject of Sordello himself a murkily-seen windmill-giant on the horizon. The act of poeticising that figure, rendering that historical moment in textual form, is troped as a rip in reality, a huge tear as ‘the dim/Abysmal past divide its hateful surge.’ The rhymes are almost like sutures holding the roughly ripped wound together, linking past and present. Sometimes rhyme-words connect similarities, reinforcing the semantic equivalence with sonic echoing; but sometimes rhyme-words are of very different things, the sonic chime pulling against incongruity of meaning or register. This might register as a comic effect, or it might lean into grotesqueness, that contemporaries saw in Browning (as with Walter Bagehot's 1864 essay, “Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry”, which contrasts in its three styles Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning). ‘Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis’, Browning’s piece about a tedious book he was reading, written by the fictional author of the poem’s title, is a case in point: gorgeously grotesquery, rendering in part via the poem’s rhyme-scheme, the rhymes growing more elaborate as the book in question is deformed and contorted by nature.

Plague take all pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to bother the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
Just when the birds sang altogether,

Into the garden I brought it to read;
And under these arbutes and laurestine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal account;
And then proceeded to my revenge.

Yonder’s a plum-tree, with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine point-levis
In a castle of the middle age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he’d be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady’s chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.

Splash, went he, as under he ducked.
—I knew at the bottom rain-droppings stagnate:
Never a handful of blossoms I plucked
To bury him with, my book-shelf’s magnate:
Then I went in-doors, brought out a load,
Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.

Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
And sate in the midst with arms a-kimbo:
So I took pity, for learning’s sake,
And, de profundibus, accentibus laetis
Cantate, quoth I, as I got a rake,
And up I fished his delectable treatise.

Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O’er the page so beautifully yellow—
Oh, the droppings have played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grew, this fellow?
Here’s one stuck in his chapter six!

How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover;
When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife’s closet.

All that life, and fun, and romping,
All that frisking, and twisting, and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend’s leaves were swamping,
Clasps cracking, and covers suppling!
As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the Ballet in trowsers and tunic.

Come, old martyr! What, torment enough is it?
Back to my room shall you take your sweet self!
Good bye, mother-beetle: husband-eft, sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf.
A’s book shall prop you up, B’s shall cover you,
Here’s C to be grave with, or D to be gay,
And with E on each side, and F light over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the judgment-day!

The rhyming here is ingenious, curious, reinforcing the grotesque transformation the book undergoes. A poem about a book, a piece of writing about a piece of writing, renders rhyme as recursiveness, an infolding, that in turn applies a pressure of creative distortion that turns writing itself into Ariel’s something rich and strange. And, to go back to Sordello, this sense of maze-like introversion is part of the skein of rhyming in the poem; not, here, as gothic grotesqueness, but as warmth and fragrance, as the poem compares—‘rhymes’, we could say—Sordello the man, and Sordello’s homeland:

Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
Some happy lands, that have luxurious names,
For loose fertility; a footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices; mere decay
Produces richer life; and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

I’m not suggesting this isn’t sensual writing, or that rhyme one of the features here that activates the sensuality (as per Levine); but its effect is of richness and perversion, the recursive patterning of those maze-like rose-petals: consummation, not longing. Overlading. The labyrinthine rhyme-scheme of the poem, twining like bindweed across the frame of the couplets, the syntax.

Then wide
Opened the great morass, shot every side
With flashing water through and through; a shine,
Thick steaming, all alive. Whose shape divine
Quivered i’ the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
Athwart the flying herons? He advanced,
But warily; though Mincio leaped no more,
Each foot-fall burst up in the marish floor
A diamond jet: and if you stopped to pick
Rose-lichen, or molest the leeches quick,
And circling blood-worms, minnow, newt or loach,
A sudden pond would silently encroach
This way and that.

This is rhyme not out of the troubadour, Italian or Arabic tradition, but out of Chapman, Arthur Golding, Donne and the metaphysicals. No amour de loin for those leeches, blood-worms and newts (they’re not loin enough away for me, frankly: ugh!) and a rich intricacy in the way the rhyming cuts across the syntax and the couplet form. ‘Shape divine’ is a cliché, yes, but deliberately deployed to break against the previous line’s ‘shine’, the mid half-rhyme of ‘flying’.

I don’t mean to overstress Sordello just because I happen to be rereading it at the moment. I recently substacked about Alicia Stalling’s wonderful poem ‘Alice in the Looking Glass’, which treats, with great skill, rhyme as a complex mirroring that replicates and inverts. Or consider Les Murray’s 1998 poem ‘Glaze’. Here are two stanzas from its opening:

Tiles are mostly abstract:
tiles come from Islam:
tiles have been through fire:
tiles are a sacred charm:

Harm fades from the spirit as tiles
repeat time beyond time their riddle,
neat stanzas that rhyme from the middle
styles with florets with tendrils of balm.

