Rhyme and reason in poetry

A couple of weeks ago, Gunadasa Amarasekera and I were seated in the verandah of one of the cabins at the Kukule Ganga holiday resort. The dusk was announcing itself, the darkness was beginning to move up the road and silence was thickening. Our wives had gone out to explore the newly discovered landscape. We started to talk about literature and fortuitously settled on the topic of rhyme in Sinhala poetry. The more we discussed the more it became apparent to us that this is indeed a topic that has not received the kind of sustained attention it merits. Hence I decided to devote this column to some reflections on rhyme in Sinhala poetry.

The question of rhyme in poetry is closely allied with prosody. Unfortunately, prosody is not a topic that is widely discussed today, not even in our higher seats of learning. As John Hollander, distinguished poet and critic who has done some important work in this area, once complained that prosody has come to be regarded as the province of cranks.

This is indeed unfortunate, because prosody can open for us fascinating pathways of inquiry into the experience of poetry. Prosody is a topic that has been largely ignored by modern literary theorists as well. It is my conviction that the study of meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, the acoustic make-up in general can deepen our appreciation of poetry and enable us to understand the genesis of poetry.

Rhyme signifies the exact echoing of a sound at the end of a line of poetry by the sound at the end of another line. This can appear to be very natural as is seen in the following poem titled infant sorrow poetry by William Blake's

My mother groan'd, my father wept;

Into the dangerous world I leapt,

Helpless, naked, piping loud,

Like a fiend hid in a cloud

Struggling in my father's hands

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary, I thought best

To sulk upon my mother's breast.

At other times, the arrival of rhymes can be less predictable, thereby adding to the final impact of the poem. The following passage of poetry, also from Blake, illustrates this point.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

When we discuss the topic of rhyme, we need to focus on a number of other categories which fall under the general rubric such as three-quarter rhyme, half-rhyme, quarter rhyme, assonance etc in the following passage, taken from Auden's poem 'Paid on Both Sides', we see the way three quarter rhyme and half rhyme work.

Outside on frozen soil lie armies killed

Who seem familiar but they are cold

How the most solid wish he tries to keep

His hands show through;; he never will look up,

Say, I am good. On him misfortune falls

More than enough. Better where no one feels…

Here we see three-quarter rhyme (killed/cold) and half-rhyme (keep/up).

The way rhyme operates in Sinhala poetry is somewhat different. This is why comparative prosody - virtually a non-existent field - should prove to be so fruitful.

For example, in English poetry, some of the most subtle effects are secured by playing off the rhythmic movement against the metrical norm, and here enjambment plays a significant role. Enjambment is the term used by students of prosody to signify the effect whereby sense and rhythm run over the line-ending and on to the following line. It stands in opposition to end-stopping of lines.

The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who has emerged into the pantheon of European thinkers along with Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Ranciere, Badiou, etc. has said of enjambment that it 'brings to light the original gait of poetry.'

He goes on to say that, 'it is a fact upon which we will never reflect enough that no definition of verse is perfectly satisfying, except that which conforms its identity with respect to prose through the possibility of enjambment.' He proceeds to make the important observation that, 'poetry is of course that discourse in which it is possible to oppose a metrical limit to a syntactical limit. - prose that discourse in which this is not possible.'

Although one can cite instances of enjambment in Sinhala poetry it is neither so pronounced or frequent as in English verse. One reason for this the definitive and authoritative role played by rhyme in Sinhala poetry. If the form of poetry can be described as the arrangement of content on the page, then, rhyme has, over the centuries, played a pivotal role in that arrangement.

In Sinhala poetry rhyme serves to inject a new vitality to the collocation of sound and sense. Valery once defined a poem as a 'hesitation between sound and meaning.' In some of the memorable Sinhala poems, this hesitation is amplified in unforgettable ways.

The way that metrical movement and syntactical movement intersect and the function of enjambment merit close analysis. As I stated earlier, rhyme seems to exert its authority on Sinhala verse in powerful ways, compelling us to pause at the end of each line in a quatrain.

In this regard, it is instructive to remind ourselves of the remark made by Helen Vendler, perhaps the most perceptive critic of poetry living in America today. She said, 'in the perpetual self-halting of poetry must lie the grounds of its peculiar attraction.' She made this remark, as she was seeking to point out the ways in which poetry differs from the novel.

