Bruce Charlton recently posted about Tolkien's unfinished poem "O! Wanderers in the shadowed land" and his own attempts at composing a suitable final line for it. (Did I resist the temptation to take a stab at it myself? Reader, I did not.)
The content of Tolkien's poem made me think of the beginning of Dante's Comedy, where Dante emerges from a dark wood and begins to climb a sunlit hill, only to be confronted by the three beasts, retreat, and take a minor detour through hell, purgatory, and the heavens.
Back in 2014, I "translated" some of this material (so loosely as to require the use of scare quotes) as an experiment. I was trying to duplicate some of the features of Dante's terza rima without the hard work of making each line rhyme with two others. I called the scheme I used "snake rhyme."
Both terza rima and my own rima serpentina have a chain-like structure which makes the poem as a whole indivisible. Each tercet in Dante or quatrain in my translation is linked by rhyme to the one before it and the one after it.
The trouble is that, as the diagram above makes clear, the first and last "links" in the chain are defective, smaller than the others. For example, the rima serpentina example above has the following rhyme structure:
aba cbdc edfe gfhg h
This defect can be solved by linking the A and H links, so that the chain becomes a circular one, the serpent an ouroboros, like so:
ahba cbdc edfe gfhg
Now it has a perfectly regular structure of quatrain "links" and is now, as I have said, circular. Once you reach the end, you go back to the beginning and recite it again; you can do this indefinitely, for as many repetitions as you like, and the whole thing will still be seamless.
So, I thought, what kind of poem would people want to repeat again and again indefinitely? Well, a mantra or prayer, obviously. Namo Amitabha, Hail Mary, that sort of thing. People who pray that way use a rosary, and a rosary is a circular "chain" of beads. In other words this sort of verse, which lends itself most naturally to writing repetitive prayers, also has the same structure as a rosary!
The Buddhist/Hindu/Sikh rosary has 108 beads -- a number which is conveniently divisible by four. So a perfectly "rosariform" poem would have 108 lines, constituting 27 quatrains of the form given above. The Catholic rosary has 59, a less convenient number.
6 comments:
This idea for a circular poem is quite clever. I also enjoyed your rendering into snake rhyme of the beginning of the Divine Comedy.
Snake rhyme? Very good, now do a poem in the shape of M.C.Escher's print "Ringslangen" (ringed snakes).
A network of rings, threaded with snakes. Snakes is the name of this woodcut produced by Escher in 1969. It is his final work. He is 71 years old, but shows no sign of frailty or deterioration. At the end of his life he is still in top form. He still has the strength and precision to cut his sketches out of wood in detail. He cuts three blocks of wood which dovetail seamlessly with one another. From design to print, Snakes takes him three months. In total he prints 12 copies. Because the print is in three colours, and he is using the same blocks for this, he is forced to complete the 12 copies in 108 runs to achieve the desired result. All entirely by hand. Using a Japanese bone spoon, in accordance with an age-old printing technique. He enjoys this. For years Escher has been struggling with his health, and the considerable demand for reprints of old works has left him scarcely any time to produce new work. Whenever he is in a position to create, he is happy. Whilst working on Snakes he writes to a friend: ‘I’ve been doing work like this for over 50 years now, and to me there’s nothing more enjoyable in this strange, frightening world’. —Escher Museum
I feel as if I am missing the point here...
Is it related to the fact that (in English - but not Italian) the more same-rhymes there are *and the closer together* - the more constricting it is...
Such that if there are too many of the same rhymes and too close together, and in a fixed rhyme scheme - the more the content gets constrained by the form (or else, the more often the same word gets 'rhymed' with itself).
Also, paired couplets are certainly better avoided except for short lyrics. 18th century verse (Pope, Dryden, Johnson...) drives me mad with its endless octosyllabic rhymed couplets in l o n g poems.
But I feel there is a problem when we wait more than two lines for a rhyme - in that I have 'forgotten' the previous occurrence, and need to go back and check.
It starts to sound (be experienced) more like blank-, than rhymed-verse.
Otto, that's some good sync work there!
Bruce, I enjoy writing with very tight rhyme constraints, but I feel that triple rhymes (as in terza rima) are just a bad idea in English. See Dorothy Sayers's terza rima translation of Dante for an illustration of this.
I agree that long poems shouldn't be in couplets. This is a large part of what makes Pope so much more quotable than readable. Byron managed to pull it off at times (and in tetrameter!), but he was a once-in-a-generation virtuoso.
I agree that rhymes can't be too far separated. The rhyme scheme abab works in pentameter, in which rhymes are 10 feet apart. All my snake-rhyme experiments so far have been in tetrameter, making the rhymes 12 feet apart. For me, that's close enough, but perhaps it's a stretch for some readers (though fourteeners do seem to work in English). Trimeter would cut the rhyme spacing down to 9 feet, making it more readable-as-rhyme -- but that's a pretty tight constraint for the writer!
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