query on poetic figure

[Charles C Doyle]

An especially beautiful example, to my way of thinking, occurs at the end of an unrhymed lyric (or metalyric!) by the poet/musician Thomas Campion (Donne and Shakespeare's contemporary):


Rose-cheek'd Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

Lovely forms do flow
>From concent divinely framed;
Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.

These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,

But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renew'd by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.


--Charlie

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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Jesse Sheidlower [jester at PANIX.COM]
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 5:44 AM
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According to the beloved _Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics_, it's called a "broken rhyme" (sometimes apparently
also called "split rhyme"). Some examples from non-comic poems
include G. M. Hopkins' "The Windhover":

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

and John Donne's "Satire IV":

Before he scapt, So'it pleas'd my destinie
(Guilty'of my sin of going,) to thinke me
As prone to'all ill, and of good as forget-
full, as proud, as lustfull, and as much in debt,
As vaine, as witlesse, and as false as they
Which dwell at Court, for once going that way.

Arnold, please don't leave!

Jesse Sheidlower

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