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Stations of the Breath: End Rhyme in the Verse of Dylan Thomas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
Starting where Yeats and Owen left off, Dylan Thomas developed a system of consonantal correspondences which moved rhyme from the matching of same to the matching of similar sounds. His early verse abounded in such devices as zero consonance (rhyming, in a context of consonance, all syllables ending in an open vowel), partial consonance (rhyming two consonant clusters one of which is deficient in one or two members), close consonance (rhyming consonants which are phonetically similar rather than identical), and frame rhyme (rhyming words marked by both alliteration and consonance). In “Then was my neophyte” Thomas built an elaborate stanza by systematically associating and contrasting rhyming syllables according to the degrees of likeness among them. During the later thirties, however, he began to exercise increasing restraint in his use of the more unconventional of these consonantal devices; and although an unprecedented system of rhymes, founded upon assonance, began to take shape throughout the forties, it never quite attained the hierarchical articulation of the earlier consonant-based system. Instead, Thomas' latest work (his unfinished “Elegy”, for example) shows him preoccupied, just before his untimely death, with the exploration of simple, even quite traditional, stanzas based almost entirely upon conventional true rhyme.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969
References
1 Because many words in consonance are spelled alike (e.g., prove: love), they were early referred to as “eye rhymes” or “spelling rhymes,” with the uneasy implication that what a poet composed was not the sounds of syllables on the air but marks on a scrap of paper, that some poets at least could not tell their eyes from their ears. But the appeal to spelling could never have provided a satisfactory cover for, say, Shelley's use of rhymes like blood: cloud (“Prometheus Unbound”); some: tomb, forth: earth (“The Triumph of Life”); or knife: grief (“Adonais”).
The expression “true rhyme” is simply intended to refer unambiguously to the classic definition, which requires that two words must agree exactly in their accented vowels and following consonants; should the rhyme words exceed one syllable, al! sounds subsequent to the accented vowel must also agree.
2 The few examples of consonance in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1959) that seem to anticipate Yeats's later practice (e.g., “The Madness of King Goll”) are the result of revisions which date mostly from the mid-twenties. See The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Alt and Russell K. Alspach (New York, 1957).
3 There are a fair number of precedents in Shelley, some of which have been given in note 1; Edgerton Smith in The Principles of English Metre (London, 1923), p. 178, cites a six-line stanza from Mrs. Browning's Swan's Nest that has alone: down, meadow: shadow, and grass: face. He also notes the triplet crowd: road: god from D. G. Rossetti's The White Ship.
4 For an authoritative theoretical description of these “complex vocalic nuclei” in linguistic terms see George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., An Outline of English Structure, Studies in Linguistics: Occasional Papers, No. 3 (Washington, D. C., 1957), pp. 15–22, especially sect. 1.32. Bars enclose phonemes; when letters are referred to as such they are italicized. The phonemic symbols used in this paper are /r/ as in row, /I/ as in low, /n/ as in no, /m/ as in mow, /n/ as in sing, /d/ as in dental, /t/ as in tone, // as in breathe, // as in breath, /s/ as in sea, /z/ as in zero, /f/ as in Orce, /v/ as in verse.
5 William York Tindall, Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas (New York, 1962), p. 12. See also John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (New York, 1955), p. 268.
6 The basic authority for publication dates is J. Alexander Rolph, Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography (New York, 1956). For manuscript dates, I have consulted Ralph N. Maud's article “Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems: Chronology of Composition,” PMLA, lxxvi (June 1961), 292–297. W. Y. Tindall's Reader's Guide is a handier source for publication dates and the more interesting manuscript dates; I have adopted his notation identifying Maud's conjectures by a following question mark.
7 A second quatrain is suggested by an enclosing rhyme: CBDC. Instead of ending with a usual sestet of quatrain and couplet or pair of tercets, Thomas has a bastard five-line “sestet” of tercet and couplet rhymed EED AB. The divisions of the sense do not always agree with the formal rhyme scheme.
8 Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York, 1957), pp. 19–20. All page references in the text, unless otherwise identified, are to this edition. Some of the rhymes in this example (e.g., know: eye) belong to types of consonance discussed below.
9 This difference in pronunciation may be clearly heard on Thomas' recording of this poem on Caedmon TC 1018.
10 “Wilfred Owen,” Quite Early One Morning (New York; 1960), pp. 125—126; henceforth referred to here as Quite Early.
11 Zero consonance occurs in W. H. Auden's Poems (London, 1930): betray: blue (p. 41), to-day: do (p. 44). The influence of Auden's usage on Thomas' is hard to estimate because both probably derive from Owen's.
12 Examples from Thomas are: sea: straw (“I see the boys of summer”); snow: dew: day (“Before I knocked”); eye: roe (“When once the waters of your face”); eye: o (“When, like a running grave”); ago: sea (“A grief ago”).
13 Wilfred Owen, “The Show,” The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (London, 1963), p. 50.
14 Katherine Taylor Loesch, “Prosodie Patterns in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas” (unpub. diss., Northwestern Univ., 1961), p. 83.
15 Some examples are hair: thigh and tree: hair from “If I were tickled by the rub of love,” air: straw from “My world is pyramid,” deny: shore from “The seed at zero,” and sea: shore from “Do you not father me.”