Murray is taking the repeating patterns in his tiles as a type of rhyme and replicating it in his poem, so that the lines rhyme tile-wise, at the end of the line (islam/charm/balm, riddle/middle) but in patterns from the start of lines to the ends (harm/balm, repeat/neat, styles/tiles, spirit/floret) and in repetition as the closest of rhymes: the four ‘tiles’ at the start of the lines in the first stanza, or ‘time/time’ in the second, themselves rhyming with ‘rhyme’ in the next line. It’s a technically accomplished piece of rhyme-writing, but although we might consider the orientalism of the poem’s burden, the use of rhyme is surely not about romantic love and longing; it is about connection, the beauty of intersection and pattern.

What about the actual origins of rhyme? Levine is entitled to sidestep the question of whether this Victorian theory, that it comes out of ‘Arabia’, via Italian and Provençal, is correct or not, for the purposes of her focus on poetry by poets who believed it was. But it seems to me unlikely that something as intuitive as rhyme could have so late, and location-specific, a single origin. This brings me back to children’s verse. Here’s Michael McKie:

Rhyme appeared in English verse in the late seventh century, yet since it first emerged elsewhere around I000 BC, we can safely assume an external source and point of transmission. In the past, critics viewed rhyme as the invention of the Barbarians who conquered the Roman Empire. According to Campion: ‘in those lack-learning times, and in barbarized Italy, began that vulgar Poesie which is now in use throughout most parts of Christendome, which we abusively call Rime and Meeter.’ The notion of an Italian or Arabic source in the eighth century prevailed until the early nineteenth century, when Sharon Turner pointed to a much earlier use of rhyme in Church Latin of the fourth and fifth centuries. The most detailed modern study of rhyme, by Henry Lanz [The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford University Press 1931)] accepted the origin within early Latin hymnology, but indicated that such hymns, notable the De judicio domini, first appeared in the Roman province of North Africa about AD 200. Lanz recorded that rhyme was used in classical Latin verse, and although most scholars have seen such uses as accidental or the result of grammatical parallelism some have argued that they were sustained and deliberate. [McKie, ‘The Origins and Early Development of Rhyme in English Verse’, Modern Language Review 92:4 (1997), pp. 817-831]

This is a different perspective than Levine’s, but even here an origin point of AD200 seems late to me. The problem is that compiling a history of rhyme is limited to finding instances of rhyme in surviving literary sources: works written down, copied, and later printed. But this is only a small proportion of poetry, much of which (a majority) has not survived transmission, and some of which was never written down in the first place. Who knows what nursery songs and poems parents and nurses recited to their children? Folk poetry was not begun to be collected and published until the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries; millennia or oral traditions have not survived. Surely much of this rhymed: ballads and folk-verse, nursery rhymes.

Carroll’s ‘You Are Old Father William’ (1865) is rhymed (not a particularly ornate or complex rhyme-scheme, but a comically effective one) and actualises a kind of larger rhyme, in that it echoes or copies with chiming variation Robert Southey’s dully didactic poem ‘The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them’. But this is a rhyming that finds joyous connectivity in the

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
    "And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
    "I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
    Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    "I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
    Allow me to sell you a couple."

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
    Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
    What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
    Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"

As rhymes, these rattle neatly home, and give comic force to the to-and-fro between father and son, and between youth and age: but the suggested Punch-and-Judy violenkce of the last (hilarious) stanza is also a kind of rhyme, in the sense of connection: of fist to face, of boot to backside. Edward Lear is a particularly missed omission from Levine’s book, since his invention of the limerick form (we could say something similar about the Clerihew) generates all its force and comedy from the arbitrariness of its rhymes. It is, of course, a point of contention as to whether Lear’s refusal to come up with a third rhyme for the final line of his limericks is a blot or a sly touch of genius. Still: there’s neither memory nor hope, but rather splendid randomness and productive energy, in what Lear does with rhyme:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’

There was an Old Man with a nose,
Who said, ‘If you choose to suppose,
That my nose is too long,
You are certainly wrong!’
That remarkable Man with a nose.

There was a Young Lady whose bonnet,
Came untied when the birds sate upon it;
But she said: ‘I don't care!
All the birds in the air
Are welcome to sit on my bonnet!’

There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a Bee;
When they said, ‘Does it buzz?’
He replied, ‘Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee!’

Perhaps the contrast here is between a fundamentally Freudian theory of desire as inevitably and always indexing a lack, and the Deleuze-Guattarian anti-oedipal notion that desire is not lack, but a positive force, outflowing and connecting rhizomatically with other lines of desire. We could say that the only reason the Old Man with a Beard has so many fearful avian squatters in his facial hair is that beard and feared happen to rhyme; or that the only reason the bee-bothered man is in a tree in the first place is because that word rhymes with bee. But the glorious open-hearted, quasi-Wordsworthian acceptance of the whole of the natural world manifested by the YoungWoman with a Bonnet is a marvellous and inspiring thing, rhyme-determined though it is.