A quick note on rhyming and the English language.

A man I admire very much indeed has said that any work which claims to be poetry and does not rhyme makes a liar out of its clasier. I happen to agree in part, and yet disagree quite completely.

I said that this would be a quick note, and I don't feel like doing a bunch of research. As much as I'd like to make a historical argument, it would be pretty time-consuming, especially for me. So I'm going to make up imaginary examples, along with imaginary etymologies, and you'll have to follow along with my argument suspending your disbelief, until you get to the end, at which time you can accept my conclusion as valid, or discard it, according to your preference.

So, let us take a pair of rhyming words. Let's say, neighbour and tabor. Tabor is a good example, because I don't recall having heard it spoken aloud, though there is a Tabor Arms Pub in the city of Prince George, and I think I might have remembered it if I had heard it pronounced differently in a radio advertisement. Neighbour is a good word too, because I'm reminded of a white comedian who used it as a substitute for another n-word whenever he sang his favorite black rap songs aloud in public.

Anyways, according to my friend, if you were to put neighbour at the end of one line, and tabor at the end of a subsequent line, you'd have a rhyme, and therefore, you've gone most of the way toward making a poem. If you're me, and you speak like me, then that's fine. These words do indeed have the same ending sound in English. However, historically, they emerged from totally different sounds. (I'm assuming they are unrelated; if they turn out to be related, suspend your disbelief.)

I have a number of problems with the principle that rhyming is a good thing for poetry. Many times it is argued that rhyming makes a poem satisfying to the ear. What rhyming does is it creates a sense of closure in a series of lines. When we end the first line, we're opening a door. When we rhyme it in a subsequent line, we're gently closing the door. Do you notice how I just rhymed "door" with "door"? That was the kind of thing that rhyme was originally supposed to do. Rhyming creates the illusion, the deception, that a logical connection has been made.

In the beginning of language, there were no rhymes. Every word had a different ending. Over time, speakers began to combine words, and some words became nothing more than common endings. For example, "ing" lost its status as an individual word, and in exchange, the Devil gave him a place among all the verbs in all the language. A fair bargain, I would say, and I have no quibble with the Devil on this point.

*Aside: Even to this day, bad poets who claim not to like rhyming will still continue to use "ing" in their poems. Falling, scintillating, gasperating, fulmingating (two ings!), turning, smiling, illuminating. Ing is the new invisible rhyme.

At this point though, you might be objecting. You might say "The English language is so vast, and there are only so many sounds you can end a word with." Well, I explained one part of it already, but there are some other parts of the reason here. (I should also note that I'm not talking about an English that was ever physically spoken, but more of a primordial English spoken in the time before time.) One other reason is simply that the language had a smaller number of concepts to convey per speaker. That is to say, the average English speaker came across a smaller number of things for which he needed words. People travelled less in those days. And what about the few who travelled more and further? Well, these people had other languages. For in those days too, there were a lot more languages around in a relatively smaller area. Not only that, but there was a lot more variation on what might be called a single language today. So much so that some clasiers describe, say, the border between linguistic regions as more of a continuum, in which the transformation is virtually seemless. The only thing that later set down language barriers was the rise of nationalism, or possibly the rise of the state.

And so, any given speaker had a relatively small vocabulary from which to draw possible rhymes. And because of his accent, combined with the accents of the people that brought new words to the region, even words that sort of sounded the same were quite different. In other words, in this time before time, neighbour and tabor did not rhyme. Everyone knew the word "neighbour" although each town had its own special way of pronouncing it. But only a few people knew a "tabor" as such. They had much more varying ways of expressing the concept of a certain kind of drum, usually referring to whatever their local model was called.

The one exception of there not being any rhymes was the fact that words with a common origin, meaning the same thing, and containing the same "sub-words" or lexemes, tended to sound alike. This gave rise to the quite correct belief that rhyming expressed truth. To rhyme was to close a topic off from discussion. A pear is a pear is a pear. A rhyme was an indication of completeness. A rhyme indicated the equivalence of two lines.

Enter the bards. The poets. The wordsmiths. These people realized that some words sounded the same despite being completely unrelated. They also discovered (those of them who could write) that the spelling of words could be altered to be the same or different from that of other words, while the sound of them would remain unaltered, except by the accent of the speaker. Thus, neighbour and tabor, it was realized, could be made to relate in a poem.

The first poet to realize this was an idiot, and he made very crappy poetry. A few other idiots followed, but then one or two poetic geniuses realized that rhyme could be judiciously used to relate heretofore unrelated concepts to each other, and yet still attain some level of profundity. That is, an unknown truth became unearthed when two unrelated concepts were made related. Thus was born the power of rhyme.

But soon after this, rhyme came to be seen as an end in itself. The idiots returned, and built fenceposts out of elephant tusks. Rhyming became nothing more than an address for the librarians at the Libary of Congress to file each work.