16 This example also has an added consonant after the rhyme sound. See below for a discussion of this practice.
17 Intrusive post-vocalic r is common in Owen. Thomas, in the lecture on Owen cited above, reads poems containing these examples: turn: tan: Town, death: earth (“A Terre”); moan: mourn, wild: world, world: walled (“Strange Meeting”). Representative samples from Thomas are: heart: light, turned: sand (“When once the twilight locks no longer”); tomb: worm, veins: suns: forwarns (“A process in the weather of the heart”).
18 Examples are: lots: halts (“Light breaks where no sun shines”); salt: sheet (“My world is pyramid”); scold him: hide him (“The seed at zero”); fault: night (“The hunchback in the park”).
19 Examples from Thomas are: land: wind: dead (“A process in the weather of the heart”); land: fade (“I fellowed sleep”); blood: bread: wind (“This bread I break”); drowned: rind: wounds: blood (“Why east wind chills”). Non-resonant intrusive consonants are unusual even in Thomas and are generally supported by assonance or vowel rhyme (e.g., coasts: notes in “Here in this spring”) so that they are associated with close rhyme rather than with consonance.
20 This operation is hereafter symbolized by the sign $pL before the consonant sound.
21 Some of the many examples of / + z/ in Thomas are: tickles: chuckle (“If I were tickled by the rub of love”); cloud: gods (“Incarnate devil”); records: tides: food (“How soon the servant sun”). One example each will do for the rest: /$pLs/ shape: maps (“Foster the light”); /$pLd/ stone: ground (“Shall gods be said to thump the clouds”); /$pLt/ clock: insect (“Here in this spring”). Thomas also uses this device in association with close rhyme; see, e.g., “A Winter's Tale.”
22 Most of the phonemes Thomas uses in close consonance differ in only one unit component. Unit components are defined as distinctive articulatory and/or phonal features of phonemes; they both distinguish any phoneme from all others taken as a group, and “cross-relate groups of phonemes that share in the same features” (Loesch, p. 8).
23 Mrs. Loesch, in her deductive listing of “syllable weighting or riming devices” uses the adjective “close” as I have here. She does not give separate names to the two kinds of partial consonance or to zero consonance, though her schema takes them into account under the single heading of “consonance.” See her discussion, pp. 122–124.
24 Shelley has ruin: pursuing (/n =/) in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” but this was probably a true rhyme in his day; he also has breathe: death (/=0/) in “Hellas.” Yeats has /f = v/ at least twice: enough: grove in “Solomon and the Witch” and move: enough in Meditations in Time of Civil War (st. iv); he also has /s = z/ several times though not before Last Poems (1936–39). Two of Owen's poems quoted in Thomas' lecture have /s = z/: eyes: bless (“Strange Meet–ing”), and use [pronounced with an /s/]: disease: eyes (“A Terre”); and one (“Exposure”) has /t = d/: fruit: afraid.
Some examples of the commoner types of close consonance in Thomas are: /z = s/ was: cross (“I see the boys of summer”), /=f/ breathe: half (“Today, this insect”), /n = m/ sun: dream (“When once the twilight locks no longer”); /n=/ stone: sun: rang (“Among those killed in the dawn raid was a man aged a hundred”), / = m/ diving: venom (“Altarwise by owl-light”), /v = f/ grave: laugh (“My world is pyramid”).
25 Internal frame rhyme is frequent in the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but never takes the place of terminal true rhyme.
26 Commenting on a poem by Dorothy Wellesley, Yeats remarks that “the rhyme of ‘lord’ and ‘loud’ ... is not admissible in any prosody,” and suggests bid and loud instead. Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (New York, 1940), p. 186.
27 We should also note, in passing, the restrained handling of frame rhyme in this poem: it is used only to reinforce the B rhymes of each stanza (except stanza iii where the B rhymes are true rhymes).
28 The charting of Thomas' more elaborate rhyme schemes requires that the degree of likeness (and difference) be indicated in some manner. I have adopted for this purpose the device of adding a superscript to the letter designating a rhyme group, to indicate that the rhyme so marked belongs to a subclass of the main group and differs in some particular from unmarked members or from those bearing a different superscript.
29 John Malcolm Brinnin in Dylan Thomas in America claims to have seen “more than 200 separate and distinct [MS] versions” of “Fern Hill” (p. 125).
80 The last three mentioned poems introduce a new prosody to English verse based on syllable-count rather than the accentual-syllabic or stress-counting systems in common use and substituting terminal assonance for true rhyme.
31 David Holbrook, Llareggub Revisited (London, 1962), p. 1S3. The pattern for the “Poem in October” stanza in terms of the number of syllables per line is: 9, 12, 9, 3, 5, 12, 12, S, 3 9.
32 Holbrook, p. 153.
33 Tindall, pp. 185–186.
34 Tindall, p. 184.
35 Tindall, p. 184.
36 Thomas' recording of this poem (included in Pleasure Dome, ed. Lloyd Frankenberg, Columbia ML 4259) leaves no doubt about the pronunciation of these words.
37 Loesch, p. 123.
38 This poem was reconstructed in part by Vernon Watkins in 1956 from Thomas' notes. See Thomas, Collected Poems, pp. 201–203.