There are many important ways in which rhyme functions in Sinhala poetry. In the interests of space, let me allude to ten of them. First, the deployment of the rhyme-scheme was seen as a mark of technical efficiency by poets and critics alike; very often inferior writers were referred to as those who could not come up with a rhyme-scheme in a quatrain.

This is, of course, linked to the performative element of poetry, and in that sense can be regarded as a cultural vestige. Second, it was a means of emphasizing certain key words in the poem. For example, in the 'Selalihini Sandeshaya', there is a wonderful trope where the descending sun is compared to a ripe fruit about to fall from a tree. In this stanza, the very last words are 'rivi mandala' (sun) and they receive poetic emphasis through rhyme. Similarly, in Gunadasa Amarasekera's poem 'Mal Yahanavata Vadinna', the very last word in the opening stanza is 'hadavata' (heart) and the rhyme schme serves to encircle it.

Third, rhymes are vitally connected to the music of poetry. The music of poetry, in the hands of talented poets, is not something outward or superficial; it is a vital part of the meaning of poetry. Indeed, the music of thought and music of sounds are inseparably intertwined in good poetry.

Fourth, gifted poets make use of the homophonic and semantic elements in rhyming words to enforce deeper meanings through contrast and juxtaposition. It seems to me that Russian formalists paid close attention to this aspect. Fifth, rhyme-schemes serve to introduce a complex network of sound and meaning into poetry.

Unlike in English, which for the most part was confined to end-rhyming, in Sinhala poetry one finds rhyming at the beginning and middle as well. This creates a complex music. For example in the description of the forest in canto four, lines 10-25 in the 'Kavyashekaraya', one sees how rhyme is deployed to secure this effect. It weaves a sonorous text of sylvan grandeur.

Sixth, Sinhala poets were able to make use of rhyme in a mildly ludic spirit by raising the expectation of the reader, by hinting that a certain word would follow to meet the rhyme-scheme, and then introduce a new one, that was totally unanticipated by the reader, and thereby enhancing the effect of surprise. Seventh, the phenomenon of self-enactment is important in poetry.

Poets - if they are distinguished ones - do not report on experiences, by dramatize them; hence the element of self-enactment assumes an importance. Classical Sinhala poets often made use of the design of rhymes as a way of enacting the theme of the poem. Eights, Sinhala poets were able to employ the plan of rhymes as an index to larger meanings suggested by the poet. This effort is discernible not only in outstanding works such as 'Selalihini Sandeshaya' and 'Kavyashekaraya' but also in lesser works such as 'Kusada kava' and 'Parakumba Siritha'.

Nine, although rhyme can, and often has, generate into an external embellishment, in the work of superior poets, it has proved itself as a force of discipline that invests poetry with a controlling detachment. Ten, in the hands of talented authors, rhyme can end up as an important part of what Harold Bloom refers to as the 'cognitive music.'

I have pointed out ten important ways in which rhyme functions in Sinhala poetry. These functions are, of course, closely interrelated. There is a real need to examine this topic as well as the larger issue of prosody in the context of contemporary literary theory. Although some important work has been undertaken by critics like John Hollander and Charles Bernstein (both of whom are also, interestingly, celebrated poets), much more needs to be done. As rhyme words are coupled acoustically as a consequence of their congruities in terms of sound, they are automatically located in certain lexical and semantic conjunctions. This can become a productive site for deconstructive reading.

The growth of rhyme schemes in Sinhala poetry and the prosody subventing it can be a topic of enormous fascination. Although rhyme-and. meter poetry attained great popularity in the Kotte period as well as in the folk tradition as we know it, the roots of rhyme extend back in history. There are rhymed poems among the Sigiri graffiti. In examining the topic of prosody in the light of modern literary theory, we can begin with the 'Elu Sandas Lakuna'. ( a text full of uncertainties and demanding rigorous editorial intervention), which in its opening stanza says that it is only following the verbal path laid out by earlier scholars of prosody. Sinhala prosody was no doubt influenced by Sanskrit theories; however, the impact of Prakrit prosody as well as indigenous prosody is far stronger.