nounced but kept the consonant plus e to emphasize thenchange:nNon, non, ma pauvre cornemuse,nTa complainte est pas si oiseuse;nEt Tout est bien une meprise,nEt Ton peut la trouver mauvaise . . .n(Poor bagpipes, the complaint you noisenIs not the tedium you suppose.nIt’s some contempt this Whole conveysnAnd you could find how bad it is.)*nThe English version without the extra syllable is morendifficult to hear.nWilfred Owen developed pararhyme in which he shiftednthe difference of sound to the vowel. He may have derivednthis method from noticing an occasional license of traditionalnEnglish verse such as Shelley’s “despair/appear”nrhyme in “Ozymandias.” On the other hand, he may havendeveloped it after hearing of experimenters in France suchnas Laforgue and Remains when he was out there. It is anneffective rhyme, particularly for some of Owen’s grimnsubject matter.nWas it for this the clay grew tall?n—O what made fatuous sunbeams toilnTo break earth’s sleep at all?nNaturally, an ear used to traditional rhyme has to acclimatizenitself to these new sounds—which may account forncommon misapprehensions about rhyme and modernnpoets.nOwen’s successors have only developed this system bynwidening the discrepancy of vowel sounds such as loaves/nlives. Owen himself was forced to use what one might callnclose rather than pure pararhyme on occasion: France/oncenin the same poem “Futility.”nYeats made two changes in Owen’s system—and if henlearned from Owen disguised his debt by calling him ansandwich-board man of the revolution. Yeats dispensednwith similarity of initial consonant so that his method couldnbe called only final consonance, if one needed a name. Henalso discarded consistency, mixing the new rhymes likenspot/cut with traditional pure rhyme and the old dodge ofneye-rhymes. (He has been followed in this by many lessernpoets and even a poet as substantial as Geoffrey Hill.)nWhile pararhyme was developing, the old pure rhymenwas by no means defunct in hands such as Hardy’s ornFrost’s. Eliot and a few others tried to develop it in newnways. Eliot wrote:nFreed from its exacting task of supporting lamenverse, it could be applied with greater effect wherenit is most needed. There are often passages in annunrhymed poem where rhyme is wanted for somenspecial effect, for a sudden tightening up, for ancumulative insistence, or for an abrupt change ofnmood.nThus we hear very effective occasional uses of it in his work:n’^Quoted from The Poems of Jules Laforgue, translated bynPeter Dale, by permission of Anvil Press Poetry (London)nAnd the ground swell, that is and was from thenbeginningnClangsnThe bell.n(Eliot also remarked that no verse was free to the man whonwanted to do a good job. One wonders with what intent henallowed himself the phrase “for a sudden tightening up” innthe first quotation.)nEliot was followed, on the example of his minor poems,nby the English religious poet Charles Williams in hisnArthurian poems. American poets have also followed himnin this usage. Jeffers will use rhyme to emphasize a point:nThose are the eyelids that never closenThe Eye.nAnd Jarrell, in his famous “Death of the Ball-turret Gunner”nuses it to emphasize the aerial dogfight: I awoke tonblack flak and the nightmare fighters . . . Louis MacNeicenwas also experimenting by moving one rhyme into the linenin a consistent rhyme scheme:nThe sunlight on the gardennHardens and grows cold. . . .nHe also experimented with a system I first found in thenSecond World War poet Keith Douglas. I call it syllablenrhyme because it involves rhyming the stressed syllable of andissyllable and ignoring the light ending: selfish/belfry. Thisnsystem has the tremendous advantage of freeing traditionalnrhyme from stressed line-ends and allowing a subtler musicnof light endings. It is a technique also found in MacLeish’sn”Conquistador.” The finest example is Auden’s “Music IsnInternational.”nDuring the same period, Dylan Thomas devised a systemnof assonance rhyme, which is best illustrated in his poemn”Fern Hill.”nNow as I was young and easy under the applenboughs . . .nAnd honoured among wagons I was prince of thenapple towns . . .nAgain, this system changes the basic proportion so thatnthere is only one similarity, but because it is the vowel itnseems easier to detect.nMore recent poets, including George Macbeth andnmyself in England, have followed Dylan Thomas butnimproved the proportion by matching the initial in rhymesnsuch as feast/feed. Others have reversed Yeats’s final consonanceninto initial consonance with systems like /eaves/fancen—but it is almost undetectable.nPasternak used to complain of translations which ignorednhis method of rhyming. Something of it can now be sensednby non-Russian speakers like myself in versions of AndreinNavrozov whose own work has been strongly influenced bynPasternak’s.nBut time would grow old, and pass. And pliant.nLike ice, armchair silk would melt and swell.nFirst audible, you stumbled and grew quiet.nThe dream grew silent like the echo of a bell.nThe rhyme pliant/quiet looks at first like a simple syllablennnOCTOBER 1987 177n